Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission entitled Inquiry into the future impact of serious and organised crime on Australian society, together with the Hansard of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

As this is no doubt the last inquiry that this committee will perform in this parliament, I want to particularly thank Dr Jacqueline Dewar, committee secretary; Ms Anne O’Connell, principal research officer; Mr Ivan Powell, research officer; and Ms Jill Manning, executive assistant. The secretariat have been marvellous in the work they have done during the last three years. On behalf of the committee, I particularly thank them for their work, their advice and their contributions.

I also want to thank the members of the committee. In my view, it is a very good committee. I particularly make reference to the deputy chair, the Hon. Duncan Kerr. The committee is indeed fortunate to have his expertise. Mr Kerr is a former Minister for Justice and Attorney-General, and brings great knowledge to the committee’s work. As well, of course, he is a senior counsel and well understands the law. We are also very fortunate to have four people on the committee who were associated with the police force: Mr Jason Wood, Mr Kym Richardson and Senator Stephen Parry, and Mr Chris Hayes, who I understand was involved with an agency of a police force. As well as that, I thank the other committee members for their contributions, particularly Senator Polley, who is always an assiduous attendee at committee hearings and I thank her for that. Indeed, I thank all the committee members.

In relation to this report, I want to thank all those who made contributions to the inquiry. I thank them for their evidence and their submissions. I particularly mention the ongoing assistance we received from the Australian Crime Commission and from all the state police commissioners or senior representatives who attended to assist the committee with its inquiry.

Serious and organised crime encompasses a widening range of criminal activities. It is involved in almost every aspect of criminal endeavour and is greatly assisted by rapid increases in technological capability. As with most enterprises in a market economy, profit is the motivator for most serious and organised crime. Organised crime trades in commodities that offer maximum profit for the lowest risk of detection and prosecution.

The inquiry heard that organised crime groups have established flexible connections with other groups domestically and internationally, as well as with legitimate businesses. Domestically, outlaw motorcycle gangs dominate serious and organised crime, notably in the manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs. However, there is a significant and growing threat to Australia from highly professional and sophisticated organised crime groups operating internationally.

While illicit drugs continue to be the major organised crime activity, the inquiry found that high-tech crime offers an unparalleled opportunity for organised crime groups to pursue new types of crime. The evidence provided a chilling sense of the scope of high-tech crime, which includes electronic piracy, counterfeiting and forgery, credit card fraud, child pornography, electronic funds transfer fraud, money laundering and denial-of-service attacks. This technology makes the task of addressing high-tech crime by law enforcement agencies both complex and costly.

Estimating the future cost of organised crime, as well as calculating the present cost, is very difficult. Not only is this because organised crime groups pursue a diffuse and shifting range of activities; most agencies do not keep discrete statistics on organised crime expenditure as opposed to other law enforcement expenditure. Further, there are social and health costs arising from organised criminal activity which are also difficult to quantify.

The inquiry demonstrated that Australia has taken important steps toward establishing a legal environment which is hostile to the activities of organised crime. These include the creation of statutory bodies such as the Australian Crime Commission as well as state crime and corruption bodies. The introduction of money laundering and proceeds of crime legislation has also provided needed support for the fight against organised crime.

However, the committee identified several areas for attention. One area is the ACC Act itself, in which there is a need to strengthen the provisions concerning the failure to co-operate with an ACC examination. That is one that really needs to be addressed very quickly by the parliament.

Another area is more difficult to fix. Because Australia has eight jurisdictions, there is a comparable variation in approaches to criminal law and therefore to dealing with organised crime. Not only does this have implications for resource use by each jurisdiction; it also means that there are areas of weakness from state to state which can be exploited by organised crime, to their advantage.

One such example is in my home state of Queensland, where there is a lack of telephone intercept powers available for criminal investigations—a situation for which the committee has recommended a speedy resolution. I am disappointed that every other state in Australia has these telephone intercept powers and has come to an arrangement with the Commonwealth on them. Queensland chooses not to adopt the same sorts of rules and therefore is the odd man out, which really, as some of the evidence to us suggested, gives criminals a bit of a break if they happen to be performing their criminal activities within the Queensland state jurisdiction. In addition, an abiding lesson of the inquiry is that legislative inconsistencies across Australia must, as far as possible, be removed and Australia must develop a harmonised legislative approach across all jurisdictions. This will require prompt identification and rectification of legislative weaknesses at a national level.

As well as legislation, there were found to be areas of administration and regulation which, if rationalised, could provide additional support in combating organised crime. In particular, the current requirements for recording SIM card user details are deficient and impede the ability of law enforcement agencies to detect suspect mobile phone users. The committee has made recommendations in that area.

The committee also heard evidence on staff retention, particularly in state forces. There is a need for police strategies to be established around a targeted, comprehensive and ongoing research effort involving police, government and academia.

One of the most important aspects of the inquiry dealt with the adequacy of Australia’s information and intelligence databases and case management systems. The committee again found that there have been substantial recent improvements to Australian information and intelligence systems, particularly with the establishment of CrimTrac and the Crime Commission. However, there is substantial potential for improvement, particularly with the addition of new datasets to CrimTrac’s Minimum Nationwide Person Profile. The committee also found that the development of a national automatic number plate recognition system would provide an additional powerful resource in cross-jurisdictional organised crime detection.

One of the most important issues to emerge from the inquiry was the need for a single national police case management system. The committee has made recommendations on that. The committee hopes that the recommendations will provide the Australian Crime Commission, as well as other law enforcement agencies, with the technical, administrative, research and financial capability they need to effectively continue their work in combating serious and organised crime.

The report was unanimously adopted. I was rather nonplussed, and found it rather curious, that my colleague Senator Mark Bishop—apparently on his own account; it is obviously not a document of the Australian Labor Party—made some additional comments. I am curious as to why the additional comments were made. With respect to Senator Bishop, the tortured English in his additional comments makes it quite difficult to understand what he was getting at. It does seem that he had some concern that the evidence was not detailed enough. If those of us on the committee did not think the evidence was detailed enough, we should have asked some additional questions and tried to get from the witnesses—and there were many of them, with a wide range of experience—more details. I am rather curious about that.

Senator Bishop also suggests in his conclusions that perhaps the committee should not exist, that the work of the committee should be conducted by way of an annual review by a retired judge or an eminent lawyer with relevant experience. To me that seems to be an unusual conclusion—but also unusual in the context of this inquiry. I would have thought that, while Senator Bishop has every right to put whatever he likes in additional comments, they are the sorts of comments he might have raised with the committee and the committee might have had a discussion about those things. He first of all suggests that perhaps we should not exist and then he goes on to suggest that perhaps the committee should give more detailed examination to the matters the committee has identified in this report. He talks about a different modus operandi for the committee. I am a fraction curious about and almost nonplussed as to why these comments were made in relation to this inquiry, which did receive unanimous support from all of the members and does contribute greatly to our fight against organised crime in Australian society. I certainly commend the report and its conclusions and recommendations to the parliament.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too wish to take note of the report from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission. I make the point at the outset that it has indeed been a wide-ranging and useful inquiry. It gives particular insight into the nature of the problem of organised crime. The recommendations are relevant and, if implemented, would improve the capacity of law enforcement agencies. To that extent I support the recommendations.

As the report notes, however, there is a gap between evidence on the nature of organised crime and the committee’s knowledge about what is happening to combat it, except in the most general terms. It is inevitably a feature of the subject matter, where compromise is necessary in the interests of confidentiality. I can understand why law enforcement agencies are reluctant to speak openly. That tends to limit the normal modus operandi of a parliamentary committee such as this. Thus, as Senator Ian Macdonald noted, my additional comments in this report may appear critical of the committee.

The inquiry had broad terms of reference, so we might not have done complete justice to the subject matter. I also suggest—and I stand by my remarks—that the committee may have misunderstood its own terms of reference in embarking on the inquiry in the first place. The committee’s terms of reference limit its role to matters ‘appertaining to the authority’—that is, the Australian Crime Commission. By my reading, each of the five terms of reference confines, and continues to confine, the committee’s activities to the functions, duties, powers, structure and procedures of the ACC.

In its report on organised crime, the committee has dealt with broad-ranging matters relating to organised crime—not the ACC’s part in combating organised crime. There are sections, of course, and the integration of, and access to, databases is one important matter where the ACC is making steady progress. Nor do my comments derogate from the value of anything the committee has heard or said. The report is a relatively useful assessment of organised crime in Australia. But the report itself makes little comment on the ACC’s role or the state of play nationally under its responsibility for dealing with this. It is an important point to be considered when the committee discusses what it might next investigate.

Putting aside the technical issue about the committee’s role and function—and, indeed, it is more than a technical issue, because it goes to the heart of the delegation of authority from the parliament to the committee and the creation of a set of functions for the committee—I would like to also address a contradiction which occurred to me during the inquiry. That is, that there is an ambivalent policy attitude towards organised crime on the one hand and terrorism on the other. When the committee looked at issues such as money laundering, identification authentication, internet access and communication interception, it found that a strict regime has been put in place for one but not for the other.

Indeed, certainly at the Commonwealth level, the resources allocated to antiterrorist activity far outweigh those for combating organised crime. The legal regime against terrorism is much tougher, yet these new powers to fight terrorism are not as yet translatable to organised crime, even though their purpose, protecting the public, is the same. Controversy surrounding identification authenticity for mobile phones and SIM cards is a case in point. State law enforcement agencies identified this shortcoming in the current law as a major gap in their capability. Whilst the Attorney-General has been reluctant to proceed with tougher identity checks for obtaining SIM cards, the Haneef case may have indeed caused a rethink. Acceptance of the committee’s recommendation should address that.

No such double standard exists in respect of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment Bill 2007 currently before the parliament. Whilst the committee did not consider the importance of this bill, the bill goes some way towards addressing another law enforcement agency need to access telephone and internet communication detail—that is, time of calls, duration, numbers calling and called, location of calls and internet sites visited but not, I stress, content. In this instance at least, the synergy of interest between policing terrorists and criminals is treated alike. My point is simply this: why is this approach not adopted more broadly? With those comments, I commend the report to the Senate. I also put on record my appreciation for the work done by the committee secretary, Dr Dewar, and the principal research officer, Ms Anne O’Connell.

I return at the end of my comments to matters raised by the chair of the committee, Senator Ian Macdonald. The point that goes to the nature of the evidence that was received—seeing that Senator Macdonald specifically raised it—is this: nothing new or that was not completely on the open and public record was presented to the committee. Everything that was presented was available in annual reports or in parliamentary reports.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not when we went in camera; we were in camera for quite a period of time.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Nothing new was presented in public that was not on the public record. What that means as a matter of logic is that you cannot engage in questioning and dialogue on matters that witnesses and law enforcement agencies do not wish to bring to you. Why do they not want to bring that information to a parliamentary committee? It is because the act that established the ACC and regulates the role of the committee provides for a different mechanism of regulation and oversight. The ACC reports to its board. That reports to an intergovernmental committee comprising seven ministers which in turn reports to individual ministers. In those lines of oversight, regulation and authority there is no role for the parliamentary committee; hence, officers of law enforcement agencies, properly, will not engage in dialogue or will refuse to answer questions because they do not believe it is the role or the responsibility of the committee to inquire into those matters. Those matters are properly regulated through the structure of authority. I have no quarrel with that.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Which matters?

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Matters that any committee member might refer to that go outside those five limited matters as to functions and roles that are in the enabling section of the act that established the committee.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That’s simply not right, mate.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is simply right. It necessarily imposes a limit on the ability of a parliamentary committee to oversee properly, publicly and in detail the role of the ACC. That may well be the intent of government, and that may well have been the intent of parliament in establishing the committee. So be it. It just imposes a limitation on members of parliament to pursue matters.

A direct analogy is the role of oversight of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which does have access to private information. It does have access to detailed information, and that in turn imposes responsibilities on members of that committee to perhaps conduct themselves, in an intelligence oversight committee, in a different way to an oversight committee of other committees of the parliament.

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission. I was not going to speak on this matter, but I totally disagree with Senator Bishop’s comments. We had a bipartisan report, and it was a good report. We conducted hearings around this country and we heard a lot of in camera evidence—evidence of a private nature, which Senator Bishop referred to. He says we have only matters which are on the public record, but he has completely ignored the in camera evidence, which was very valuable and of a very private nature. Some of the police commissioners, in particular, were very forthcoming with information during the in camera sessions, so I do not agree with Senator Bishop. I wish we had had that discussion in the committee, because it is the first I have heard of this. I thought we had a very congenial and bipartisan approach which established a good inquiry, and the inquiry established some good key findings and recommendations. Senator Bishop’s remarks are remarkable in the sense that I did not detect any of that during the inquiry.

Question agreed to.