Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. What is the latest information regarding law enforcement success in combating drug trafficking?

Bob Debus (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Longman for that question and acknowledge that he has indeed, for many years now, taken a special interest in the problem of drug abuse. I believe he and his wife, Karen, have for 14 years been engaged in that kind of education in the schools of the honourable member’s electorate.

On the very eve of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, the Australian Federal Police and Customs held a press conference to announce the result of an intense 12-month investigation that they called Operation Inca, which led to the world’s largest ever ecstasy bust. It was a gold medal result. The statistics are quite hard to comprehend. Hidden in 3,000 tins of tomatoes were 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy tablets, 15 million tablets, worth $440 million. For good measure, there were also 150 kilograms of cocaine hidden with bags of coffee beans. That is an amazing, indeed world-class, result for our law enforcement agencies, and therefore for the Australian community.

It began as a snippet of information received 12 months ago by the Victoria Police, who passed it on to Australian Customs. Customs narrowed down shipments, which were coming from Italy, to 800 shipping containers and then made an initial detection. That of itself was a most significant technical achievement, but, building on that very good work, a tactical decision was made by the agencies not to make that discovery public. Instead, our agencies decided to conduct further investigations and began working with law enforcement partners in Europe. It turned out to be a very wise decision because it led to the dismantling of a large global criminal syndicate. Not that it was an easy matter; 400 AFP officers took part at various times in the operation. It involved 185,000 telephone intercepts and 10,000 hours of surveillance. On the day of the operation, officers arrested 20 people across Australia in four states, some of them, the House will recall, with a very high profile indeed, and a total of 25 people have now been charged. In addition, there was a coordinated operation in Europe with warrants executed in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy.

As Commissioner Keelty indicated at the time, the minds of investigators were seized by the knowledge that the syndicate could continue to operate for a year after importing 4.4 tonnes of narcotics and losing them. Only a major global syndicate has the resources to write off a loss like that. The commissioner made the sobering observation that it is the premium price that young people in Australia are prepared to pay for ecstasy that is driving up demand. He said:

If you think it through there are not many boardrooms in Australia where you would write off half a billion dollars worth of a commodity and continue your business.

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What we have to do is reach out to the youth of this country and reduce demand.

In the last six weeks alone—in other words, in the period in significant part after the dramatic detections that I have been speaking of—law enforcement in Australia has been at its most effective in dealing with the threat of drugs. It has made seizures of more than 8.5 tonnes of illicit drugs.

Detections that substantial do not happen by chance, and they are a demonstration of the targeting and detection capabilities of Customs combined with the exceptional intelligence and investigation capabilities of the AFP, state police and the Crime Commission and, not least, the anti-money-laundering agency, AUSTRAC, together with all of the international partners of those organisations. Our agencies are not only protecting the community—I might say it is estimated that the Melbourne seizure prevented $2 billion worth of harm in our community when you take into account the health effects and so on. Of course our agencies are, at the same time, making Australia a hostile environment to drug dealers. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in its 2008 World drug report released in June, concluded that general drug use in Australia fell over the last year, as did the trafficking of heroin, morphine, cannabis and ecstasy to Australia. The Australian authorities—the AFP, Customs and the others—will continue to cooperate and share investigations and information with their international networks to good end, and we congratulate all who have been concerned in these recent successful operations on their professionalism.