I rise today in support of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026. This bill is about protecting the public. It gives Australia a simple, practical switch we can use when criminals find a weak point in our financial system. When a particular channel is being exploited at scale to bank profits from illegal activity or to exploit Australians through scams, this bill lets AUSTRAC step in quickly and shut down the harm.

As the Minister for Home Affairs said at the National Press Club in October last year, 'When we have a convergence of threats, we need to have a convergence of protection,' and this bill delivers exactly that. Gone are the days when terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering and espionage are separated. We have seen that these threats converge and overlap, from the Adass Israel Synagogue attack to the Dural caravan incident to the illicit tobacco trade. Money laundering runs through almost all of them. This is about making sure that crime does not get a free run through the parts of the system that are vulnerable to abuse. Australians are being targeted by sophisticated scams and criminal networks. These operations move money through whatever channel is the hardest to trace.

One such channel is cash-to-crypto ATM machines. Crypto ATMs are a high-risk product, and there's no doubt about that. These are high risk products, and they're multiplying. Six years ago, there were 23 of these machines in Australia, two years ago, there were 200; and today there are about 2,000. Australia is now ranked third in the world for the number of crypto ATMs. When crypto is bought online through a bank account, it at least leaves a traceable transaction. When it is bought through cash through one of these machines, that trail disappears. This growth in crypto machines translates to a growth in exploitation. Every year, there are around 150,000 transactions, worth about $275 million, and 99 per cent of those transactions are deposits, as cash is turned into crypto.

This bill is about warning and protecting people. More and more of our everyday systems—banking, messages and shopping—are moving online, and that shift creates a space for people who do not fully understand these systems to be exploited. But it's not just about understanding. Every Australian who knows the system well would say that they are careful, switched on and hard to fool, but, unfortunately, we still see that people are being scammed. Phishing or scam operations have become so realistic and so deceptive that old warning signs no longer apply. Scamwatch figures show that Australians have reported losses of more than $186 million to scams this year, and the age group that is hardest hit is Australians over the age of 65. They make up around 17 per cent of our population, but they account for more than a quarter of all scam losses.

It's interesting that in my community of Swan we have run multiple scam forums. We've done them with the former assistant treasurer Stephen Jones, who was particularly passionate about the area. I've also done them with Cassie Rowe, the state member for Belmont, who's super passionate about making sure that our locals know what the scams look like but also can take steps to protect themselves. I also note that these reforms build on existing anti-money-laundering reforms that related to the purchase and sale of houses, and that regime came into effect on 1 July this year.

I remember, before I was about to get married, my future husband and I were looking for a home to purchase. We went to an open home and a man said to the real estate agent: 'How much for this house? I'll pay you in cash. What is your best price?' It kind of freaked me out, but we are fixing this hole. Crypto ATMs, for these nefarious regimes that we're seeing, sit at the centre of the problem when it comes to money laundering. You see, when authorities look at the top users of these machines, they see that 85 per cent were scam victims or money mules who had been tricked or coerced into moving money. Behind each of these numbers are real stories of people in our communities. When debating legislation, we often cite facts and figures, as I've done, but it's also important to not lose sight of the fact that, behind each of these statistics is a person, a family and a life that has been shattered. The minister's National Press Club address told of a 77-year-old widow who was groomed online and directed to feed cash into machines until $430,000 was gone. I repeat this story today to honour the human reality behind these statistics and make it clear that our responsibility is to act so that fewer Australians ever face the same harm.

The public needs more safeguards as these scams become more and more sophisticated at each iteration and more convincing each time. In Western Australia, a 72-year-old pensioner answered what looked like a Microsoft security alert on her computer and then a very convincing phone call. She was told that her computer had been hijacked and was instructed to withdraw all of her savings and deposit the cash into a crypto ATM at her local supermarket. By the time she got home, she realised that $12,000 was gone. The police and AUSTRAC have also contacted more than 90 of the highest value crypto ATM users around the country and found that the majority were victims or people being used as mules, not offenders. Investigators also identified another woman in her 70s who followed what looked like a legitimate trading promotion and lost more than $200,000 before authorities intervened.

The pattern is clear. You see, when a bank blocks a suspicious transfer, scammers redirect the victim to a crypto ATM and tell them to use cash instead. Many people only learn that they've been defrauded when the police arrive to warn them. The tactics are also evolving, with criminals even impersonating police to pressure people into moving cryptocurrencies 'for safety'. Know that the police will never say to you that you need to move your money into crypto. It's beyond what they are responsible for and what they can do. The thing that I'd encourage people to do is always think critically but also recognise that people want your hard-earned savings. It's important that we put protections in place to protect ourselves, but as a government we're looking at the systems as well.

In a single year, there were 150 reports of scams involving crypto ATMs to 'Report' at cyber.gov.au, a national online portal for reporting cybercrime. These reports recorded approximately $3.1 million in losses, with the average loss per individual being above $20,000, but the Australian Federal Police believe actual losses are probably greater than reported, as a significant number of victims do not lodge reports due to embarrassment or uncertainty.

The bill gives the AUSTRAC CEO a fast and flexible power to put conditions on, limit or when necessary temporarily stop a high-risk mechanism that is causing significant harm to the financial system or the community when acting is in the interest of the public. It requires a public interest test and evidence of significant harm. It also includes consultation with the public and relevant agencies for a minimum of 30 days, except in urgent cases. It must be exercised by a legislative instrument which is transparent, public and disallowable by the parliament. It is targeted, proportionate and reviewable.

The bill also updates the definition of 'terrorism financing' so our laws keep pace with modern threats, and it tidies up some of the 2024 changes so that businesses can comply more easily and AUSTRAC can move more effectively—a focused power to cut off harm and a few pragmatic improvements so that the system works as intended. Some will ask whether this is an attack on crypto or new technology, and I say it is not. This bill is technology neutral and risk based. If a channel is safe and legitimate, it continues. If a channel becomes a magnet for scams and laundering, the community expects us to act, and that's what we will do.

The bill ensures that we can act quickly and fairly, with checks and balances, when the evidence shows significant harm. Scammers and money launderers target people who are easy to pressure or confuse. Newcomers to Australia may not recognise a fake call from a supposed bank or immigration official. Students looking for part-time income can be lured into easy money offers to hand over their bank details. Seniors can be pushed into making cash deposits on demand. The damage is not only financial; it's also emotional, it's life altering and it erodes trust in our institutions. This bill closes channels that criminals use to exploit people. It helps stop money that fuels drug trafficking, child exploitation, fraud and other organised crime. It protects savings, livelihoods and confidence in our systems.

The key points are these. When a high-risk mechanism is being abused, this bill gives AUSTRAC a practical switch to limit or pause it, and it does so with clear thresholds, consultation, time limits and parliamentary oversight. The bill brings our terrorism-financing laws up to date and smooths the 2024 reforms so that they can deliver on their purpose. This is also about giving AUSTRAC the power to restrict or prohibit high-risk products where the evidence requires it. Crypto ATMs are a high-risk product. They're growing in number and they're linked to scams, money mules and large cash deposits that are much harder to trace. Scams and organised crime drain household savings, fuel mental health crises and undermine confidence.

The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that serious and organised crimes cost Australia up to $82 billion in the 2023-24 period. That is money that is stripped out of our economy and out of the pockets of everyday Australians. The broader anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing reforms are moving the system away from this box ticking and towards outcomes and real risk management. This bill is about protecting people and cutting the fuel line to serious and organised crime. It backs our agencies with modern tools that are precise, proportionate and accountable. It makes it harder for criminals to move money and makes it easier for honest Australians to get on with their lives. I commend the bill to the House.

Deputy Speaker, I know how happy you are to be here, as all Labor members are, to hear my speech on this important legislation.

I'm happy to be here!

The member for Casey is happy as well, but that was not in question; he is a happy man. This is an important bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026. In a shopping strip in Australia—just about any shopping strip you go to around the country—there's a machine that turns cash into cryptocurrency. I periodically walk past them myself, and I sometimes wonder who on earth puts money into these machines. But they're out there, and there's consumer demand. So be it. But, of course, once money goes into those machines, the question is: where does that money go, and can it be traced? For many people, it's simply a way of exchanging their cash for an alternative currency to be able to build a different form of security of wealth. But where does it go beyond the slot, the screen, the queue? They can very quickly be utilised by organised crime as the pathway to be able to launder money. We've seen this in many cases.

When we have a continuing problem of organised crime and the CFMEU Labor cartel, you can almost say that the Victorian government, working with the Albanese government, has put $15 billion through these machines, all the way through to organised crime. Or maybe it's the other way around—back into the coffers of the unions and the Labor Party. You could say that organised crime and the tobacco industry use these machines, potentially, to be able to launder money to hide its origins. So I'm actually quite surprised that the federal Labor government actually wants to shut down a pathway to be able to launder money, considering their history is normally to run protection for organised crime by refusing to take any measures to stop it, particularly around excise.

Of course, there are plenty of people who use these machines for the first time and don't know where the money goes. What we want to do is make sure that there's appropriate proportionate regulation so that they do not become a backdoor pathway for money laundering through crypto ATMs in the Asia-Pacific. We as a nation now have the highest number of crypto ATMs in the Asia-Pacific, 2,000 of them. In 2019, only a few years ago, we had barely a couple of dozen. Almost 150,000 transactions are run through the machines every year, worth more than $275 million, and 99 per cent of that is cash going in and mostly not coming out.

Cash, by design, is almost impossible to trace, and AUSTRAC has found that 85 per cent of frequent transactions through these machines are tied to scams or to money mules. The Federal Police reported scam losses through crypto ATMs in the millions and then told us the truth is that that figure is vastly underreported; the real number is substantially greater. This, of course, is not confined just to crypto going through the machines. In a single year, the bank shut down 22,000 mule accounts. Some belonged to criminals, but many belonged to ordinary Australians who never knew their name was even being used.

If you step back and look at the situation more broadly, it's a sobering picture. The Australian Institute of Criminology puts the cost of serious and organised crime at up to $82 billion in one year, and cryptocurrency has been described fairly as a magnet for money laundering because of what it removes around traceability. Late last year, this parliament created new offences for financing state sponsors of terrorism, but our anti-money-laundering laws have not sufficiently caught up to empower our enforcement agencies to stop the financing of terrorism through these types of means.

Behind every one of these numbers is a person—a retiree talking to an investor, a pensioner too ashamed to report a loss—and a community that's started to wonder whether anyone is guarding the gate. That's why we need proper AML regulation associated with these ATMs to give people clarity and confidence. The problem is that we need a lot more measures to stop money laundering and the involvement of organised crime in this country.

The sad thing is that, while the government is taking action against consumers in this space and trying to shut down at least one pathway for organised crime to engage in money laundering, they're not doing it across the board. Australians need confidence that their government is on their side. Australians need confidence that a government is going to act to improve outcomes for the Australian people, and at the moment we have an Albanese government that is not doing that. We know full well that they are running protection for organised crime to continue to engage in super profits through illicit tobacco sales. We wish they brought the same focus in this legislation to that debate.

While they like to talk about enforcement action, we now know that the Prime Minister is buckling under the pressure from the coalition to reduce excise. Yesterday, and throughout this week in question time, he was asked multiple times, particularly by the member for Monash, who's doing an outstanding job in this space, and he refused to answer. He sent in the—what do we call him?—health-minister-cum-prime-minister-in-waiting-cum-prime-minister-in-training to answer questions on his behalf so he can't be caught on the record. An audition, a prime minister audition—that's not fair, actually, because, if you lined them up in a prime minister lookalike competition, you couldn't say that they look the same. I think the minister for health is—in a platonic way, of course—a much better looking individual. But he was sending him up so that the Prime Minister doesn't have to answer questions about whether he's ultimately going to cut excise, because he knows—like we know, like this parliament knows, like the Australian people know—that the illicit tobacco trade is delivering superprofits for organised crime.

Let me put it to you bluntly as this: they don't need to put it through cryptocurrency ATMs, because they don't report their gains to the Australian Taxation Office. They just take them and they use them for whatever it is they actually want. Funnily enough, once you break the Rubicon of breaking the law on illicit tobacco, you're not overly concerned about breaking the law on anything else. In fact, they're more likely to then go on and do things like finance terrorism.

We know this. This is not some sort of hypothetical debate. Organised crime is working with groups like Iranian sponsored agencies that engaged in firebombing, just outside the Goldstein electorate, on synagogues. We have antisemitism financed by organised crime through terrorist networks. The answer from the Albanese government is, 'Let's keep running the laws that enable it for them to secure their superprofits.' I mean, just frankly, it's insane. It's utterly insane, as is the fact that everybody in the Labor Party just sits there and goes, 'Nothing to see here.' You know the meme where they sit there with everything burning around them and they're saying, 'This is fine.'

I don't say that to make light of it. It's because everyone on this side of the chamber is looking at that side of the chamber and saying, 'We know that terrorism is being financed through organised crime, sponsored by terrorist networks and activated by government policy, and the government isn't going to do anything about it.' Most of us are asking what is going on here! We're quite happy to change the laws and to engage in an honest conversation about it. We're happy to put things on the table and say we need to change the laws to remove the superprofits of organised crime through illicit tobacco, and the response of the Albanese government is: 'This is fine. Carry on.'

I know the 94 seats have gone to the Prime Minister's head and his ego, but there's actually a point where members of the government have a moral responsibility to stand up to their own government and point out the consequences of the conduct. Don't be fooled into believing that just because he's been here longer, or he sits in that chair, he has some sort of moral superiority, genius or insight. It is quite the reverse.

Our Prime Minister, our government, is now running a protection racket for the superprofits of organised crime. The fact that I can stand up here in this parliament and say that and not a single member of the Labor Party actually stands up and even calls a point of order is demonstrative of just how absurd the situation now is. We have organised crime and money laundering that's been engaged—again, not through ATMs, because they don't need it; a chequebook is just opened up, which is made out from the Commonwealth of Australia and the taxpayers of Australia to public projects where there has been known involvement of organised crime through the CFMEU-Labor Party cartel. The money has been provided to them—$15 billion and in some estimates nearly $30 billion—and the response has been exactly the same.

We know that money has gone to organised crime. We know it's gone towards sexism. We know it's gone towards abusing women. We know it's gone towards violence against other workers. We know it's gone towards enforcement of threats of assault and violence against private individuals. We know that the Victorian premier—the last one, sorry—was aware. The current one was aware too, as was the previous one before the last one, but, even more distressingly, this has been known on the public record. This is a message for Andrew Clennell from News24. He said it's an outrageous allegation to say that the federal government was signing cheques to public projects which ended up in the hands of organised crime. I say it's all on the public record. When that has been known, the response from the government hasn't been 'maybe we should send the money through a crypto ATM so that organised crime can get it'. They've simply got out the Commonwealth chequebook and struck a cheque that has then been handed on through the Victorian government to organised crime.

I've written to the Prime Minister and said, 'Maybe we should do an audit trail of federal funding and whether it's landed in the hands of organised crime, since we know these facts.' I thought perhaps we would get the Prime Minister to say: 'That's a good idea. I don't think taxpayers' money should go into organised crime, and I certainly don't think it should go towards things like terrorist financing.' Instead, we've had silence. The Prime Minister won't even respond to a reasonable request to follow the audit trail.

I welcome the legislation, although we're sending it off to the Senate for a Senate inquiry to see if it can be fine tuned and improved. What I can't understand is why this Labor government thinks that, when consumers put money into a crypto ATM, we should follow the money, but, when it comes to taxpayers' money from a chequebook signed by the Prime Minister and the minister for infrastructure—and we know explicitly on the public record, through a series of multiple inquiries, they don't want to follow the money trail. When we know that tax laws are leading to an explosion in illicit tobacco, which leads to super profits by organised crime, they don't want to follow the money trail or the tax trail.

This government is not a serious government. It does not have the best interests of the Australian people at heart. When they know things that dents their pride, their answer is to stick with their pride. We have a minister for health and ageing—a wannabe prime minister in training—who simply won't change the law and blocks any attempt to do so because he won't stand up against the policies of one of his predecessors Nicola Roxon, the former minister for health. While they paraded themselves as world leaders around tobacco regulation—I've got a tip for you: nobody's buying plain packaged tobacco products in Australia anymore. I can tell you the Manchester or whatever other brand that's out there is not in olive green. It's funny that organised crime doesn't just engage in super profits when they sell something illegal. They also don't follow branding regulations or laws.

I mean this is really serious stuff. We have a government that is in utter denial of the consequences of its actions, and there must be, at some point, not just an awakening—and I hope and pray there is, but I'm not seeing it. But, more importantly, there needs to be an opportunity for the Australian people to turn around and throw the Albanese Labor government out because we have never had a government in this nation's history that has so betrayed the Australian people by undermining our economic stability through empowering organised crime and providing them a revenue source and super profits on a scale this unimaginable. The fact that I say that and all we get from Labor backbenchers who sit there is silence says everything.

I rise to speak in strong support of the Albanese Labor government's Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026. It's not like the movies. It's not cool guys in cool jackets, suits and a lot of leather. It's not Ocean's Eleven. Organised crime is vicious. It is cruel. It seeks to cause harm and damage to our children, our communities and our borders for one very simple thing—money. Once you've got that money, you have to clean that money. If we remember back to the prohibition times in the United States, they got Al Capone not on the St Valentine's Day Massacre, not only the other garbage that he was pulling in Chicago, but they got him on tax avoidance. Follow the money.

Organised crime doesn't care about tax; it doesn't care about excise. It cares about making sure that it can spend on what it wants—flash cars, holidays, becoming Instagram famous or whatever it is. We need to stop these people. You stop them in the hip pocket. You make it harder to get the money. You need to take the risk profile out of the scenario. If they think they're going to lose money and if they think they're going to spend a bit more time in the pen, that's not a good risk. But if they believe that they're going to be able to get through and keep that money in their pocket, that's a really good risk.

This bill delivers on the reforms announced by the Minister for Home Affairs at the National Press Club last October to crack down on money laundering through high-risk mechanisms, particularly crypto ATMs. I'm not a crypto bro—I think I missed that generation slightly—but there are legitimate uses for it. It is an exciting new way to move wealth around. People see, particularly, dogecoin, and the NFTs—the one where it is a dog—and they seem really cool. But security agents have been warning us about this for some time because once it hits that crypto land, it vanishes. You can't keep track of it. And when things are in the dark, that's when bad things happen. Any town planner can tell you that. Make sure people can see what's going on. It's when people can't see what's going on that things start to fall apart.

We live in a different world. Gone are the days when the various threats of terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering, people smuggling and espionage existed in their own silos—specialists, if you like. But now these threats are starting to converge. They're taking more time to add more strings to their bow. They overlap. And that is why we have to hit them in the hip pocket.

And we have seen this with the Adass Israel Synagogue attack—the disgraceful attack on Australian soil—with the dual caravan incident and with the illicit tobacco debate. Money laundering is one element that ties those three things together—the ability to move vast sums of money around quickly, without oversight, and to ensure that it's going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. There will always be bad people, and there will always be bad people who are motivated by profit. We have to keep the profit out of their pockets.

Cryptocurrency is a reality of the world we live in, and some people here in Australia use it as a legitimate investment tool. Some people have done really well out of it, and more power to them; it's really great. These laws are not intended for them. There is legitimate use of cryptocurrency. People should be allowed to invest and profit to make their own lives and the lives of their families better.

Think about the ordinary purchase of crypto. When it is done online through a bank account, it's a traceable transaction. That doesn't always happen with the crypto ATMs. There's one down by the local servo where I walk my dogs. I have no idea how it works—absolutely none. But, allegedly, when crypto is purchased using cash through the crypto ATMs, while there may be some limited identification involved to varying extents, the reality is the capacity to trace those transactions is far less than when using a bank or a traditional resource.

Australia is currently ranked third in the world for the number of crypto ATMs. There's been a massive amount of growth; it's been very, very fast. Just six years ago there were only 23 crypto ATMs in the entire country. Today there are 2,000. Every year approximately 150,000 transactions, totalling $275 million, go through crypto ATMs with 90 per cent of those transactions being deposits. This is putting cash into the machine and getting crypto as an exchange.

Crypto is tricky because it doesn't exist in the real world. You can't touch it; you can't feel it. I don't know what it tastes like—I've never bitten on it by accident; my grandmother didn't put crypto into the Christmas pudding. It's very hard to trace once it hits the ether. We're not saying that everybody who goes and deposits cash into a crypto machine is a problem or involved in illegal activity, because we know that's not the case. Many people are excited by this technology. But it is happening. It is a significant problem in the area, and we need to be able to trace it.

The bill will make targeted amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 and provide power to restrict the use of high-risk products, service delivery channels and things of that ilk. Basically, we're going to have a bit tighter control—keep that leash tight. The bill will introduce a new framework enabling the AUSTRAC CEO to regulate the use of these high-risk mechanisms through general sector-wide restrictions or prohibitions, and the bill also amends the meaning of 'financing' and 'terrorism' in section 5 of the AML/CTF Act to reference new offences, including into the Criminal Code Act 1995 for financing of state sponsored terrorism.

We wish that we didn't have to create these laws. But the reality of the world that we live in now is that we do. When people start using money through these crypto machines and through the World Wide Web to fund terrorism, to fund crime, to damage our children and to damage our country, we have to strike back.

The amendments will also clarify and improve the operation of provisions introduced by the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Act of 2024, and these amendments have been identified through the implementation of the 2024 AML/CTF reforms. That sounds like a lot of political jargon and a lot of different reforms and acts, and a whole lot of things are intertwined.

But let's take a look at what that actually means from a layman's point of view—day-to-day stuff. On 16 October, when Minister Burke announced the government would introduce power to AUSTRAC to restrict or prohibit high-risk products, and service and delivery channels, this means we can disrupt the use of the mechanisms which allow criminal actors exploiting and harming our community by using these cryptocurrency ATMs. For those playing at home, the very high risk mechanisms of any high-risk product service, delivery channel or thing—scammers, that includes you. This could include cryptocurrency, but it's basically everything.

The new framework will require the AUSTRAC CEO to take into account specific matters when considering whether restriction or prohibition is necessary in the public interest. The public interest is important. We don't like, as I said before, restricting people's ability to invest in this new technology. What we're looking at is the nature and effect of the harm, the effect the proposed restriction will have on the harm, whether there are alternative channels to provide the service and any other matters prescribed by regulations.

These are important. Understanding the nature of what's happening and how it is happening to critical to any response, as is what the proposed restriction will achieve—there's no point having a law for the sake of having a law—and whether there are alternative channels to providing the service. We don't want to remove cryptocurrency from the economy. The framework mandates a minimum 30-day consultation program with public and other affected agencies before the AUSTRAC CEO has to make a final decision, unless, of course, urgent circumstances apply. The new power is intended to provide a flexible, risk based response for emerging and evolving money-laundering and terrorism-financing risks while still allowing reporting entities to use innovative technologies and business models. This is not intended to be a power that is used to restrict or prohibit a reporting entity from using a high-risk mechanism merely because it involves digital assets, speculative activity or presents any financial investment or risk. It's there for guardrails and guidance to make sure that people are safe.

Schedule 2 of this bill amends the meaning of 'financing of terrorism' in section 5 to reference new offences introduced into the Criminal Code Act 1995 by the Criminal Code Amendment (State Sponsors of Terrorism) Act 2025 for financing state sponsored terrorism. The reality of state sponsored terrorism was made very clear to our shores recently and was a heartbreaking moment for every single person in this House and every single Australian, particularly the Jewish community.

We have a moral obligation to put a stop to it. We have a moral obligation to stand up for the people that we are elected to represent and the people we are elected to protect to cut off those resources. We are not always able to directly influence a country if they decide to act in a way that would seek to do us harm, but, by God, we will stop them paying our people to do it for them. We are not going to let state sponsored terrorists get their hands on money to damage Australia and Australians. There is no place for it. I'm proud to be a part of a government that looks them in the eye and says, 'Not here, not today, and not on our watch.'

Schedule 3 has several technical amendments which we won't go into because, really, technical amendments have not been my strength.

This is about protecting all of us. It's about making sure that the investments people make are safe and that the money that they put into these machines doesn't disappear and wind up in the pocket of someone who seeks to do them or their community harm. We need to get these laws through. We need to send a message to organised crime and to anyone who is considering state sponsored terrorism on Australian soil: there is no money to be made here. We will take the thing that drives you, that financial profit, that gain that you think you're going to get—we are going to take it from you and then we'll come for your freedom as well because, if you're going to pull that kind of rubbish, you belong in jail for a very, very long time.

We are working hard as the Albanese Labor government to make Australia safer. I commend this bill to the House.

There is a strip of shops along Forest Road that I've walked past many times as a kid, as a local councillor and now as the member for Barton. This particular road also traverses the electorate of my friend the member for Banks. I'm sure he would agree with me about the businesses that are operating on this very busy road—a convenience store, a hairdresser, a tobacconist that's probably changed hands a couple of times. But it is very much an ordinary Australian high street, the kind you find in Hurstville, in Kingsgrove or in Rockdale and in pretty much every corner of this country. And it's exactly this kind of street that organised crime has now learnt to hide inside.

That's what I want to talk about today with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026—reporting entities, designated services, legislative instruments. But underneath all this very technical language is a very simple and very human problem—that criminals hiding amongst us have gotten better at moving money without being seen. It is this parliament's job to make sure that they can't.

Here's a fact that stopped me when I read it. Six years ago, there were 23 cryptocurrency ATMs in this country; today there are 2,000. Australia now has the third-highest number of crypto ATMs anywhere in the world. Think about what that machine actually is. It sits in a shopping strip, maybe next to a newsagent, and it lets someone walk in with a bag of cash and walk out with cryptocurrency—no bank, no name on the account, barely even a paper trail. Every year, roughly 150,000 transactions worth about $275 million pass through these machines, and 99 per cent of them are cash going in.

I want to be very clear—because I don't want anyone in Barton to think that this bill is aimed at them—that cryptocurrency is a legitimate part of the modern economy. If you buy it through your bank account online, that transaction is traceable, the same as any other. This bill is not about punishing ordinary investors, and it says so explicitly. It is about a much narrower problem: cash going into a machine on a street corner, being converted into an asset that can move across borders in seconds, leaving almost nothing behind for our police and intelligence agencies to follow. That gap between an ordinary high street and an untraceable financial pipeline is precisely where organised crime has been setting up shop.

For a long time, we talked about national security threats as if they lived in separate silos or boxes—terrorism over here, organised crime over there, foreign interference somewhere else again. Our security agencies have been telling us for many years that this picture is out of date. The threats are converging. They are borrowing each other's tools, each other's networks and, increasingly, each other's money. We saw it in the most painful way imaginable in December 2024, when the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was set alight in the early hours of the morning by masked attackers, who poured accelerant through the building and set it alight while people were inside. One worshipper was injured, and a community's spiritual home was gutted. It has since been established that the attack was orchestrated with the involvement of a foreign state sponsor—a chilling reminder that the line between terrorism, foreign interference and criminal facilitation is not a line at all anymore.

We saw the same blurring in Sydney's own backyard when a caravan packed with explosives and a note listing Jewish addresses was discovered at Dural, north-west of the city, in January 2025. It triggered exactly the fear it was designed to trigger. Investigators later established that the plot had not been the work of ideological extremists at all. It had been staged by organised criminals, both here and offshore, using the machinery of terror as a tool for their own ends: different motive, same convergence—criminal networks reaching for the same tactics, the same fear and the same financial plumbing that terrorism and organised crime have always shared. And we see it, more quietly but just as corrosively, in the illicit tobacco trade, the firebombings of shopfronts and the turf wars playing out on suburban streets, funded and enabled by the same laundering pathways this bill is designed to close down. These are not three separate stories. They are one story, told in three different settings. Money laundering is a thread that runs through every single chapter.

Moving to what this bill does, this legislation delivers on reforms the Minister for Home Affairs announced at the National Press Club last October, and it does three things. First, and this is the core of the bill, it gives AUSTRAC's CEO a new power to restrict or prohibit the use of high-risk mechanisms like crypto ATMs, where those mechanisms are being exploited to cause significant harm to the financial system or the Australian community. This isn't a blunt instrument. Before any restriction can be imposed, the AUSTRAC CEO must be satisfied it's necessary in the public interest, weighing the nature of the harm, whether the restrictions will actually address it and whether legitimate alternatives exist for people who rely on that service. There's a mandatory minimum 30-day consultation period with the public and affected agencies before any decision is made, except in urgent circumstances. And, because these restrictions are made by legislative instrument, this parliament retains the power to disallow them if they get the balance wrong. That's the safeguard that matters most to me. A power this significant should never operate beyond the reach of parliamentary scrutiny.

Second, the bill updates the definition of 'financing of terrorism' in the act to capture new offences, introduced last year under the Criminal Code Amendment (State Sponsors of Terrorism) Act 2025, for financing a state sponsor of terrorism. Given what we now know about the origins of the Adass Israel Synagogue attack, this is not an academic, legal tidy-up. It closes a gap that a real attack on Australian soil exposed. Third, the bill makes a series of technical amendments to the 2024 AMLCTF reforms, clarifying provisions that businesses and reporting entities identified as unclear during implementation. These are simple but necessary amendments, the kind that make sure that the system we've already built actually works the way parliament intended it to.

I guess the question is: why? I represent one of the most diverse electorates in this country, and diversity is precisely what organised crime and extremist networks try to exploit—communities they think are easier to frighten, easier to divide and easier to launder money and fear through. Barton is also, like many electorates in this country, home to small-business owners running the exact kinds of shopfronts that have become collateral damage in the illicit tobacco wars, and residents have watched with genuine anxiety as antisemitic attacks and threats have escalated in Sydney over the past couple of years. When my community sees a synagogue firebombed in another city, a caravan of explosives found on a Sydney road or a tobacconist on their own strip go up in flames overnight, they don't experience those as three unconnected news stories. They really experience them as a single, growing sense that something has shifted, and they have a right to ask what their parliament is actually doing about it.

This bill isn't part of the answer. It won't fix everything. No single piece of legislation does that. But it closes a mechanism that has been exploited precisely because it was invisible. It gives our agencies a tool that's proportionate and accountable to this parliament aimed purely and squarely at the criminals exploiting a gap, not at the ordinary Australians using cryptocurrency the way millions of people around the world now do. I think often about the strip of shops in Forest Road and the people who run those businesses, who just want to open up in the morning without wondering if their street has become part of someone's criminal network. It's about the locals who go to the shops wanting to know they're supporting the real, genuine small businesses that I am very proud to represent as well in my electorate. That's who this bill is for.

I understand the member for Pearce would like to present a copy of their speech for incorporation into Hansard, in accordance with the resolution agreed to on 6 November 2025.

() (): The incorporated speech read as follows—

I would like to speak on the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026. I do so because this bill speaks to something very basic that Australians expect from their government: that we will keep our communities safe, protect the integrity of our financial system and make sure the law keeps up with the way criminals operate in a modern world.

This is not a dry technical issue, and it is certainly not a matter for bankers and lawyers alone. Money laundering and terrorism financing are serious crimes that allow people with bad intentions to hide dirty money, fund further offending and undermine trust in the institutions that honest Australians rely on every day. When criminal money is allowed to move freely through the system, the harms spread well beyond the original offence. They reach into our businesses, our charities, our property markets, our community organisations and our neighbourhoods. That is why I support this bill.

In Pearce, I know that people want clear rules and a fair system. They want to know that, when they work hard, pay their taxes and run their businesses honestly, they are not being undercut by criminals who can use illicit funds to distort competition or hide behind legitimate activity. I hear that from small business owners, from community leaders, from professional service providers and from volunteers who simply want to do the right thing. A local business owner may notice transactions that do not quite fit the normal pattern of trade. A professional office may be asked to deal with payments that raise questions. A community group may receive a donation or transfer that seems unusual or out of step with its usual supporters. These are not theoretical concerns. They are the kinds of situations that decent people face, and they need a legal framework that helps them identify risk and act with confidence.

That is one of the strengths of this bill. It is not just about enforcement after the fact. It is about prevention, early detection and giving regulators the ability to respond when criminal methods change. The Department of Home Affairs has made clear that these reforms are part of a broader effort to address threats to national security, including the laundering of illicit funds and the financing of terrorism. The reforms were announced in October 2025 and introduced into parliament in March 2026 after consultation with industry and other stakeholders. That consultation is important. Good law should be built with a clear understanding of how it will work in the real world.

One of the most important elements of the bill is the power it gives to AUSTRAC's Chief Executive Officer to restrict or prohibit high-risk products, services or delivery channels. That is a sensible and modern response to a changing threat environment. Criminals do not sit still, and neither can our laws. When a product or delivery channel becomes a vehicle for abuse, the regulator needs the ability to act quickly and proportionately. That matters because some channels are more vulnerable than others. Cash-heavy transactions, fast-moving digital transfers, emerging payment technologies and other high-risk mechanisms can be exploited in different ways depending on the circumstances. A strong legal framework must be flexible enough to identify those risks and precise enough to avoid unnecessary burden on legitimate activity.

The bill also amends the definition of financing of terrorism. That may sound like a technical drafting change, but it is actually a very important reform. Terrorism financing is often difficult to detect because it can involve small amounts, fragmented transfers or disguised activity that is only obvious when patterns are reviewed together. Clarifying the law helps ensure that law enforcement, intelligence agencies and prosecutors have the strongest possible basis to detect, investigate and disrupt those flows. This is especially important in an age where funds can move quickly and where legitimate channels can be misused. We must be able to distinguish between genuine charitable, humanitarian or community activity and conduct that is designed to mask the support of violent extremist causes. The law needs to be clear enough to support legitimate activity and firm enough to stop abuse.

I also want to acknowledge the transitional rules, because they are a critical part of making these reforms workable. The AML/CTF Transitional Rules 2026 are designed to give reporting entities time to adjust their systems and processes while still managing money laundering and terrorism financing risk. That is a pragmatic and responsible approach. Compliance changes on this scale require training, systems updates, legal review and operational planning. Transitional arrangements do not weaken the reform; they help it succeed.

That matters in Pearce. A small accounting practice does not have the same compliance capacity as a major institution. A local business does not have the same legal resources as a bank. A community organisation does not have a dedicated regulatory team. They need guidance that is clear, practical and proportionate. They need support that helps them understand what suspicious activity looks like and how to respond appropriately. That is why the reform package, including AUSTRAC's guidance and the transitional rules, is so important. It helps businesses and organisations know what is expected of them. It gives them time to adjust. And it helps ensure that ordinary people who are trying to do the right thing are not overwhelmed by complexity or left guessing about their obligations.

I also think it is important to say that this bill is about protecting honest enterprise. When dirty money flows through the economy, it distorts competition. It can allow criminal operators to undercut legitimate businesses, inflate prices in certain sectors and erode trust in the fairness of the market. That hurts families, workers and small operators across Pearce and across Australia. For that reason, this bill is not just about law enforcement; it is also about economic integrity. It is about making sure that good businesses are not forced to compete with criminal proceeds. It is about preserving a level playing field so that success comes from hard work, not from concealment and corruption.

There is also a wider public safety issue here. Money laundering is the financial engine room of organised crime. It helps criminal groups turn illegal gains into usable wealth. It supports the networks behind drug trafficking, fraud, exploitation and corruption. If we are serious about disrupting serious crime, we have to be serious about following the money. The same applies to terrorism financing. The sums involved can be small, but the consequences can be catastrophic. That is why the law must give investigators the clarity they need to identify suspicious patterns and the confidence they need to act quickly.

I know that some people worry about privacy, proportionality and the possibility of regulatory overreach. Those are legitimate issues, and they should never be dismissed. But the answer to those concerns is not to leave the system exposed. The answer is to make the law clear, impose proper safeguards and maintain strong parliamentary scrutiny. This bill takes a measured approach, and it is one I can support.

The consultation process also deserves recognition. Stakeholders from the profession and industry provided feedback on how the reforms would work in practice. That input helps make sure that the final legislation is not only strong in principle but practical in operation. It is exactly the kind of policy development Australians should expect—firm on principle, careful in execution and informed by the people who have to make it work. For people in Pearce, the principle is simple. They want a government that stops criminals from exploiting the financial system, protects legitimate businesses and keeps the rules fair and understandable. They want laws that support the honest majority and make it harder for bad actors to hide. That is what this bill does.

I want to finish by acknowledging the people who will make these reforms real in practice—the compliance teams, the small business owners, the not-for-profit leaders, the professional advisers and the staff at AUSTRAC and Home Affairs who will support implementation. Their work is often unseen, but it is vital. They are the people who help turn legislation into protection. This bill is sensible, necessary and responsible. It strengthens our defences against criminal abuse of the financial system, modernises our framework for the risks of today and gives honest Australians and the businesses they run the clarity they need to comply with confidence. For those reasons, I commend the bill to the House.

Australians rightly expect to have confidence in the financial sector. While we used to think about terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering, people smuggling and espionage as diverse and separate threats, this is no longer the case. More and more, our security agencies are warning of the convergence, coexistence and overlapping trends in Australia's threat landscape.

Australia's national security architecture has historically been segmented into distinct categories. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation handles counterespionage and counterterrorism. The Australian Federal Police tackles transnational organised crime. AUSTRAC monitors financial compliance and the Australian Border Force guards our physical points of entry. In the modern world, we can no longer continue to combat complex threats through siloed agencies. Today, our security agencies, including ASIO, the AFP and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, warn of unprecedented convergence.

Organised crime networks act not only to profit from illicit substances or extortion. They can also carry out services desired by hostile foreign intelligence services. Foreign powers can use criminal networks to conduct politically motivated arson, track down dissidents and execute acts of violent intimidation. Conversely, terrorist cells and extremists can utilise the infrastructure and supply chains of organised crime, including illegal firearm networks, identity fraudsters and untraceable financial channels to plan and enact their aims.

Consider the real manifestations of this risk in recent years. The appalling attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue was not an isolated act of hate. It highlighted how radicalised individuals and malevolent actors seek out untraceable financial services to carry out targeted violence against the Australian Jewish community. Likewise, the discovery of weapons, improvised explosives and tactical gear in the Dural caravan incident demonstrated how illicit arms dealing, financing and extremism can merge into public safety threats on the outskirts of Sydney. The surge in the illicit tobacco market has fuelled shocking violence in recent weeks and months, prompting strong enforcement action to crush the organised criminals involved.

Money is the fuel that powers the transactions behind all these incidents. Anonymous cash is critical to these operations. Illicit enterprise cannot function without the ability to move cash into untraceable digital value. Money laundering is the functional engine of violence and subversion in Australia. The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026 delivers on the reforms announced by the Minister for Home Affairs at the National Press Club last October to crack down on money laundering through high risk mechanisms, particularly crypto ATMs.

When crypto is purchased using cash through crypto ATMs, our agencies have limited capacity to trace those transactions, even though there may be limited identification to some extent. Criminal syndicates know this. They exploit the gap between cash and digital ledgers to wash illicit money with alarming efficiency.

Australia is currently ranked third in the world for the number of crypto ATMs. A mere six years ago, there were 23 crypto ATMs operating in Australia. Today there are around 90 times that number. Over 2,000 crypto ATMs are now spread across the country in shopping centres, convenience stores and servos. There are around 150,000 transactions facilitated by crypto ATMs, at a value of around $275 million, and 99 per cent of these transactions are deposits, putting cash into the machine in exchange for digital cryptocurrencies. This is a massive vulnerability across our payments system. Not all these transactions are problematic or reflect illegal behaviour. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and many people use them as a legitimate investment instrument. But crypto ATMs are a covert and convenient means for avoiding detection by security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We know that AUSTRAC data shows that these machines are overwhelmingly used by scammers, money mules and syndicates funnelling money offshore. In some cases, they are coercing vulnerable Australians, typically seniors, into feeding their savings through these channels under the influence of deceptive investment scams.

This bill introduces targeted amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006. It equips our authorities with the modern statutory tools needed to combat modern financial crime. The bill establishes a high-risk mechanism framework, granting authorities the power to restrict or prohibit the use of high-risk products, services, delivery channels and things that criminal actors exploit to harm our financial system and our community. This bill empowers AUSTRAC, enabling the AUSTRAC CEO to issue general sector-wide restrictions or prohibitions on these high-risk mechanisms, subject to clear public interest conditions. It modernises counterterrorism-financing definitions by amending section 5 of the act to explicitly reference new offences introduced into the Criminal Code Act 1995 for financing a state sponsor of terrorism, and it enhances operational clarity, improving provisions introduced under our previous landmark reforms.

In October last year, the Minister for Home Affairs announced that the government would introduce legislation to give AUSTRAC the statutory power to restrict or prohibit high-risk products, services and delivery channels. This bill fulfils that promise. Under schedule 1 of the bill, a high-risk mechanism is defined as any high risk product, service or delivery channel used by reporting entities to provide designated services. This squarely encompasses cryptocurrency ATMs.

To ensure that this broad regulatory authority is exercised with the appropriate procedural fairness and transparency, the bill establishes a structured decision-making framework. When considering whether a restriction or prohibition is necessary in the public interest, the AUSTRAC CEO must take into account specific statutory matters. These include the nature and effect of the harm being caused to the financial system or the Australian community; the effect the proposed restriction will have in mitigating or eliminating that harm; whether there are legitimate alternative channels to provide the service safely; and any additional matters prescribed by regulations.

The framework also mandates a minimum 30-day consultation period with affected parties, industry bodies and state and federal agencies before any final order is enacted. Of course, there may be urgent circumstances where immediate risk mitigation is paramount, but this provision helps ensure that these powers are exercised with appropriate prudence and care. This power is intended to support a flexible, risk based response to emerging and evolving money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing risks while still allowing legitimate entities the freedom to innovate. It's not intended to restrict or prohibit a delivery channel merely because it involves digital assets, speculative activity or financial risk. We aren't interested in stifling technological innovation or dictating how Australians choose to invest. This legislation is about dismantling the regulatory gaps in which organised criminals thrive.

Schedule 2 addresses another critical pillar of our national security architecture: stopping the flow of funds to terror. It amends the definition of 'financing of terrorism' in section 5 of the act, which aligns our anti-money-laundering laws with the new offences introduced under the Criminal Code Amendment (State Sponsors of Terrorism) Act 2025. The nature of state sponsored terrorism and foreign aggression is ever evolving. When state actors or state financed entities engage in acts of terror and subversion, our financial regulatory framework must have the legal coverage to identify, freeze and interdict any financial pipelines supporting those actions.

Australia's terrorism-financing legislation has been built around the threats we faced in the early 2000s. At the turn of the century, Australia grappled with threats from non-state actors such as al-Qaeda and Daesh operating in small, decentralised cells. Traditional counterterrorism-financing mechanisms focused on detecting small cash transfers through illicit hawala networks to purchase equipment or fund travel expenses. Over time, Australia's threat landscape has shifted and reflects a heightened presence of state sponsored terrorism. Under our 2025 reforms to the Australian Criminal Code, we established a legislative framework that allows the Governor-General, on the advice of the Federal Police and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, to officially list foreign state entities as state sponsors of terrorism, including actors such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

These amendments have made it a severe criminal offence to interact with or finance these state entities. However, the AML/CTF Act's core regulatory terms had not yet been updated to match this new framework. Schedule 2 of this bill fixes the compliance mismatch that AUSTRAC and reporting entities faced, where an act that might constitute financing a state sponsored terror activity under the Criminal Code did not automatically trigger the statutory supervisory, reporting and asset-freezing powers that exist under the AML/CTF regime. By updating the definition in the AML/CTF Act, schedule 2 grants AUSTRAC and reporting entities such as banks, remittance providers, digital asset exchanges and gatekeeper professions the statutory authority to target state sponsored financial channels.

State backed proxies rely on local financial nodes to pay for their operations. Denying these actors access to Australia's banking system raises their costs and the risks for any intelligence operations that these actors may wish to conduct on Australian soil. It also represents an important step in protecting diaspora communities. State sponsored terror frequently uses hired proxies to intimidate, track and attack political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious minorities. Cutting off financial flows hampers these transnational campaigns of repression. Aligning our counterterrorism-financing definitions with those of international partners, including our Five Eyes allies and the Financial Action Task Force, also ensures smoother tracking and intelligence sharing when state actors attempt to engage in cross-border money-laundering schemes.

In a world where criminals can exploit gaps in communication between the countries in which they operate, these provisions ensure closer collaboration to achieve our shared aims and manage shared threats. They complement our government's efforts to ensure a comprehensive alignment across the regulatory space, including our Criminal Code, sanction regimes and anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing enforcement mechanisms. Schedule 3 of the bill clarifies the operation of these provisions. Following the passage of our major AML/CTF reforms in 2024, our government has worked closely with reporting entities to get the implementation right.

This bill provides regulatory certainty regarding several technical points, lowering compliance costs for honest businesses while ensuring that our enforcement agencies have clear and unambiguous laws with which to hold bad actors to account. National security does not begin or end at our coastlines. Crime and terror do not respect borders. In the 21st century, national security cannot be separated from financial security. The threats we face in the form of organised crime, foreign interference, state sponsored terrorism and violent extremism are bound together by intricate networks of anonymous finance. The Albanese Labor government recognises that the first and principal responsibility of government is the security of our citizens.

This bill is a decisive step forward in defending Australia's sovereignty, the integrity of our payment system and public safety. This is a government that is not allowing the organised crime networks to determine our health policy, and this is a government that is taking seriously enforcement action against organised crime. No longer can we afford to view financial crime in isolation from the major risks we face. The modern security environment calls on us to treat money laundering as the engine driving transnational crime, foreign interference, state sponsored terror and organised crime. We are taking the necessary steps to protect Australians and strengthen our financial system.

By targeting money laundering, closing the crypto ATM loophole, modernising our terrorism financing laws and giving AUSTRAC the powers it needs, this bill advances the security and social cohesion of our community. Our message to organised crime syndicates and foreign hostile actors is clear: Australia is closed to illicit enterprise and will deploy the full suite of our regulatory apparatus and security agencies to combat illicit enterprise. I commend this bill to the House.

There's a phone call doing the rounds in my electorate. In fact, it's doing the rounds in every electorate represented in this place. A woman in her 70s picks up. The man on the other end is calm. He's professional. He tells her he's from her bank. He tells her there's been suspicious activity on her account and her savings are at risk. He is kind about it. He's patient. He stays on the phone with her for an hour, which is long enough that she stops thinking of him as a stranger and starts thinking of him as a person seeking to help her.

Then he tells her what to do: 'Go down to the shops. There's a machine there, near the newsagency. Put your money in and it will be safe while we sort this out.' So she does it. She does it because she is frightened and because a kind voice has spent an hour earning the right to be believed. By the time she works out what has happened, the money is gone. It is not sitting in an account anywhere waiting to be frozen while the police catch up. It has gone, and so has the man on the phone. That machine is a crypto ATM, and these machines are not incidental to these scams. It is the reason the story ends the way it does, and the people making these phone calls understand that better than anyone.

How do these machines end up on our shopping strips? New technology has been good to us. It has opened up opportunities for our economy and for working people's lives that we would have struggled to imagine decades ago. But the things that make technology useful to the rest of us are the same things that make it useful to criminals, and they have moved on that faster than anyone anticipated. Six years ago there were about 23 crypto ATMs in the country. By the end of last year there were more than 2,000. That is a rapid growth in a short period of time—faster than a framework built for banks and shopfront businesses was ever designed to keep pace with.

We are now the third-largest market for these machines in the world, behind only the United States and Canada. We have more machines than countries that have vastly bigger populations than ours. About 150,000 transactions go through them every year, worth somewhere near $275 million. At an ordinary ATM, people take money out. In these machines, 99 per cent of transactions are people putting money in.

We should be clear: this bill is not an attack on cryptocurrency. Plenty of Australians own crypto—they treat it as an investment—and nothing in this bill touches them. When you buy it the ordinary way through an exchange or through your bank, you leave a trail. If something goes wrong, someone can follow it. A crypto ATM doesn't work like that. You put cash in, you walk away with crypto and that one step—cash to crypto—is where the trail goes cold and where our police and our intelligence agencies lose the thread. Organised crime worked that out a long time before we did. That is the distinction the minister has drawn from the beginning. He described this reform as legitimising the good actors and shutting out the bad. Those doing the right thing lose nothing here. The people who should be worried built their criminal behaviour on untraceable cash.

In this debate, we must focus on who is standing in front of these machines. AUSTRAC, our financial intelligence agency, looked at the 90 most prolific users of these machines in the country in 2024. You would assume the heaviest users of cash-to-crypto machines would be young people trying to invest or, as this legislation aims to confront, people engaged in criminal activity—that's a fair assumption. But they weren't the core group. Eighty-five per cent of users were either scam victims or money mules, people who'd been tricked or pressured into moving money that was not theirs. The people feeding these machines are overwhelmingly the people being robbed by them. There's a finding that goes alongside this statistic. Before criminals take the crypto scam route, they try the online banking method first, but, when a bank spots the fraud and stops the transaction, those same criminals don't give up. They redirect the victim to one of these machines. It is where people get sent once every other door has been shut in the scammer's face. And it gets worse. By the value of money going through them, the biggest single group of users is Australians aged between 50 and 70. They account for close to three-quarters of it—people at or near retirement with a working life of careful saving behind them and targeted for that very reason.

When I hear this evidence, I think about those in my community that I have come across—retirees and older residents in their final years of work. They are proud people. This is the group who is most at risk of losing the nest egg they'd spent a working life building, and so often they are too ashamed to tell their family what has happened. Maribyrnong is a young electorate on paper—our median age is 39—but the people these criminals hunt are in every street across Maribyrnong, in Avondale Heights, Ascot Vale and Airport West. These are people who paid off their house, raised their kids, put something aside and still answer the phone when it rings because that's the world they grew up in. The machines are turning up in exactly the ordinary places where my constituents do their shopping—the strip near the station, the petrol station, the corner shop. They are targeted by professionals who do this for a living, who have done it a thousand times and who are very good at it.

The answer here is not to tell older Australians to be more careful. They are already careful. Telling people to individually outsmart a transnational criminal industry is not going to meaningfully change the landscape that has given rise to this crime. The answer is in legislation and in regulation—rules that apply across the whole sector so that this criminal behaviour is tackled at the highest levels.

The damage runs well past the individual losses. These machines have been linked to the proceeds of drug trafficking, to cybercrime and to financing of child exploitation. Laundered cash doesn't evaporate. We know that it gets reinvested into more drugs, more scams and more misery, not only here in Australia but across our region. The Australian Institute of Criminology puts the cost of serious and organised crime in this country at up to $82.3 billion in 2023-24. That is money taken out of the pockets of ordinary people and out of the public services all of us rely on. There was a time when we thought about these dangers in separate boxes, with terrorism in one place, organised crime over there and money laundering somewhere else. But those days are over. What our security agencies tell us now is that these threats overlap and feed off each other. We're seeing it in the illicit tobacco wars in our suburban streets, an issue that my community knows all too well about. Running through nearly all of it is money—dirty money being moved, hidden and washed clean. Choke off the money, and you weaken every one of those threats at once. That is what this bill sets out to do. It does three things.

First—this is the heart of it—schedule 1 gives AUSTRAC a new power. Right now, when a dangerous new laundering method emerges, our regulator can go after operators one at a time. To be fair to AUSTRAC, that is exactly what they have been doing. They put conditions on the sector last year: a $5,000 cap per transaction, stronger customer checks and scam warnings on the machines. They refused to renew one operator's registration, and just this week they suspended another, taking 96 machines offline. The network has come down from its peak of just over 2,000 to around 1,745 recently. That scrutiny and pressure is working, but look at what it takes. Operator by operator, months of work at a time. It's often a bit like one of those Whac-A-Mole machines that you can play. By the time you've dealt with one, three more have emerged.

This bill lets AUSTRAC act across an entire sector at once. It gives the AUSTRAC CEO the power to restrict or prohibit the use of a high-risk product or service—a crypto ATM being the obvious example—where it is doing real harm. That's the commitment the Minister for Home Affairs made at the National Press Club in October last year, and now our government is delivering it. This is a serious power, so of course it comes with guardrails. Before the power can be used, the CEO has to be satisfied of two things: that the thing being targeted is causing, or is likely to cause, significant harm to our financial system, our community or both; and that acting is genuinely necessary in the public interest. Building it that way lets AUSTRAC respond as risks shift without closing the door to Australian businesses using new technology honestly. On top of that, there's a public consultation period of at least 30 days in all but genuine emergencies so affected businesses get their say. Every decision is made by a legislative instrument, which means this parliament keeps its oversight and can disallow it. Given the powers in this bill, we have ensured that it has been through the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is exactly the scrutiny a bill like this should attract.

This parliament is not banning anything today. The decision sits with the regulator, made on the evidence after consultation, and answerable to this place. AUSTRAC's chief executive has said that if we pass this law, his agency is ready to use it. It is not a tool for shutting something down because it's new or digital, or because someone in here thinks crypto is a poor investment. That's not the role of government. Our job is stopping the harm being done to working people.

The second part of this bill, schedule 2, strengthens our terrorism financing laws. It updates the definition of terrorism financing so it lines up with the new Criminal Code offences dealing with those who bankroll state sponsors of terrorism, and it makes sure we can keep pace with our sanctions laws into the future. That keeps us in step with the global watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, which happens to be assessing Australia this year. Other countries are moving the same way. Canada has proposed making it a criminal offence to run one of these machines, and US states are legislating caps and warnings. Doors are being locked around the world, and our government is making sure that Australia is not the one left open.

Third, schedule 3 makes a set of technical fixes. We passed major reforms in 2024—long overdue and the reason we are not the world's back door for dirty money—and putting them into practice this year surfaced a handful of things that needed clarifying. These amendments tidy them up, making life simpler for honest businesses and people doing the right thing, without weakening a single protection.

Let me come back to where I started. In my community, there are people who have been robbed in plain sight, in a brightly lit shop, in front of a machine, doing what a stranger on the phone told them to do. The thing that gets me about these stories is the shame. They blame themselves. They replay the call and wonder how they missed it. Most say nothing at all, which is precisely what the criminals are banking on. None of this is their fault. The shame in this does not belong to them, which is why our government is determined to pass this bill. We are passing it because the harm is real and is landing on Australians who have done nothing wrong. Retirees and grandparents are talked out of their savings by professionals who do this for a living. The money doesn't stop with them. It gets reinvested into organised crime and terrorism that cost this country up to $82.3 billion a year.

Chasing that one operator at a time is too slow. This bill lets AUSTRAC deal with a high-risk product across an entire sector in a single decision, and it does that without punishing the businesses and the millions of Australians using new technology honestly. That is why I commend this bill to the House.

When people hear the words 'anti money-laundering', I think many Australians simply switch off because it can sound technical. It can sound like something that only matters to banks and large businesses. But this bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026, is about something much more familiar to Australians. It is about the retiree who is told their account has been compromised and is pressured to move their savings; it is about organised crime groups using technology to hide the profits of drug trafficking; it is about a scam text message that lands on your phone, pretending to be from your bank; and it is about making sure that, when criminals try to profit from harm, Australia has the laws and tools to stop them—because money laundering is not a victimless crime. It is the financial engine room of serious crime. Criminals do not scam people or traffic drugs for the sake of it; they do it for the money. And, if they can move that money, hide that money and make that money look legitimate, then those criminal networks become stronger, more sophisticated and harder to stop. But, if we make it harder for criminals to move money, we make it harder for them to profit from crime. That is why this legislation matters.

AUSTRAC has said that the money being laundered that is generated by illegal activity causes up to $60 billion in harm to the Australian community. That is not an abstract number. That is someone's mum losing her retirement savings to a scam. That is a young person being targeted online. That is a small business's system being taken down by a hacker. That is why Australians should care about this bill.

Our national security agencies have been warning for some time about the changing nature of threats in Australia. Gone are the days when terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering, people smuggling and espionage existed neatly in their own silos. Those threats are no longer separate. They are converging and overlapping, and they are increasingly enabling one another. We have seen that convergence play out in very real and confronting ways: in the attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue, in the dual caravan incident and in the growth of the illicit tobacco trade—different actors, different motivations, but common enablers.

One of the most consistent enablers across these threats is money laundering. If you can move money undetected, you can fund criminal activity and you can evade law enforcement. The reality is that the way criminals move money is changing. They are using new technologies. They are exploiting gaps. They are looking for the weakest point in the system. If governments failed to modernise their frameworks, criminals will always move faster than the law.

Here's the simple truth. The threats evolved, but the laws didn't. For years, international experts warned that Australia's anti-money-laundering framework had serious gaps. The coalition knew about those warnings, but they failed to act. Labor fixed that in 2024, modernising Australia's anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing laws and bringing Australia back into line with international standards because protecting Australians from organised crime requires more than tough rhetoric; it requires action. And the cost of delay was real. While reforms were put in the too-hard basket, criminals adapted. They exploited crypto pathways, laundered the proceeds of scams and made stolen money harder to recover. Meanwhile, ordinary Australians paid the price, targeted by increasingly sophisticated scams designed to steal their savings. Victims were told to withdraw cash and deposit it into a crypto ATM, often in their local shopping centre, and, within minutes, their money had been converted into cryptocurrency and sent offshore, making it incredibly difficult to trace and recover.

Australians are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, their entire life savings, and that is why this bill matters. Let me be clear about what it does and what it doesn't do. This bill is not anti cryptocurrency. Many Australians use digital assets legitimately. They invest, innovate and participate in the modern digital economy. This bill doesn't ban cryptocurrency. It doesn't punish legitimate users or businesses. What it does is target risk. Specifically, it targets the products, services and channels increasingly exploited by criminals to launder money and facilitate harm.

One of the clearest examples is the rapid rise of crypto ATMs. When cryptocurrency is purchased through a bank account, there is a clear transaction trail. That traceability is vital for law enforcement, but, when cash is fed into a crypto ATM, that trail can become harder to follow. That's exactly why these machines have become attractive to scammers and money launderers. This isn't a small problem. Six years ago, Australia had just 23 crypto ATMs. Today, we have around 2,000—the third-highest number in the world. Criminals are adapting quickly, and this bill ensures our laws can keep pace.

Each year approximately 150,000 transactions, totalling around $275 million, pass through these machines, and 99 per cent of those transactions are deposits—people putting cash into a machine and receiving crypto in exchange. We are not saying that every person who uses a crypto ATM is doing the wrong thing, but it is a growing problem for our security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to trace and monitor using existing powers. Ignoring that risk would be irresponsible.

This bill delivers on the reforms announced by the Minister for Home Affairs to give AUSTRAC a new power to tackle emerging threats, including high-risk channels like crypto ATMs. Importantly, this is not a blunt instrument. It is a targeted risk based power that allows AUSTRAC to restrict and prohibit products, services and delivery channels only where there is significant harm added and where it is in the public interest to act. There are safeguards, and AUSTRAC must consider the nature of the harm, whether the proposed action will reduce that harm and whether alternative services remain available. It must also consult industry, government agencies and the public before acting, except in urgent circumstances.

This bill does not target innovation, it does not ban cryptocurrency, and it does not penalise legitimate businesses or consumers. What it does do is draw a clear line between legitimate innovation and criminal exploitation. The bill also strengthens Australia's response to terrorism financing, updates the laws to reflect modern threats and makes practical improvements to ensure the 2024 reforms work as intended. In short, this is a commonsense reform—strong safeguards where they are needed and better protection for Australians. This bill comes down to a simple question: should criminals be allowed to exploit new technologies faster than government can respond, or should we give our agency the tools they need to protect Australians? This bill backs innovation, but it refuses to give organised crime a free pass. It protects Australians, strengthens our national security and ensures our laws keep pace with the changing world, because, when we make it harder for criminals to move money, we make it harder for them to cause harm.

We live in an age of breakneck speed and change, but, surely, the rate of change nowadays is unlike what was ever encountered in any previous generation. This is especially the case in the banking, finance and investment sector. It's an area I know extremely well, having worked in the banking industry for decades before entering this place. Much of this change of course is positive. It has made our lives easier. For example, gone are the days of lining up at the bank on a Friday afternoon looking for a lost passport, waiting for cheques to clear or storing share certificates.

Internet banking, tap and go and digital wallets are now the norm. Unfortunately, the technology that makes the lives of everyday Australians easier is also the technology that can assist organised crime, especially money laundering.

The legislation before us today was foreshadowed by the minister in October 2025, in his address to the National Press Club. Specifically, it delivers on the government's commitment to crack down on money laundering through high-risk mechanisms, especially crypto ATMs.

The ATM, in the way we understand them, was first introduced into Australia in the early 1980s as individual networks. By the 1990s, they'd progressed to a point where they were interconnected as part of a network, greatly enhancing their effectiveness and benefit to consumers. Banking ATMs are familiar to all of us. There are currently well over 20,000 ATMs in Australia, but a more recent addition to the ATM family is crypto ATMs. Australia has the highest number of crypto ATMs in the Asia-Pacific region, from a modest 23 in 2019 to around 2,000 today. Australia is ranked third in the world in the number of ATMs.

To be clear, cryptocurrencies are a genuine, legitimate form of investment that many thousands of Australians use. This legislation is not aimed at the users or at Australians. When crypto is purchased online through a bank account, traceable transactions are created. This is not always the case when crypto is purchased with cash through a crypto ATM. As a result, the ability for our security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to trace those transactions is far more limited, and this opens the door for organised crime and money laundering. There are approximately 150,000 transactions every year through crypto ATMs totalling $250 million. Of these transactions, 99 per cent are deposits—that is people placing money into the machine and gaining crypto in exchange.

The Australian government agency tasked with anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing is AUSTRAC. The bill before us amends the 2006 Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act to give AUSTRAC the power to restrict the use of high-risk products, services and delivery channels. In particular, the new framework will enable the AUSTRAC CEO to impose general, sector-wide restrictions on high-risk mechanisms that are obviously being exploited by criminal actors. This will apply where the existing powers are not enough to combat the identified risks and disrupt illicit financing and other money-laundering activities.

Now to the specifics of the bill. Schedule 1 pertains to regulating the use of high-risk mechanisms which are in any high-risk product, service, delivery channel or thing. It introduces a new power for the AUSTRAC CEO to restrict or prohibit high-risk products, servicing delivery channels which criminal actors are exporting to harm the community. This could include cryptocurrency ATMs, which are used by reporting entities to provide a designated service. The framework will require the AUSTRAC CEO to take a number of matters into account when considering whether a restriction or prohibition is necessary and in the public interest. These include the nature and effect of harm, whether there are alternative channels to provide this service and the effect the proposed restriction will have on the harm. A minimum 30-day consultation period will be mandated before the AUSTRAC CEO makes a decision, unless, of course, an urgent circumstance exists. The new power will support a flexible, risk based approach to emerging and evolving money-laundering and terrorism-finance risks. It is not intended that the power be used to restrict or prohibit a reporting entity from using a high-risk mechanism merely because it involves digital assets or speculative activity or presents financial or investment risk.

Schedule 2 relates to the meaning or definition of financing terrorism. It will amend the definition of financing terrorism in section 5 of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 to reference new offences introduced into the Criminal Code Act 1995 for financing a state sponsor of terrorism.

Schedule 3 relates to technical amendments to better support businesses to implement their obligations under the anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism financing regime by clarifying and putting beyond doubt the operation of the provisions. Money laundering and financing terrorism are a scourge. Crypto ATMs allow money to be turned into digital currency that can be sent instantly and virtually anonymously anywhere in the world. Further, many in our communities—the most vulnerable—have been subject to the crypto ATM scams.

The risks to individuals and our nation are obvious. Organised criminals are clever. They are always looking for new ways to launder money and to get around the rules. Sadly, one of the disadvantages of the advances in technology is that platforms like crypto ATMs have allowed this criminal activity to converge and overlap, when once they operated in their own individual silos. We've seen this with the Adass Israel Synagogue attack, the illicit tobacco trade and other things.

The bill before us addresses these concerns and risk. Public consultation regarding this matter took place in late 2025 and early this year. A consultation paper outlining proposed amendments in schedule 1 and 2 has been released. Further, I understand that AUSTRAC has begun a proactive campaign to inform Australians about these proposed changes. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.