Senate debates

Wednesday, 21 March 2007

Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2007

In Committee

6:46 pm

Photo of Joe LudwigJoe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I was interested in giving you a practical way of looking at it, and perhaps even a recent example. The UN or the US government—we will call it the Volker inquiry—says, ‘We’re interested in the Australian Wheat Board arrangements and money that has gone from Australia overseas’—or money that has gone from overseas to Australia, more generally, if we use AUSTRAC as an example. So ASIS asks AUSTRAC to take the name ‘Australian Wheat Board Ltd’ and run it through the AUSTRAC database, or use a data-mining software to query the various databases that they may have and see what matches come out the other end.

Had it been in place at that time, the match might have come out the other end to show that there was a figure of $300 million being transferred. That is the practical application of it and that is how you can use it for financial intelligence information. It holds financial intelligence. Why they want to run a particular company, financial institution or person through the system will sometimes be unknown to the AUSTRAC CEO. They put those things in place to ensure that they know that there is a relationship and the AUSTRAC CEO has an entrusted official in place. You can see how they could use the information advantageously. It would have been very helpful if that had been run back then, but it was not, as far as we are aware—or as far as we are told. That is the practical way these things work.

It does not necessarily mean that ASIS might be swimming around in AUSTRAC’s database unguided. But in this instance—if we can use the example—ASIS would be conducting an investigation into those overseas transactions and then use the names and various information it has in place to create a picture by searching the database in a variety of ways using a variety of analytical tools to come up with answers. Those answers then fit into a bigger picture of the money trail—where the money has gone, how the money has gone, who the money has gone with, and who the entities are that it might be associated with. That is the purpose of it. That might help.

Progress reported.

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