Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to endorse the comments made by the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission and also endorse his thanks to the members of the committee and to the secretariat for the outstanding work they do. I have great pleasure in speaking to the tabling of this report on the 2007-08 annual report from the Crime Commission. The establishment of the Crime Commission in January 2003 was a proud achievement of the Howard government and I believe has been well borne out by the great work that the commission has done since. The commission replaced the National Crime Authority, the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Crime Assessments. It has become a truly national criminal intelligence and investigation agency, with a greater focus continuing to be put on the intelligence side of its work.

The ACC started with a budget of $65 million in 2003-04 and in 2009-10 it will have a budget of $111 million, which I think demonstrates the growth in its work. However, we found during a hearing that arrest rates have fallen. The number of people charged by the ACC in 2004-05 was 294, and this dropped to 176 in 2006-07 and went to 210 in 2007-08. Some of the submissions made to the committee’s review of the ACC noted these figures and suggested that they represented a decline in the commission’s effectiveness. The investigative journalist and author on organised crime Mr Bob Bottom pointed out that during 2006-07 the New South Wales Crime Commission was responsible for 445 arrests, compared with the ACC’s 176. The New South Wales figure was achieved with a staff of just 110, compared to the 619 employed by the ACC. The budgets were also compared: there was $14 million for the New South Wales commission and well over $100 million that year for the ACC.

The ACC, I think quite rightly, explains the drop in the arrests by emphasising the change in the focus of its operations, as I noted. They told our committee that the investigations of many offences are best carried out by Australia’s police forces, with the ACC working more on national intelligence. Certainly, an overarching intelligence role is the ideal use of the commission’s resources, but we as a committee feel that this must also be accompanied by a rigorous accounting of this move towards more qualitative KPIs for the ACC. We can measure arrests and the like, but intelligence by its very nature is a far more difficult measurement to make, and so we must rely very carefully and heavily on qualitative KPIs to be sure that the money given to the ACC is being effectively used.

The intelligence services provided by the ACC to its partner organisations are invaluable in their ability to make arrests. Eighty-seven per cent of the ACC’s operations are conducted with its 16 partner organisations, including the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Customs Service, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Taxation Office. The ACC reports that the feedback and success of its collaborations with partner organisations has been positive. This, of course, is an area that we must continue to watch with great vigilance and to investigate very thoroughly.

The first indicator of the ACC’s performance is the provision of effective and efficient criminal intelligence systems, which includes the storage of intelligence data, in collaboration with partner organisations. I am pleased that the commission is continually upgrading and revising its data capabilities. Last year saw the launch of its latest version of the Australian criminal intelligence database, which includes new capabilities in text analysis and socionetwork analysis tools to detect and map criminal networks—putting two and two together so that you get four right across Australia, not just in small areas and not just in one city. These networks will be invaluable in the time to come.

Recently, data intelligence regarding tax avoidance, tax evasion and large-scale money laundering has been a strong focus of the commission through Project Wickenby. Project Wickenby, of course, is a cooperative partnership between the ATO, the AFP, ASIC, the Commonwealth DPP and the Australian Crime Commission. In March this year the ACC reported to us that Project Wickenby had resulted in 23 criminal investigations, three convictions and 40 people being charged with indictable offences, as well as $287.3 million in tax liabilities being raised. Given the links that organised crime has with tax avoidance and money laundering, collecting and analysing intelligence on taxation is going to be a growing and ever more important part of the commission’s work.

The links between the ATO and the ACC are very important in detecting organised crime through taxation data. This committee has continually advocated that the Commissioner of Taxation have a permanent position on the Australian Crime Commission board and that view has been supported by Commissioner Keelty, who said, ‘There is great benefit in having the tax commissioner on the board.’ Therefore, we recommend to the government that the process to include the taxation commissioner as a full member of the Australian Crime Commission board should be expedited.

The second performance indicator of the commission’s operations is to provide investigation and intelligence operations into federally relevant criminal activity. A very necessary component of its work in this area to investigate and to gather intelligence is their powers to coerce witnesses to appear and to provide information. In 2007-08 the ACC issued 895 summonses to attend an examination and they conducted 760 examinations. These coercive powers of the ACC are invaluable in their investigation of cross-border organised crime and for gathering information that can be used by both the AFP and state police bodies. For instance, under Strike Force Wolsley the commission recently executed 31 search warrants in relation to the alleged criminality and acquisition of illegally obtained assets by the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gang. Strike Force Wolsley was established in August last year and has so far resulted in 123 charges being laid, 36 arrests and the seizure of 31 illegal firearms as well as illegal drugs with an estimated street value of $5 million. The commission’s work with the Joint Asian Crime Group has also had success with the recent prevention of $25 million worth of methamphetamines going onto Australian streets. It was in May, last month, that this shipment was prevented from entering the Australian drugs market.

However, the committee has noted that the ACC needs to have stronger and more expedient mechanisms for dealing with contempt when a person fails to cooperate with the examiners and the examination process. We have heard from the commission that delays in the court’s hearing of contempt matters have often resulted in ‘the importance, relevance and value of the information that comes from those hearings being greatly degraded’. In short, it is too easy for people called as witnesses to frustrate the process by using court appeals to destroy the timeliness and the value of the information they have. Naturally enough, it is the criminals or the alleged criminals with the deepest pockets who have the most opportunity to delay and frustrate the process of uncovering evidence which will assist the Australian community. So certainly we need to work in that area to support this extraordinarily valuable organisation in the work that it is doing to save and protect the Australian community. I commend the report to the House.

Question agreed to.