The Hon Tony Burke MP

First Pacific Police Ministers Meeting, coordination of policing organised crime in the Pacific MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, TONY BURKE: It’s a real pleasure to have co‑hosted the meeting today with Minister Naivalurua and to acknowledge this is the first time that the Pacific police ministers have ever met as one. For a long time our commissioners and police chiefs have been meeting, and they have asked for the extra layer of the political involvement to be there present meeting, too.

And so for the first time – and I thank Fiji, and including thanking Prime Minister Rabuka, who greeted us last night – for making it clear that this had the status of being that first meeting. The decisions that we’ve taken we’re now sending through to the Pacific Islands Forum, because effectively if organised crime is going to function on a transnational basis, then our response needs to be on a transnational basis as well.

We have talked about the full range of cooperation, including maritime cooperation, cyber coordination, seeing how we can harmonise legislation, seeing how we can better share information, not simply direct criminal movement information but also information that goes to money laundering and goes to movement of funds. With all of this, this means today we have a level of political resolve that matches the work that’s been done for a long time.

In each of our jurisdictions our police forces have worked hard, have worked hard to fight organised crime. But now we are starting the work in the same sort of coordinated way that those who want to do us harm have chosen to do. Some drugs have found their way into the Pacific transiting through to Australia.

Others have seen the Pacific as a destination in its own right. But in every instance we are talking about something that is driven by demand and something that is driven by greed. And now the strength of the criminal resolve meets a unified strength from the Pacific family.

We have also decided that while this was the first meeting we have had, we have resolved that we will be meeting again next year and each year after that. Today’s date is not simply the date of a meeting; it is a date of resolve where we decided to turn the corner and to start organising in a way that the Pacific has not before to be able to fight organised crime in our region.

FIJIAN MINISTER FOR POLICE IOANE NAIVALURUA: I think you’ve said everything I wanted to say. Yeah, this is history in making. The first ever summit for the Pacific police ministers.

For Fiji to host such an important gathering like this, it’s a huge achievement for the Government, for the people of Fiji, and especially for me as the minister responsible for policing. There were 18 countries that gathered here the last two days with four Prime Ministers. That just demonstrates the importance of this meeting here, including our Honourable Prime Minister who opened the summit last night with the very clear direction and clear guidance of what we should be doing as police ministers.

It’s never happened before. We had agreed to meet. Now we have met and we’ve also agreed to do something about what we have met about.

So that’s the mandate that we’ve agreed on. And we know that next year we’ll be moving to another place to meet. The momentum now has moved.

We now have a mandate and that’s what the minister and I are happy about. We have now a mandate. JOURNALIST: So, Ministers, what is this something you’ve decided on?

You say you’ve made some decisions. So beyond actually meeting – which is a good start – what have you got show for today’s meeting? It’s the list that I went through, but I’ll go through it again: harmonising legislation, maritime coordination, cyber incident management, harm reduction protocols, information sharing including financial information, financial intelligence and anti-money laundering information.

Putting together all the tools that we have that we have individually as nations and starting to use that work collectively to be able to make sure that we have every possible tool against organised crime. We saw some horrific statistics as we went through about the damage of organised crime, about the damage of increased drug use in each of the jurisdictions that were represented here today.

Young people, families, criminal groups throughout the Pacific and crime that need to be dealt with at every source. If you take the transport of drugs from South America through to Australia, for example, we need to act in South America and we’ve been on the ground there since 2000. We need to be acting in Australia where we’re throwing everything we can at it there as well.

But we also need to be making sure we are doing the work in the Pacific because the Pacific is not simply a transit location for these drugs; it has also become a cruel destination in its own right. And so we need to stand together and go through every one of those levers that I just said to work as one. JOURNALIST: Minister, the demand by Australia is more than Pacific islands.

Is Australia doing enough? Should you do more? Or is that something that Australia needs to work on?

Australia needs to do more and is doing more. Part of what we are talking about here is to make sure we are dealing with every section. I reported to the meeting on different things we’ve been doing, including increased border – increased work by the Australian Border Force with interceptions at our border, in making sure that we do more in South America.

In 2024, for example, 8,000 kilograms of illegal drugs intercepted, half of it in Colombia, half of it in Mexico. The best option is to stop it at its source and it never gets on the first vessel. But we then need to make sure we stop it at every single place, and we need to make sure we are doing more on our own shores, but we also cannot leave the Pacific family alone.

The Pacific family, some of the damage here is as a transit country, but some of it is as a direct destination. And we need to make sure for the people being harmed directly by drugs, for the people being harmed indirectly, that the Pacific is not alone in this, which is why that sense of working as one, as working as one community, characterised everything we did today.

JOURNALIST: Minister Burke, but how will you ensure that the support that Australia is giving the Pacific is led by the Pacific and motivated by the Pacific and not merely an extension of Australia’s law enforcement borders? Everything we did today was about the Pacific having – increasing its sovereign capacity. When we talk about where you might want to be able to harmonise legislation, the role for Australia there is providing information, but no doubt there’ll be information where there’ll be some areas where in aspects of legislation different Pacific nations are in front of us, and we’ll be doing our harmonising, too.

This is about – the reason I started this morning and I started this media conference with the concept of vakaveiwekani is the concept no-one is senior in this – absolutely no-one. And Australia comes here as a member of the family wanting to provide what assistance we can but wanting to be able to work together, respecting the sovereign capability, respecting the sovereignty of every single country around that table and saying how can we work at one.

JOURNALIST: Ministers, you talked about how you want to harmonise efforts and coordinate efforts. Minister Burke, when you were talking, you mentioned so many different centres – maritime centres, centres of excellence. It seems like there’s already a very big network that should already be harmonising.

Why has that not happened before? And what are you going to do that makes a difference? And may I also ask a second question, which is: we also heard some concerns by smaller island nations about lack of resources, how they would actually be incorporated into that harmonisation.

Can you talk a bit about that? If I talk about the last point first, one of the classic examples from smaller island nations was with respect to maritime capability. So effectively the smaller the nation, the bigger the proportion of maritime area to population.

And you find that for each country. So when we talk about maritime capability, we are working through how, while respecting people’s sovereign ownership of their own assets, how we can better coordinate the information that we have, how we can better coordinate surveillance, and the issue has been raised during the meeting about making sure that the work we do there very specifically is respectful of the additional needs that there will be for small island nations.

So the issues that you raise there were specifically referred to in the contributions around the table. But when I go to the first part of that question, which is about the number of different centres we already have, I suspect that question goes to exactly why this meeting was called. I suspect that question goes to exactly why the police chiefs and commissioners together with the first ministers of the Pacific Islands Forum said that they wanted to make sure that the police ministers were meeting, not simply the police chiefs.

Because to be able to get that extra layer of coordination, you also need the engagement at the political level. You don’t simply need the people who are managing the resources; you need the people who argue for the resources within government and the people who are there when the laws themselves are being made on the floor of the different parliaments around the region.

And so I suspect the frustration about if all these different agencies are there why haven’t we already landed, goes precisely to why this meeting was called. The meeting has been sufficiently successful and sufficiently ambitious that we resolved at the end – and it wasn’t in the original talking points for any of us – but we resolved at the end today that there will be a meeting again in 2027.

We want this to now become a regular annual meeting because it’s one thing to set up a work plan; we need to be reconvening and reconvening to be checking progress. And even if at any point in time we had everything in a position that we thought might be perfect, organised crime keeps adapting. Organised crime will try to break every single system we put forward.

And we need to be willing to adapt and to change as quickly as they do to be able to protect the people who rely on meetings like this, people who won’t even know the meeting has been held but whose future relies on our work. JOURNALIST: Minister, how important was insider threat in the conversations you’ve had over the last two days? How much of a priority was it?

There were a number of specific references to making sure that you have the probity in every system, that everyone needs to make sure they have probity in their systems to be able to have the integrity to be able to deliver. I couldn’t count the number of times that it was referenced. It was referenced very regularly during the meeting.

JOURNALIST: So there are concerns that there are institutions that are compromised, and this partnership, this sharing of intelligence, is very crucial. How will this summit address that? Well, one of the outcomes is that we do need to improve the sharing of information, the sharing of intelligence.

And it goes not simply to the movement of organised criminal gangs themselves but also very specifically to the shift of funds to financers and to money laundering. That was specifically there in the decisions that we made and in the comments that I’ve referred to. JOURNALIST: But how can you be confident about information-sharing if there is corruption within those institutions you are sharing the information with?

How do you know it’s not going to end up in the plans of the local drug facilitators or the cartels? We’ve made decisions today about making sure we do better information-sharing, about making sure that we do better at being able to deal with organised crime. Effectively, if we were to say, ‘Oh, if not every system is perfect, we may as well give up’, then organised crime would win.

And so we need to have the resolve that we’ve had today and to meet next year and to keep meeting and to know that whatever we do, organised crime won’t give up. But can I say, the 19th of May 2026 is a day that organised crime will wish did not exist. NAIVALURUA: