Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026

Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (17:37): I think I'll just ignore that last comment from the member opposite. Somewhere in this country today, there's a machine bolted to a wall in a service station or in a shopping centre, and standing in front of it is a woman in her 70s, maybe a gentleman in his 70s, with an envelope of cash in her hands. She may have been on the phone for an hour to a man she's never met.

That person will have told her that her account has been compromised or that he loves her or that her grandson is in trouble, and he's told her precisely which machine to go to, which buttons to press and which wallet address to type into the screen. She feeds the notes in. The cash becomes cryptocurrency in seconds.

The cryptocurrency leaves the country, and then it is gone—not gone in the sense that a bank might be able to claw it back but gone in the sense that nobody on this earth is getting it back for her. Last October, the Minister for Home Affairs told the National Press Club about a 77-year-old woman taken for $430,000 in exactly that way—$430,000, a lifetime of work, fed one bundle of notes at a time into a machine in a shopping centre.

That's what this bill is all about. Let me put the scale of this problem on the record. In 2019, Australia had 23 cryptocurrency ATMs.

Today, we have more than 2,000. That is the third-highest number of any country on the planet. AUSTRAC estimates almost 150,000 transactions run through those machines each year, moving around $275 million.

About 99 per cent of that activity is cash going in. When AUSTRAC's cryptocurrency taskforce examined the 90 most frequent users of these machines, it found that 85 per cent of the of that transaction value was linked to scams or money mule activity. Australians over the age of 50 account for almost 72 per cent of the value moving through cryptocurrency ATMs.

Those aged 60 to 70 alone account for 29 per cent. Read those findings together and the picture is unmistakeable. The heaviest users of these machines are overwhelmingly older Australians being talked through a transaction by a criminal on the other end of a phone line.

But crypto ATMs are only one channel. Australian banks closed 22,000 mule accounts in a single financial year, and the Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that serious and organised crime cost this country between $35.5 billion—that's billion, with a B—and $82.3 billion in 2023-24. Before my dad passed away, he wanted to buy a car.

Dad was a motor mechanic by trade. He left school at 14. He'd never owned a new car in his life, and he wanted to buy himself a nice car.

It was a 16-year-old car. It wasn't a new car, but he wanted to buy himself a nice car. He answered an ad—I don't know whether it was on Marketplace or whatever it was—and he went to the bank and tried to get the cash out or get a bank cheque for the purchase of this car.

He must have had the bank details to buy this car. To their credit, the teller at his bank, seeing my dad, a man in his 90s, said, 'Mr Wallace, I'll be with you in a moment; I just want to check something.' She went out the back and typed in the details of this account number, and she came back out and she said, 'Mr Wallace, I think you're being scammed.' So I want to give so a big shout-out to our banks.

I don't often give a shout-out to our banks, but our banks are getting better at identifying these sorts of scam activities. It's not just cryptocurrency that organised crime gangs are involved in. It's not just tobacco, although that's front and centre at the moment.

It's illegal alcohol. It's the purported sale of motor vehicles. I cannot begin to tell you how many of my constituents, how many people I bump into, tell me how much money they have lost.

These are smart businesspeople who, ordinarily, you would think would be all over this stuff, but these scammers are so smart. Their systems are so clever that, even to savvy businesspeople, they present a real and present danger. We do need to take away the stigma of scams, because I know that many Australians who get scammed feel such shame that they have been robbed, that they've been sucked in.

I can think of two people, two close friends, who are in their late 80s, who were scammed and, thankfully, were able to get their money back from their bank, but they were the lucky ones. There are Australians across this country who are losing money hand over fist to organised crime gangs, and much of it is through these terrible cryptocurrency machines. AUSTRAC is the agency in the National Intelligence Community that tracks money flows through this country.

It is an organisation which is not powerless. It's imposed a $5,000 cash limit on crypto ATM transactions. It's refused to renew a registration.

Last month, it suspended a crypto ATM operator's registration outright. But look at how it has to do that: operator by operator, one enforcement action at a time, against a sector that can stand up a new machine in a new suburb every day. That is the gap that this bill identifies, and the coalition accepts that the gap is real, it's significant and it's dangerous.

Schedule 1 creates a power to act on the mechanism itself—on the product, the service and the delivery channel. The United Kingdom has moved against these machines. So has New Zealand.

The coalition is not prepared to accept Australia remaining the soft target of this region. So we support the objective of this bill. But supporting an objective has never meant handing any government a blank cheque, and it does not mean that today.

The schedule 1 power is a very large one. It can restrict the volume and value of funds moved, the method and the destination. Used carelessly, it could reach beyond crypto ATMs into legitimate services that ordinary businesses rely upon.

As the bill is drafted, this power sits with the AUSTRAC chief executive officer, triggered by two concepts carrying enormous discretion: significant harm and the public interest. Consultation can be bypassed in exceptional or urgent circumstances, and failing to consult would not invalidate the resulting instrument. Strong powers deserve strong scrutiny, so let me talk about the coalition's position.

We say that this bill should be passed, but I would like the House to be clear about the four improvements that we will pursue. These improvements came about through the work of the PJCIS, on which I am the deputy chair. First and foremost, this power should be exercised by the responsible minister acting on the advice of the AUSTRAC chief executive, rather than the chief executive officer alone.

Under the bill's current drafting, this government has given that power to the chief executive alone, and that is commonplace for this government. This government doesn't want its ministers to have their feet on the sticky paper. That's why the PJCIS recommended the very amendment that we are seeking.

AUSTRAC has the intelligence, the data and the expertise. Nobody disputes that. But a decision to shut down an entire financial channel across an entire economy is not merely a technical one.

It carries consequences for consumers, for businesses and for competition. Decisions of that magnitude should be made by a minister who can be questioned in this chamber, hauled before an estimates committee and ultimately removed by the Australian people at an election. Accountability is not a brake on the power; it's what gives the power its legitimacy.

Second—and something those opposite struggle with—there should be real transparency around the consultation that precedes any restriction, with publication of the submissions received and the consultation undertaken, and AUSTRAC's response to the issues raised. If a mechanism is to be restricted or banned, affected businesses and this parliament are entitled to see the evidence and the arguments weighed against it.

Third, commencement should be deferred until 1 July 2027. That's not the coalition inventing a grievance for industry; it's what industry and the legal profession, including the Law Council of Australia, have said publicly for months. Industry have said they need more time to make these changes.

Let me be clear about what that is not. It is not a softening. Industry is already absorbing an enormous body of change from the tranche 2 reforms—new systems, new training, new compliance arrangements in businesses never regulated this way before.

Solicitors, accountants and real estate agents are all telling me that they are buckling under the pressure which this CTF/AML legislation is already putting them under. A regime that lands before anyone can realistically comply with it does not catch criminals; it buries honest operators in paperwork while sophisticated players move on to the next big thing.

Getting the start date right is a crucial part of making this law work. Fourth, a deferred start date is no excuse for inaction on a threat that is in front of us right now. The minister, in consultation with AUSTRAC, should be considering as a matter of priority whether restrictions or prohibitions on crypto ATMs are warranted in the public interest.

The evidence is on the table. The victims are real. The government does not need to wait for this bill to start doing its job.

While we're at it—criminals do not only exploit what is new; they exploit what is old and poorly watched, and the money laundering risks sitting inside our legacy payments infrastructure deserve the same hard look. Schedule 2 also deserves support. It brings the financing of state sponsors of terrorism and state terrorist acts within the definition of terrorism financing and allows sanctions offences to be brought into that framework.

Our financial intelligence laws should move in step with our national security laws, not trail years behind them. Schedule 3 makes technical repairs to customer due diligence, politically exposed person definitions, legal professional privilege claims and registration requirements. Where those changes remove burden without weakening integrity, they are welcome.

Let me finish where I began. This is not a debate about cryptocurrency; it's a debate about whether the laws of this country can keep pace with people who steal from Australians for a living. The coalition will not be slow.

We will allow the bill to pass the House. When it reaches the Senate, we will move or support amendments to put this power in the hands of the accountable minister and give affected entities until 1 July— (Time expired)