Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026
Mr LAXALE (Bennelong) (18:35): When this government was elected in 2022 and then re-elected in 2025, we made it clear that we wanted our financial systems and national security framework strengthened. The job of reform never ends. In these two important areas, this Labor government has continued to bring laws to this place to strengthen our national security framework and our financial systems because we need our laws to work better in practice to keep people safe.
This bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026, delivers directly on the critical security reforms announced by the Minister for Home Affairs over his time in government and, most recently, as we heard from the member for Riverina, at the National Press Club in October last year. For some time now, our premier intelligence and security agencies have been warning about a dangerous, growing convergence of threats to our national security.
The days when terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering, people smuggling and espionage existed in isolated and predictable silos are completely gone. We are seeing these national threats constantly overlap, blur and feed into one another. We've seen the stark reality of this threat convergence play out right across our communities.
From horrific terrorism attacks through to highly organised crime networks, these threats are real and they all have one thing in common. Money laundering is the single, corrosive element that runs through almost every single security threat we face. It's the grease and the gears of syndicated crime.
These reforms are squarely aimed at breaking those networks down. Across the country, keeping our economy clean and disrupting criminal syndicates has meant real, measurable protection. It's meant safeguarding economic infrastructure that families and small businesses rely on.
It's meant stopping the flow of illicit wealth into our everyday economy. It's meant practical, direct protection delivered through modern regulatory tools that trust our legitimate business community while isolating bad faith actors. Just as our healthcare and cheaper medicine reforms have eased cost-of-living pressures—directly in my electorate and across the country—our financial security reforms are aimed to protect the economic wellbeing and safety of exactly the same households.
These protective frameworks, which we constantly need to look at, matter right across the economy. They matter to older residents, who are prime targets for highly sophisticated scams, identity theft and financial fraud. They matter to local families, who increasingly transact in a digital environment and whose hard earned savings must be protected from crooks.
Ask any local accountant, community banker or financial adviser. They'll tell you just how important robust modern financial protections are, and they'll probably tell you a story of one of their clients who has been scammed. These laws and their reforms matter directly to people who expect their government to keep an eye on this stuff, to make policies which protect them from criminals and from organised crime.
For this Labor government, strengthening our national security frameworks in this space is about reforming the system so it's fit for purpose and ready for the future. It's about making it easier for legitimate businesses to navigate their compliance requirements and how the safety net can work smoothly whilst encouraging innovation in the sector. Even with our strong existing frameworks, local businesses and reporting entities still tell me there's work to do.
In situations where a highly professional, compliant local business is executing everyday services, it needs to make sure that it can deal with a financial system that avoids operational friction because of lack of updated regulation. That's what these bills and these ongoing reforms we've delivered in government are designed to do: remove that friction and make systems easier for legitimate businesses.
This bill builds directly on the methodical work that we've been doing to make our national security regime more responsive, more flexible and better aligned with how modern transactions occur on the ground right across our economy. Specifically, this bill makes a targeted and highly practical set of changes to disrupt serious crime networks under the AML/CTF Act, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act, serving as the next piece in a sequence of essential reforms to make it harder for money launderers to succeed; it introduces a new framework enabling the AUSTRAC CEO to regulate high-risk products, services, delivery channels and things through general sector-wide restrictions or prohibitions; it amends the meaning of the financing of terrorism in section 5 of the act to explicitly capture new offences under the Criminal Code related to financing a state sponsor of terrorism; and it delivers critical technical amendments to better support businesses implementing their obligations under the AML/CTF regime, ensuring data travels with payments to meet obligations and directly supporting efforts to modernise the Australian payments system.
In Australia, we have incredible local payment networks. In hearings that I was happy to be a part of in my role in my committee work, it was great to hear AUSTRAC and the Australian Payments Network really tell the committee how important it was for government, and also for the private sector, to start transacting through our local modern payment networks, like the New Payments Platform.
I look forward to working on that committee and with industry and government to go to this better platform so that more of our transactions travel with more data to protect Australians from further money laundering. These reforms are not a chaotic rewriting of our banking laws. It's not heavy-handed overregulation of everyday financial activities.
It's important reform that removes regulatory time lag, giving our regulators the power to act in a streamlined, agile and effective way to protect Australians from organised crime. And there's no area more desperately in need of reform than cryptocurrency ATMs. But we need to be clear here.
Cryptocurrencies are a reality in the world we live in. Many people use them as a perfectly legitimate investment or economic tool, and these laws are absolutely not aimed at cryptocurrencies. But we must understand that in Australia right now there exists a systemic vulnerability.
When a consumer buys crypto online through a bank account, it creates a clean and traceable transaction history. That doesn't happen when cash is thrown into a crypto ATM. When crypto is purchased using cash through these ATMs, the reality is that our law enforcement agencies' capacity to trace that transaction drops to near zero.
The data on the use of these crypto ATMs is staggering. Australia is now ranked third in the world for the number of crypto ATMs in our communities, and the growth has been explosive. Just six years ago, there were only 23 crypto ATMs across Australia; today, there are over 2,000.
Every single year, approximately 150,000 transactions go through these machines, moving roughly $275 million. Unbelievably, 99 per cent of those transactions are deposits—people loading physical cash into a machine and retrieving an untraceable crypto in exchange. We're not saying that every person depositing cash into these terminals is a criminal, but advice is that this specific channel represents a massive blind spot that makes it incredibly easy for crime syndicates to wash illicit money.
This bill gives AUSTRAC the exact tools needed to intervene. It means that regulatory oversight can be delivered more efficiently without compromising safety standards or community confidence. For local business owners, it means fewer redundant compliance loops and clearer guidelines, and, for everyday consumers, it means a safer financial environment where criminal networks cannot easily exploit local technological infrastructure.
The reform is highly careful, deliberate and bounded by a robust accountability framework. The power given to AUSTRAC's CEO is not arbitrary. It's an important power but one that will be within oversight.
In considering a restriction or sector-wide prohibition, the CEO must take into account clear statutory factors: the nature and extent of the harm, the direct effect the proposed restriction will have on that harm, whether alternative financial channels exist to provide that service or any other specific matters prescribed by formal regulation. Except in urgent or exceptional circumstances, the framework mandates a minimum 30-day consultation period with the public, with industry and, of course, with affected stakeholders before a decision is finalised.
This is a risk based, flexible response. The primary legislation explicitly states it's not intended to restrict a mechanism merely because it involves a digital asset, speculative activity or inherent financial risk. Importantly, every decision made by the AUSTRAC CEO will occur via legislative instrument, ensuring it is brought directly to parliament for full oversight, scrutiny and the very important accountability power of disallowance.
Schedule 1 is slated to commence on 1 January 2027, giving reporting entities and legitimate industries a clear runway to adapt. This bill is a next step in the work that this government has been doing to strengthen our economy, to support our small businesses and to protect communities from organised crime. In phase 1, we started by tackling economic fairness, cutting costs and building stable foundations for budgets.
Phase 2 was us backing up and supporting local businesses to adapt to digital economic shifts, ensuring that compliance doesn't break the back of small businesses. Just as we've promised to deliver tangible local infrastructure everywhere, we're also delivering the invisible structural infrastructure needed to keep our local financial systems safe. That's what strengthening our nation is about.
It's about making sure that our systems work for everyday consumers and compliant businesses and protecting communities from organised crime. Our combined efforts in safety and efficiency are making a difference, taking pressure off legitimate businesses and giving locals peace of mind that their financial environment is secure. The reality of the future is that our digital economy is expanding rapidly.
More and more people are interacting with our financial systems digitally, and increasingly in complex ways. The demands on our financial regulators will continue to increase as serious and organised crime try to exploit our growth and exploit these networks. Removing unnecessary administrative barriers for regulators and businesses is an important part as we sharpen our tools to crush money laundering and ensure that our financial system frameworks remain responsive and sustainable.
This bill seeks to do exactly that and I commend it to the House.