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

Mr TIM WILSON (Goldstein) (10:14): Deputy Speaker, I know how happy you are to be here, as all Labor members are, to hear my speech on this important legislation. Mr Violi: I'm happy to be here! Mr TIM WILSON: The member for Casey is happy as well, but that was not in question; he is a happy man.

This is an important bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026. In a shopping strip in Australia—just about any shopping strip you go to around the country—there's a machine that turns cash into cryptocurrency. I periodically walk past them myself, and I sometimes wonder who on earth puts money into these machines.

But they're out there, and there's consumer demand. So be it. But, of course, once money goes into those machines, the question is: where does that money go, and can it be traced?

For many people, it's simply a way of exchanging their cash for an alternative currency to be able to build a different form of security of wealth. But where does it go beyond the slot, the screen, the queue? They can very quickly be utilised by organised crime as the pathway to be able to launder money.

We've seen this in many cases. When we have a continuing problem of organised crime and the CFMEU Labor cartel, you can almost say that the Victorian government, working with the Albanese government, has put $15 billion through these machines, all the way through to organised crime. Or maybe it's the other way around—back into the coffers of the unions and the Labor Party.

You could say that organised crime and the tobacco industry use these machines, potentially, to be able to launder money to hide its origins. So I'm actually quite surprised that the federal Labor government actually wants to shut down a pathway to be able to launder money, considering their history is normally to run protection for organised crime by refusing to take any measures to stop it, particularly around excise.

Of course, there are plenty of people who use these machines for the first time and don't know where the money goes. What we want to do is make sure that there's appropriate proportionate regulation so that they do not become a backdoor pathway for money laundering through crypto ATMs in the Asia-Pacific. We as a nation now have the highest number of crypto ATMs in the Asia-Pacific, 2,000 of them.

In 2019, only a few years ago, we had barely a couple of dozen. Almost 150,000 transactions are run through the machines every year, worth more than $275 million, and 99 per cent of that is cash going in and mostly not coming out. Cash, by design, is almost impossible to trace, and AUSTRAC has found that 85 per cent of frequent transactions through these machines are tied to scams or to money mules.

The Federal Police reported scam losses through crypto ATMs in the millions and then told us the truth is that that figure is vastly underreported; the real number is substantially greater. This, of course, is not confined just to crypto going through the machines. In a single year, the bank shut down 22,000 mule accounts.

Some belonged to criminals, but many belonged to ordinary Australians who never knew their name was even being used. If you step back and look at the situation more broadly, it's a sobering picture. The Australian Institute of Criminology puts the cost of serious and organised crime at up to $82 billion in one year, and cryptocurrency has been described fairly as a magnet for money laundering because of what it removes around traceability.

Late last year, this parliament created new offences for financing state sponsors of terrorism, but our anti-money-laundering laws have not sufficiently caught up to empower our enforcement agencies to stop the financing of terrorism through these types of means. Behind every one of these numbers is a person—a retiree talking to an investor, a pensioner too ashamed to report a loss—and a community that's started to wonder whether anyone is guarding the gate.

That's why we need proper AML regulation associated with these ATMs to give people clarity and confidence. The problem is that we need a lot more measures to stop money laundering and the involvement of organised crime in this country. The sad thing is that, while the government is taking action against consumers in this space and trying to shut down at least one pathway for organised crime to engage in money laundering, they're not doing it across the board.

Australians need confidence that their government is on their side. Australians need confidence that a government is going to act to improve outcomes for the Australian people, and at the moment we have an Albanese government that is not doing that. We know full well that they are running protection for organised crime to continue to engage in super profits through illicit tobacco sales.

We wish they brought the same focus in this legislation to that debate. While they like to talk about enforcement action, we now know that the Prime Minister is buckling under the pressure from the coalition to reduce excise. Yesterday, and throughout this week in question time, he was asked multiple times, particularly by the member for Monash, who's doing an outstanding job in this space, and he refused to answer.

He sent in the—what do we call him?—health-minister-cum-prime-minister-in-waiting-cum-prime-minister-in-training to answer questions on his behalf so he can't be caught on the record. An audition, a prime minister audition—that's not fair, actually, because, if you lined them up in a prime minister lookalike competition, you couldn't say that they look the same.

I think the minister for health is—in a platonic way, of course—a much better looking individual. But he was sending him up so that the Prime Minister doesn't have to answer questions about whether he's ultimately going to cut excise, because he knows—like we know, like this parliament knows, like the Australian people know—that the illicit tobacco trade is delivering superprofits for organised crime.

Let me put it to you bluntly as this: they don't need to put it through cryptocurrency ATMs, because they don't report their gains to the Australian Taxation Office. They just take them and they use them for whatever it is they actually want. Funnily enough, once you break the Rubicon of breaking the law on illicit tobacco, you're not overly concerned about breaking the law on anything else.

In fact, they're more likely to then go on and do things like finance terrorism. We know this. This is not some sort of hypothetical debate.

Organised crime is working with groups like Iranian sponsored agencies that engaged in firebombing, just outside the Goldstein electorate, on synagogues. We have antisemitism financed by organised crime through terrorist networks. The answer from the Albanese government is, 'Let's keep running the laws that enable it for them to secure their superprofits.' I mean, just frankly, it's insane.

It's utterly insane, as is the fact that everybody in the Labor Party just sits there and goes, 'Nothing to see here.' You know the meme where they sit there with everything burning around them and they're saying, 'This is fine.' I don't say that to make light of it. It's because everyone on this side of the chamber is looking at that side of the chamber and saying, 'We know that terrorism is being financed through organised crime, sponsored by terrorist networks and activated by government policy, and the government isn't going to do anything about it.' Most of us are asking what is going on here!

We're quite happy to change the laws and to engage in an honest conversation about it. We're happy to put things on the table and say we need to change the laws to remove the superprofits of organised crime through illicit tobacco, and the response of the Albanese government is: 'This is fine. Carry on.' I know the 94 seats have gone to the Prime Minister's head and his ego, but there's actually a point where members of the government have a moral responsibility to stand up to their own government and point out the consequences of the conduct.

Don't be fooled into believing that just because he's been here longer, or he sits in that chair, he has some sort of moral superiority, genius or insight. It is quite the reverse. Our Prime Minister, our government, is now running a protection racket for the superprofits of organised crime.

The fact that I can stand up here in this parliament and say that and not a single member of the Labor Party actually stands up and even calls a point of order is demonstrative of just how absurd the situation now is. We have organised crime and money laundering that's been engaged—again, not through ATMs, because they don't need it; a chequebook is just opened up, which is made out from the Commonwealth of Australia and the taxpayers of Australia to public projects where there has been known involvement of organised crime through the CFMEU-Labor Party cartel.

The money has been provided to them—$15 billion and in some estimates nearly $30 billion—and the response has been exactly the same. We know that money has gone to organised crime. We know it's gone towards sexism.

We know it's gone towards abusing women. We know it's gone towards violence against other workers. We know it's gone towards enforcement of threats of assault and violence against private individuals.

We know that the Victorian premier—the last one, sorry—was aware. The current one was aware too, as was the previous one before the last one, but, even more distressingly, this has been known on the public record. This is a message for Andrew Clennell from News24.

He said it's an outrageous allegation to say that the federal government was signing cheques to public projects which ended up in the hands of organised crime. I say it's all on the public record. When that has been known, the response from the government hasn't been 'maybe we should send the money through a crypto ATM so that organised crime can get it'.

They've simply got out the Commonwealth chequebook and struck a cheque that has then been handed on through the Victorian government to organised crime. I've written to the Prime Minister and said, 'Maybe we should do an audit trail of federal funding and whether it's landed in the hands of organised crime, since we know these facts.' I thought perhaps we would get the Prime Minister to say: 'That's a good idea.

I don't think taxpayers' money should go into organised crime, and I certainly don't think it should go towards things like terrorist financing.' Instead, we've had silence. The Prime Minister won't even respond to a reasonable request to follow the audit trail. I welcome the legislation, although we're sending it off to the Senate for a Senate inquiry to see if it can be fine tuned and improved.

What I can't understand is why this Labor government thinks that, when consumers put money into a crypto ATM, we should follow the money, but, when it comes to taxpayers' money from a chequebook signed by the Prime Minister and the minister for infrastructure—and we know explicitly on the public record, through a series of multiple inquiries, they don't want to follow the money trail.

When we know that tax laws are leading to an explosion in illicit tobacco, which leads to super profits by organised crime, they don't want to follow the money trail or the tax trail. This government is not a serious government. It does not have the best interests of the Australian people at heart.

When they know things that dents their pride, their answer is to stick with their pride. We have a minister for health and ageing—a wannabe prime minister in training—who simply won't change the law and blocks any attempt to do so because he won't stand up against the policies of one of his predecessors Nicola Roxon, the former minister for health. While they paraded themselves as world leaders around tobacco regulation—I've got a tip for you: nobody's buying plain packaged tobacco products in Australia anymore.

I can tell you the Manchester or whatever other brand that's out there is not in olive green. It's funny that organised crime doesn't just engage in super profits when they sell something illegal. They also don't follow branding regulations or laws.

I mean this is really serious stuff. We have a government that is in utter denial of the consequences of its actions, and there must be, at some point, not just an awakening—and I hope and pray there is, but I'm not seeing it. But, more importantly, there needs to be an opportunity for the Australian people to turn around and throw the Albanese Labor government out because we have never had a government in this nation's history that has so betrayed the Australian people by undermining our economic stability through empowering organised crime and providing them a revenue source and super profits on a scale this unimaginable.

The fact that I say that and all we get from Labor backbenchers who sit there is silence says everything.