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

Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (10:28): I rise to speak in strong support of the Albanese Labor government's Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026. It's not like the movies. It's not cool guys in cool jackets, suits and a lot of leather.

It's not Ocean's Eleven. Organised crime is vicious. It is cruel.

It seeks to cause harm and damage to our children, our communities and our borders for one very simple thing—money. Once you've got that money, you have to clean that money. If we remember back to the prohibition times in the United States, they got Al Capone not on the St Valentine's Day Massacre, not only the other garbage that he was pulling in Chicago, but they got him on tax avoidance.

Follow the money. Organised crime doesn't care about tax; it doesn't care about excise. It cares about making sure that it can spend on what it wants—flash cars, holidays, becoming Instagram famous or whatever it is.

We need to stop these people. You stop them in the hip pocket. You make it harder to get the money.

You need to take the risk profile out of the scenario. If they think they're going to lose money and if they think they're going to spend a bit more time in the pen, that's not a good risk. But if they believe that they're going to be able to get through and keep that money in their pocket, that's a really good risk.

This bill delivers on the reforms announced by the Minister for Home Affairs at the National Press Club last October to crack down on money laundering through high-risk mechanisms, particularly crypto ATMs. I'm not a crypto bro—I think I missed that generation slightly—but there are legitimate uses for it. It is an exciting new way to move wealth around.

People see, particularly, dogecoin, and the NFTs—the one where it is a dog—and they seem really cool. But security agents have been warning us about this for some time because once it hits that crypto land, it vanishes. You can't keep track of it.

And when things are in the dark, that's when bad things happen. Any town planner can tell you that. Make sure people can see what's going on.

It's when people can't see what's going on that things start to fall apart. We live in a different world. Gone are the days when the various threats of terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering, people smuggling and espionage existed in their own silos—specialists, if you like.

But now these threats are starting to converge. They're taking more time to add more strings to their bow. They overlap.

And that is why we have to hit them in the hip pocket. And we have seen this with the Adass Israel Synagogue attack—the disgraceful attack on Australian soil—with the dual caravan incident and with the illicit tobacco debate. Money laundering is one element that ties those three things together—the ability to move vast sums of money around quickly, without oversight, and to ensure that it's going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

There will always be bad people, and there will always be bad people who are motivated by profit. We have to keep the profit out of their pockets. Cryptocurrency is a reality of the world we live in, and some people here in Australia use it as a legitimate investment tool.

Some people have done really well out of it, and more power to them; it's really great. These laws are not intended for them. There is legitimate use of cryptocurrency.

People should be allowed to invest and profit to make their own lives and the lives of their families better. Think about the ordinary purchase of crypto. When it is done online through a bank account, it's a traceable transaction.

That doesn't always happen with the crypto ATMs. There's one down by the local servo where I walk my dogs. I have no idea how it works—absolutely none.

But, allegedly, when crypto is purchased using cash through the crypto ATMs, while there may be some limited identification involved to varying extents, the reality is the capacity to trace those transactions is far less than when using a bank or a traditional resource. Australia is currently ranked third in the world for the number of crypto ATMs. There's been a massive amount of growth; it's been very, very fast.

Just six years ago there were only 23 crypto ATMs in the entire country. Today there are 2,000. Every year approximately 150,000 transactions, totalling $275 million, go through crypto ATMs with 90 per cent of those transactions being deposits.

This is putting cash into the machine and getting crypto as an exchange. Crypto is tricky because it doesn't exist in the real world. You can't touch it; you can't feel it.

I don't know what it tastes like—I've never bitten on it by accident; my grandmother didn't put crypto into the Christmas pudding. It's very hard to trace once it hits the ether. We're not saying that everybody who goes and deposits cash into a crypto machine is a problem or involved in illegal activity, because we know that's not the case.

Many people are excited by this technology. But it is happening. It is a significant problem in the area, and we need to be able to trace it.

The bill will make targeted amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 and provide power to restrict the use of high-risk products, service delivery channels and things of that ilk. Basically, we're going to have a bit tighter control—keep that leash tight. The bill will introduce a new framework enabling the AUSTRAC CEO to regulate the use of these high-risk mechanisms through general sector-wide restrictions or prohibitions, and the bill also amends the meaning of 'financing' and 'terrorism' in section 5 of the AML/CTF Act to reference new offences, including into the Criminal Code Act 1995 for financing of state sponsored terrorism.

We wish that we didn't have to create these laws. But the reality of the world that we live in now is that we do. When people start using money through these crypto machines and through the World Wide Web to fund terrorism, to fund crime, to damage our children and to damage our country, we have to strike back.

The amendments will also clarify and improve the operation of provisions introduced by the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Act of 2024, and these amendments have been identified through the implementation of the 2024 AML/CTF reforms. That sounds like a lot of political jargon and a lot of different reforms and acts, and a whole lot of things are intertwined.

But let's take a look at what that actually means from a layman's point of view—day-to-day stuff. On 16 October, when Minister Burke announced the government would introduce power to AUSTRAC to restrict or prohibit high-risk products, and service and delivery channels, this means we can disrupt the use of the mechanisms which allow criminal actors exploiting and harming our community by using these cryptocurrency ATMs.

For those playing at home, the very high risk mechanisms of any high-risk product service, delivery channel or thing—scammers, that includes you. This could include cryptocurrency, but it's basically everything. The new framework will require the AUSTRAC CEO to take into account specific matters when considering whether restriction or prohibition is necessary in the public interest.

The public interest is important. We don't like, as I said before, restricting people's ability to invest in this new technology. What we're looking at is the nature and effect of the harm, the effect the proposed restriction will have on the harm, whether there are alternative channels to provide the service and any other matters prescribed by regulations.

These are important. Understanding the nature of what's happening and how it is happening to critical to any response, as is what the proposed restriction will achieve—there's no point having a law for the sake of having a law—and whether there are alternative channels to providing the service. We don't want to remove cryptocurrency from the economy.

The framework mandates a minimum 30-day consultation program with public and other affected agencies before the AUSTRAC CEO has to make a final decision, unless, of course, urgent circumstances apply. The new power is intended to provide a flexible, risk based response for emerging and evolving money-laundering and terrorism-financing risks while still allowing reporting entities to use innovative technologies and business models.

This is not intended to be a power that is used to restrict or prohibit a reporting entity from using a high-risk mechanism merely because it involves digital assets, speculative activity or presents any financial investment or risk. It's there for guardrails and guidance to make sure that people are safe. Schedule 2 of this bill amends the meaning of 'financing of terrorism' in section 5 to reference new offences introduced into the Criminal Code Act 1995 by the Criminal Code Amendment (State Sponsors of Terrorism) Act 2025 for financing state sponsored terrorism.

The reality of state sponsored terrorism was made very clear to our shores recently and was a heartbreaking moment for every single person in this House and every single Australian, particularly the Jewish community. We have a moral obligation to put a stop to it. We have a moral obligation to stand up for the people that we are elected to represent and the people we are elected to protect to cut off those resources.

We are not always able to directly influence a country if they decide to act in a way that would seek to do us harm, but, by God, we will stop them paying our people to do it for them. We are not going to let state sponsored terrorists get their hands on money to damage Australia and Australians. There is no place for it.

I'm proud to be a part of a government that looks them in the eye and says, 'Not here, not today, and not on our watch.' Schedule 3 has several technical amendments which we won't go into because, really, technical amendments have not been my strength. This is about protecting all of us. It's about making sure that the investments people make are safe and that the money that they put into these machines doesn't disappear and wind up in the pocket of someone who seeks to do them or their community harm.

We need to get these laws through. We need to send a message to organised crime and to anyone who is considering state sponsored terrorism on Australian soil: there is no money to be made here. We will take the thing that drives you, that financial profit, that gain that you think you're going to get—we are going to take it from you and then we'll come for your freedom as well because, if you're going to pull that kind of rubbish, you belong in jail for a very, very long time.

We are working hard as the Albanese Labor government to make Australia safer. I commend this bill to the House.