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

Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR (Barton) (10:40): There is a strip of shops along Forest Road that I've walked past many times as a kid, as a local councillor and now as the member for Barton. This particular road also traverses the electorate of my friend the member for Banks. I'm sure he would agree with me about the businesses that are operating on this very busy road—a convenience store, a hairdresser, a tobacconist that's probably changed hands a couple of times.

But it is very much an ordinary Australian high street, the kind you find in Hurstville, in Kingsgrove or in Rockdale and in pretty much every corner of this country. And it's exactly this kind of street that organised crime has now learnt to hide inside. That's what I want to talk about today with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026—reporting entities, designated services, legislative instruments.

But underneath all this very technical language is a very simple and very human problem—that criminals hiding amongst us have gotten better at moving money without being seen. It is this parliament's job to make sure that they can't. Here's a fact that stopped me when I read it.

Six years ago, there were 23 cryptocurrency ATMs in this country; today there are 2,000. Australia now has the third-highest number of crypto ATMs anywhere in the world. Think about what that machine actually is.

It sits in a shopping strip, maybe next to a newsagent, and it lets someone walk in with a bag of cash and walk out with cryptocurrency—no bank, no name on the account, barely even a paper trail. Every year, roughly 150,000 transactions worth about $275 million pass through these machines, and 99 per cent of them are cash going in. I want to be very clear—because I don't want anyone in Barton to think that this bill is aimed at them—that cryptocurrency is a legitimate part of the modern economy.

If you buy it through your bank account online, that transaction is traceable, the same as any other. This bill is not about punishing ordinary investors, and it says so explicitly. It is about a much narrower problem: cash going into a machine on a street corner, being converted into an asset that can move across borders in seconds, leaving almost nothing behind for our police and intelligence agencies to follow.

That gap between an ordinary high street and an untraceable financial pipeline is precisely where organised crime has been setting up shop. For a long time, we talked about national security threats as if they lived in separate silos or boxes—terrorism over here, organised crime over there, foreign interference somewhere else again. Our security agencies have been telling us for many years that this picture is out of date.

The threats are converging. They are borrowing each other's tools, each other's networks and, increasingly, each other's money. We saw it in the most painful way imaginable in December 2024, when the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was set alight in the early hours of the morning by masked attackers, who poured accelerant through the building and set it alight while people were inside.

One worshipper was injured, and a community's spiritual home was gutted. It has since been established that the attack was orchestrated with the involvement of a foreign state sponsor—a chilling reminder that the line between terrorism, foreign interference and criminal facilitation is not a line at all anymore. We saw the same blurring in Sydney's own backyard when a caravan packed with explosives and a note listing Jewish addresses was discovered at Dural, north-west of the city, in January 2025.

It triggered exactly the fear it was designed to trigger. Investigators later established that the plot had not been the work of ideological extremists at all. It had been staged by organised criminals, both here and offshore, using the machinery of terror as a tool for their own ends: different motive, same convergence—criminal networks reaching for the same tactics, the same fear and the same financial plumbing that terrorism and organised crime have always shared.

And we see it, more quietly but just as corrosively, in the illicit tobacco trade, the firebombings of shopfronts and the turf wars playing out on suburban streets, funded and enabled by the same laundering pathways this bill is designed to close down. These are not three separate stories. They are one story, told in three different settings.

Money laundering is a thread that runs through every single chapter. Moving to what this bill does, this legislation delivers on reforms the Minister for Home Affairs announced at the National Press Club last October, and it does three things. First, and this is the core of the bill, it gives AUSTRAC's CEO a new power to restrict or prohibit the use of high-risk mechanisms like crypto ATMs, where those mechanisms are being exploited to cause significant harm to the financial system or the Australian community.

This isn't a blunt instrument. Before any restriction can be imposed, the AUSTRAC CEO must be satisfied it's necessary in the public interest, weighing the nature of the harm, whether the restrictions will actually address it and whether legitimate alternatives exist for people who rely on that service. There's a mandatory minimum 30-day consultation period with the public and affected agencies before any decision is made, except in urgent circumstances.

And, because these restrictions are made by legislative instrument, this parliament retains the power to disallow them if they get the balance wrong. That's the safeguard that matters most to me. A power this significant should never operate beyond the reach of parliamentary scrutiny.

Second, the bill updates the definition of 'financing of terrorism' in the act to capture new offences, introduced last year under the Criminal Code Amendment (State Sponsors of Terrorism) Act 2025, for financing a state sponsor of terrorism. Given what we now know about the origins of the Adass Israel Synagogue attack, this is not an academic, legal tidy-up.

It closes a gap that a real attack on Australian soil exposed. Third, the bill makes a series of technical amendments to the 2024 AMLCTF reforms, clarifying provisions that businesses and reporting entities identified as unclear during implementation. These are simple but necessary amendments, the kind that make sure that the system we've already built actually works the way parliament intended it to.

I guess the question is: why? I represent one of the most diverse electorates in this country, and diversity is precisely what organised crime and extremist networks try to exploit—communities they think are easier to frighten, easier to divide and easier to launder money and fear through. Barton is also, like many electorates in this country, home to small-business owners running the exact kinds of shopfronts that have become collateral damage in the illicit tobacco wars, and residents have watched with genuine anxiety as antisemitic attacks and threats have escalated in Sydney over the past couple of years.

When my community sees a synagogue firebombed in another city, a caravan of explosives found on a Sydney road or a tobacconist on their own strip go up in flames overnight, they don't experience those as three unconnected news stories. They really experience them as a single, growing sense that something has shifted, and they have a right to ask what their parliament is actually doing about it.

This bill isn't part of the answer. It won't fix everything. No single piece of legislation does that.

But it closes a mechanism that has been exploited precisely because it was invisible. It gives our agencies a tool that's proportionate and accountable to this parliament aimed purely and squarely at the criminals exploiting a gap, not at the ordinary Australians using cryptocurrency the way millions of people around the world now do. I think often about the strip of shops in Forest Road and the people who run those businesses, who just want to open up in the morning without wondering if their street has become part of someone's criminal network.

It's about the locals who go to the shops wanting to know they're supporting the real, genuine small businesses that I am very proud to represent as well in my electorate. That's who this bill is for. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Garland ): I understand the member for Pearce would like to present a copy of their speech for incorporation into Hansard, in accordance with the resolution agreed to on 6 November 2025.