Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (11:06): There's a phone call doing the rounds in my electorate. In fact, it's doing the rounds in every electorate represented in this place. A woman in her 70s picks up.
The man on the other end is calm. He's professional. He tells her he's from her bank.
He tells her there's been suspicious activity on her account and her savings are at risk. He is kind about it. He's patient.
He stays on the phone with her for an hour, which is long enough that she stops thinking of him as a stranger and starts thinking of him as a person seeking to help her. Then he tells her what to do: 'Go down to the shops. There's a machine there, near the newsagency.
Put your money in and it will be safe while we sort this out.' So she does it. She does it because she is frightened and because a kind voice has spent an hour earning the right to be believed. By the time she works out what has happened, the money is gone.
It is not sitting in an account anywhere waiting to be frozen while the police catch up. It has gone, and so has the man on the phone. That machine is a crypto ATM, and these machines are not incidental to these scams.
It is the reason the story ends the way it does, and the people making these phone calls understand that better than anyone. How do these machines end up on our shopping strips? New technology has been good to us.
It has opened up opportunities for our economy and for working people's lives that we would have struggled to imagine decades ago. But the things that make technology useful to the rest of us are the same things that make it useful to criminals, and they have moved on that faster than anyone anticipated. Six years ago there were about 23 crypto ATMs in the country.
By the end of last year there were more than 2,000. That is a rapid growth in a short period of time—faster than a framework built for banks and shopfront businesses was ever designed to keep pace with. We are now the third-largest market for these machines in the world, behind only the United States and Canada.
We have more machines than countries that have vastly bigger populations than ours. About 150,000 transactions go through them every year, worth somewhere near $275 million. At an ordinary ATM, people take money out.
In these machines, 99 per cent of transactions are people putting money in. We should be clear: this bill is not an attack on cryptocurrency. Plenty of Australians own crypto—they treat it as an investment—and nothing in this bill touches them.
When you buy it the ordinary way through an exchange or through your bank, you leave a trail. If something goes wrong, someone can follow it. A crypto ATM doesn't work like that.
You put cash in, you walk away with crypto and that one step—cash to crypto—is where the trail goes cold and where our police and our intelligence agencies lose the thread. Organised crime worked that out a long time before we did. That is the distinction the minister has drawn from the beginning.
He described this reform as legitimising the good actors and shutting out the bad. Those doing the right thing lose nothing here. The people who should be worried built their criminal behaviour on untraceable cash.
In this debate, we must focus on who is standing in front of these machines. AUSTRAC, our financial intelligence agency, looked at the 90 most prolific users of these machines in the country in 2024. You would assume the heaviest users of cash-to-crypto machines would be young people trying to invest or, as this legislation aims to confront, people engaged in criminal activity—that's a fair assumption.
But they weren't the core group. Eighty-five per cent of users were either scam victims or money mules, people who'd been tricked or pressured into moving money that was not theirs. The people feeding these machines are overwhelmingly the people being robbed by them.
There's a finding that goes alongside this statistic. Before criminals take the crypto scam route, they try the online banking method first, but, when a bank spots the fraud and stops the transaction, those same criminals don't give up. They redirect the victim to one of these machines.
It is where people get sent once every other door has been shut in the scammer's face. And it gets worse. By the value of money going through them, the biggest single group of users is Australians aged between 50 and 70.
They account for close to three-quarters of it—people at or near retirement with a working life of careful saving behind them and targeted for that very reason. When I hear this evidence, I think about those in my community that I have come across—retirees and older residents in their final years of work. They are proud people.
This is the group who is most at risk of losing the nest egg they'd spent a working life building, and so often they are too ashamed to tell their family what has happened. Maribyrnong is a young electorate on paper—our median age is 39—but the people these criminals hunt are in every street across Maribyrnong, in Avondale Heights, Ascot Vale and Airport West.
These are people who paid off their house, raised their kids, put something aside and still answer the phone when it rings because that's the world they grew up in. The machines are turning up in exactly the ordinary places where my constituents do their shopping—the strip near the station, the petrol station, the corner shop. They are targeted by professionals who do this for a living, who have done it a thousand times and who are very good at it.
The answer here is not to tell older Australians to be more careful. They are already careful. Telling people to individually outsmart a transnational criminal industry is not going to meaningfully change the landscape that has given rise to this crime.
The answer is in legislation and in regulation—rules that apply across the whole sector so that this criminal behaviour is tackled at the highest levels. The damage runs well past the individual losses. These machines have been linked to the proceeds of drug trafficking, to cybercrime and to financing of child exploitation.
Laundered cash doesn't evaporate. We know that it gets reinvested into more drugs, more scams and more misery, not only here in Australia but across our region. The Australian Institute of Criminology puts the cost of serious and organised crime in this country at up to $82.3 billion in 2023-24.
That is money taken out of the pockets of ordinary people and out of the public services all of us rely on. There was a time when we thought about these dangers in separate boxes, with terrorism in one place, organised crime over there and money laundering somewhere else. But those days are over.
What our security agencies tell us now is that these threats overlap and feed off each other. We're seeing it in the illicit tobacco wars in our suburban streets, an issue that my community knows all too well about. Running through nearly all of it is money—dirty money being moved, hidden and washed clean.
Choke off the money, and you weaken every one of those threats at once. That is what this bill sets out to do. It does three things.
First—this is the heart of it—schedule 1 gives AUSTRAC a new power. Right now, when a dangerous new laundering method emerges, our regulator can go after operators one at a time. To be fair to AUSTRAC, that is exactly what they have been doing.
They put conditions on the sector last year: a $5,000 cap per transaction, stronger customer checks and scam warnings on the machines. They refused to renew one operator's registration, and just this week they suspended another, taking 96 machines offline. The network has come down from its peak of just over 2,000 to around 1,745 recently.
That scrutiny and pressure is working, but look at what it takes. Operator by operator, months of work at a time. It's often a bit like one of those Whac-A-Mole machines that you can play.
By the time you've dealt with one, three more have emerged. This bill lets AUSTRAC act across an entire sector at once. It gives the AUSTRAC CEO the power to restrict or prohibit the use of a high-risk product or service—a crypto ATM being the obvious example—where it is doing real harm.
That's the commitment the Minister for Home Affairs made at the National Press Club in October last year, and now our government is delivering it. This is a serious power, so of course it comes with guardrails. Before the power can be used, the CEO has to be satisfied of two things: that the thing being targeted is causing, or is likely to cause, significant harm to our financial system, our community or both; and that acting is genuinely necessary in the public interest.
Building it that way lets AUSTRAC respond as risks shift without closing the door to Australian businesses using new technology honestly. On top of that, there's a public consultation period of at least 30 days in all but genuine emergencies so affected businesses get their say. Every decision is made by a legislative instrument, which means this parliament keeps its oversight and can disallow it.
Given the powers in this bill, we have ensured that it has been through the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is exactly the scrutiny a bill like this should attract. This parliament is not banning anything today. The decision sits with the regulator, made on the evidence after consultation, and answerable to this place.
AUSTRAC's chief executive has said that if we pass this law, his agency is ready to use it. It is not a tool for shutting something down because it's new or digital, or because someone in here thinks crypto is a poor investment. That's not the role of government.
Our job is stopping the harm being done to working people. The second part of this bill, schedule 2, strengthens our terrorism financing laws. It updates the definition of terrorism financing so it lines up with the new Criminal Code offences dealing with those who bankroll state sponsors of terrorism, and it makes sure we can keep pace with our sanctions laws into the future.
That keeps us in step with the global watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, which happens to be assessing Australia this year. Other countries are moving the same way. Canada has proposed making it a criminal offence to run one of these machines, and US states are legislating caps and warnings.
Doors are being locked around the world, and our government is making sure that Australia is not the one left open. Third, schedule 3 makes a set of technical fixes. We passed major reforms in 2024—long overdue and the reason we are not the world's back door for dirty money—and putting them into practice this year surfaced a handful of things that needed clarifying.
These amendments tidy them up, making life simpler for honest businesses and people doing the right thing, without weakening a single protection. Let me come back to where I started. In my community, there are people who have been robbed in plain sight, in a brightly lit shop, in front of a machine, doing what a stranger on the phone told them to do.
The thing that gets me about these stories is the shame. They blame themselves. They replay the call and wonder how they missed it.
Most say nothing at all, which is precisely what the criminals are banking on. None of this is their fault. The shame in this does not belong to them, which is why our government is determined to pass this bill.
We are passing it because the harm is real and is landing on Australians who have done nothing wrong. Retirees and grandparents are talked out of their savings by professionals who do this for a living. The money doesn't stop with them.
It gets reinvested into organised crime and terrorism that cost this country up to $82.3 billion a year. Chasing that one operator at a time is too slow. This bill lets AUSTRAC deal with a high-risk product across an entire sector in a single decision, and it does that without punishing the businesses and the millions of Australians using new technology honestly.
That is why I commend this bill to the House.