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

Ms SITOU (Reid) (11:20): When people hear the words 'anti money-laundering', I think many Australians simply switch off because it can sound technical. It can sound like something that only matters to banks and large businesses. But this bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2026, is about something much more familiar to Australians.

It is about the retiree who is told their account has been compromised and is pressured to move their savings; it is about organised crime groups using technology to hide the profits of drug trafficking; it is about a scam text message that lands on your phone, pretending to be from your bank; and it is about making sure that, when criminals try to profit from harm, Australia has the laws and tools to stop them—because money laundering is not a victimless crime.

It is the financial engine room of serious crime. Criminals do not scam people or traffic drugs for the sake of it; they do it for the money. And, if they can move that money, hide that money and make that money look legitimate, then those criminal networks become stronger, more sophisticated and harder to stop.

But, if we make it harder for criminals to move money, we make it harder for them to profit from crime. That is why this legislation matters. AUSTRAC has said that the money being laundered that is generated by illegal activity causes up to $60 billion in harm to the Australian community.

That is not an abstract number. That is someone's mum losing her retirement savings to a scam. That is a young person being targeted online.

That is a small business's system being taken down by a hacker. That is why Australians should care about this bill. Our national security agencies have been warning for some time about the changing nature of threats in Australia.

Gone are the days when terrorism, foreign interference, organised crime, money laundering, people smuggling and espionage existed neatly in their own silos. Those threats are no longer separate. They are converging and overlapping, and they are increasingly enabling one another.

We have seen that convergence play out in very real and confronting ways: in the attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue, in the dual caravan incident and in the growth of the illicit tobacco trade—different actors, different motivations, but common enablers. One of the most consistent enablers across these threats is money laundering. If you can move money undetected, you can fund criminal activity and you can evade law enforcement.

The reality is that the way criminals move money is changing. They are using new technologies. They are exploiting gaps.

They are looking for the weakest point in the system. If governments failed to modernise their frameworks, criminals will always move faster than the law. Here's the simple truth.

The threats evolved, but the laws didn't. For years, international experts warned that Australia's anti-money-laundering framework had serious gaps. The coalition knew about those warnings, but they failed to act.

Labor fixed that in 2024, modernising Australia's anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing laws and bringing Australia back into line with international standards because protecting Australians from organised crime requires more than tough rhetoric; it requires action. And the cost of delay was real. While reforms were put in the too-hard basket, criminals adapted.

They exploited crypto pathways, laundered the proceeds of scams and made stolen money harder to recover. Meanwhile, ordinary Australians paid the price, targeted by increasingly sophisticated scams designed to steal their savings. Victims were told to withdraw cash and deposit it into a crypto ATM, often in their local shopping centre, and, within minutes, their money had been converted into cryptocurrency and sent offshore, making it incredibly difficult to trace and recover.

Australians are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, their entire life savings, and that is why this bill matters. Let me be clear about what it does and what it doesn't do. This bill is not anti cryptocurrency.

Many Australians use digital assets legitimately. They invest, innovate and participate in the modern digital economy. This bill doesn't ban cryptocurrency.

It doesn't punish legitimate users or businesses. What it does is target risk. Specifically, it targets the products, services and channels increasingly exploited by criminals to launder money and facilitate harm.

One of the clearest examples is the rapid rise of crypto ATMs. When cryptocurrency is purchased through a bank account, there is a clear transaction trail. That traceability is vital for law enforcement, but, when cash is fed into a crypto ATM, that trail can become harder to follow.

That's exactly why these machines have become attractive to scammers and money launderers. This isn't a small problem. Six years ago, Australia had just 23 crypto ATMs.

Today, we have around 2,000—the third-highest number in the world. Criminals are adapting quickly, and this bill ensures our laws can keep pace. Each year approximately 150,000 transactions, totalling around $275 million, pass through these machines, and 99 per cent of those transactions are deposits—people putting cash into a machine and receiving crypto in exchange.

We are not saying that every person who uses a crypto ATM is doing the wrong thing, but it is a growing problem for our security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to trace and monitor using existing powers. Ignoring that risk would be irresponsible. This bill delivers on the reforms announced by the Minister for Home Affairs to give AUSTRAC a new power to tackle emerging threats, including high-risk channels like crypto ATMs.

Importantly, this is not a blunt instrument. It is a targeted risk based power that allows AUSTRAC to restrict and prohibit products, services and delivery channels only where there is significant harm added and where it is in the public interest to act. There are safeguards, and AUSTRAC must consider the nature of the harm, whether the proposed action will reduce that harm and whether alternative services remain available.

It must also consult industry, government agencies and the public before acting, except in urgent circumstances. This bill does not target innovation, it does not ban cryptocurrency, and it does not penalise legitimate businesses or consumers. What it does do is draw a clear line between legitimate innovation and criminal exploitation.

The bill also strengthens Australia's response to terrorism financing, updates the laws to reflect modern threats and makes practical improvements to ensure the 2024 reforms work as intended. In short, this is a commonsense reform—strong safeguards where they are needed and better protection for Australians. This bill comes down to a simple question: should criminals be allowed to exploit new technologies faster than government can respond, or should we give our agency the tools they need to protect Australians?

This bill backs innovation, but it refuses to give organised crime a free pass. It protects Australians, strengthens our national security and ensures our laws keep pace with the changing world, because, when we make it harder for criminals to move money, we make it harder for them to cause harm.