Heather Cook, Chief Executive Officer
Chair, thank you for the opportunity to provide opening remarks.
The ACIC reform package is an essential step in modernising and strengthening Australia’s response to serious and organised crime. It re-positions the ACIC with the intelligence functions and powers it requires to deliver its role as Australia’s national criminal intelligence agency.
For the ACIC, this package is not about expanding our remit. It is about ensuring our functions, powers, safeguards and information-sharing arrangements enable us to effectively fulfil our role to support Australia’s collective efforts to combat serious and organised crime.
Serious and organised crime threat
Serious and organised crime is an enduring and pervasive national security threat that endangers our communities, erodes our economy and undermines the integrity of our borders and institutions.
Criminal networks targeting Australia are increasingly globalised, operate across state and international borders, and exploit geopolitical, economic and social uncertainty to maximise their profits – often at the direct expense of the Australian community’s wellbeing.
The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates the cost of serious and organised crime to Australia now exceeds $82 billion annually – which is more than the national defence budget – and represents funding that could otherwise support essential services like education, health care and emergency responses.
Against this backdrop, the role of the ACIC as Australia’s national criminal intelligence agency is crucial to inform efforts to combat serious and organised crime.
ACIC role
The ACIC is focussed on protecting Australia from serious criminal threats by collecting, assessing and disseminating timely and actionable criminal intelligence and policing information. We support community safety outcomes by sharing thousands of intelligence products, making criminal intelligence assessments and undertaking millions of background checks per year.
We also support more than 72,000 police officers and other accredited users to undertake crime prevention and day to day operations by providing access to national policing information systems.
And while the agency and its staff are dedicated and committed, the ACIC has been operating under legislation designed for a different purpose.
The current framework has resulted in a lack of clarity about our role, duplication in the system, created unnecessary complexity and risk, and limited how efficiently we can share intelligence and information with those who need it.
ACIC Review
In recognition of the scale and complexity of the threat, the Government commissioned a first principles Independent Review of the ACIC and associated Commonwealth law enforcement arrangements.
The Independent Review recognised that the functions and powers vested in the ACIC are no longer fit-for-purpose and inhibit the ACIC from effectively fulfilling its intelligence mandate.
ACIC reform package
In line with the Government Response to the Independent Review, the Bill comprehensively reforms the ACIC’s powers and functions, ensuring the agency can operate in the anticipatory phase to produce more actionable and timely intelligence to support national efforts to combat serious and organised crime.
Critically, it removes duplication by ensuring the ACIC fills a critical gap rather than undertaking work that Australia’s effective police agencies can already do. This will strengthen our collective response and close operational gaps.
The Bill supports the continued delivery of national policing information systems, nationally coordinated criminal history checks and criminal intelligence assessments, which play an essential role in hardening the environment against serious and organised crime.
It establishes a streamlined information‑sharing framework that will enable the ACIC to share intelligence with key partners in a timely manner. The package also recognises that capability must be matched with confidence. The reforms strengthen the authorisation and oversight arrangements that apply to the ACIC’s powers – providing clearer thresholds and implementing ministerial authorisation.
The second Bill, the National Policing Information Charges Bill, enables continuity of the financial arrangements that ensure the ACIC can support the sustainability, reliability and integrity of critical national policing information systems.
The significance of this reform package for the agency and our work cannot be overstated.
Serious and organised crime is evolving faster than legacy arrangements can support. The package gives the ACIC a clearer role, a more coherent legal framework and stronger safeguards to support the national response.
The reforms will be accompanied by a package of consequential and transitional amendments, which will make necessary changes to Commonwealth legislation to give full effect to the Independent Review. Their introduction is a matter for government.
Together, these bills will better position the ACIC to deliver its role, allowing it to focus on obtaining and disseminating critical intelligence to support Australia’s collective efforts to combat serious and organised crime.
I’d like to acknowledge my staff and our colleagues at the Department of Home Affairs for their dedicated work to develop the significant ACIC reform package. I also thank the Committee for its review.
Thank you Chair, I am happy to take questions.