Heather Cook, Chief Executive Officer
Thank you Chair, I am pleased to appear before the Committee today for the examination of the ACIC’s 2024–25 Annual Report. The ACIC is Australia’s national criminal intelligence agency with a focus on the transnational serious and organised crime threat environment and its impact on Australia.
Serious and organised crime is an enduring and pervasive national security threat. It endangers our communities, erodes our economy, and undermines the integrity of our borders and institutions. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, it is a threat that costs Australia more than $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 response.
While the scale of harm is significant, Australians can be assured that our agencies are committed, capable and united in the fight. The ACIC works closely with a range of partners, to strengthen and inform the national response to the threat. We focus on identifying and understanding new criminal entities and methodologies, and play a critical role in coordinating national efforts to inform disruption of threats to Australia – regardless of their origin.
We support community safety by providing more than 76,000 frontline officers access to national policing information systems, as well as by sharing thousands of intelligence reports and undertaking millions of background checks per year.
Our annual report is a vital tool for accountability and transparency. It assures the government and the community that the ACIC maintains robust governance and performance standards, and complies with legislative requirements. It also provides an opportunity to highlight the ACIC’s performance and achievements.
Summary of results
I won’t provide commentary on our results against each performance criterion, I will instead highlight some key achievements during the 2024–25 reporting period.
Much of our work is sensitive and cannot be disclosed publicly as it may prejudice intelligence operations, our capability and methodologies, the safety of people, or the fair trial of people charged with criminal offences.
In 2024–25, in response to the Independent Review of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and associated Commonwealth law enforcement arrangements – and the need to ensure we are agile and efficient in countering the threat posed by serious and organised crime – the ACIC commenced implementing a new intelligence operating model.
This initiative has helped inform the strategic prioritisation, resource realignment and development of a future sustainable funding model to equip the ACIC to effectively deliver on our mission.
In 2024–25, we streamlined our performance framework to better align with our 3 key activities. This involved reducing the number of our performance criteria from 13 to 3, and reducing our performance measures from 32 to 11. The ACIC fully met 2 performance criteria and, substantially met one, and fully met 9 of our 11 performance measures, and substantially met 2. In 2024–25, the ACIC generated 2,002 new products, and disseminated our intelligence products 12,500 times to 291 agencies.
NPI milestones
Our results for 2024–25 show that the national policing information systems continue to perform strongly, delivering a reliable and effective service for our partners and supporting diverse policing tasks and community safety.
In 2024–25, our National Police Checking Service processed over 7.26 million police checks – the highest volume since it was established.
We also delivered the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System NextGen capability, replacing the legacy system with a more advanced search engine and features that support fingerprint and palmprint matching. This critical tool – used thousands of times daily by policing agencies across Australia – strengthened frontline identification of suspects in a range of crimes, reinforcing criminal justice responses and improving investigative outcomes.
The ACIC also continues to expand the National Criminal Intelligence System, which is now accessible to over 52,000 frontline law enforcement officers.
Intelligence focus
The ACIC continued to lead in anticipating emerging criminal treats through scientific innovation, including our National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program. In 2024–25, this capability detected the presence of the synthetic opioids – nitazenes and xylazine – in the Australian market, providing early intelligence that informed public health and law enforcement responses, and supported the strengthening of legislative controls on synthetic opioids and precursors.
The ACIC produced a strategic assessment on the threat posed by serious and organised crime’s exploitation of Australia’s international supply chain. The assessment identified key risk points across maritime routes and Pacific staging hubs, guiding coordinated whole-of-government action to strengthen and protect these critical nodes. This is an area we continue to work closely with our partners to close vulnerabilities and harden the environment against criminal exploitation.
Looking forward
While we appear here today in relation to the 2024–25 reporting period, looking forward the ACIC continues to deliver a number of government priorities.
Following the tragic events of 14 December at Bondi, we are contributing to the response through our role in providing criminal intelligence assessments for the new firearms background checking framework. We are also accelerating delivery of the Commonwealth components of the National Firearms Register, to ensure that, as jurisdictions become ready, they are able to integrate their registers as a priority.
In November 2025, the government announced the ACIC will deliver the National Continuous Checking Capability, which will provide continuous, near-real time monitoring of national changes to criminal history information on Working with Children Check holders. The pilot capability is now adoption ready and the ACIC continues to work closely with jurisdictional partners as to their future onboarding.
A key focus for the ACIC in 2026 will be to embed and strengthen our role as Australia’s national criminal intelligence agency – one that is attuned to the complexity of the threat environment and driven by the need for sharper, faster and actionable intelligence.
Thank you Chair, I am happy to take questions.