Heather Cook, Australian Institute of Criminology Director and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission CEO
Thank you, Aunty Violet Sheridan, for your Welcome to Country. I’d also like to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather today.
Good morning everyone, thank you for being here at the Australian Institute of Criminology’s 2026 Conference. The purpose of the conference is to bring together the latest crime and justice research evidence on issues of national significance.
It is my pleasure to welcome 220 delegates from across government, intelligence, law enforcement, academia, industry and the not-for-profit sector, as well as from New Zealand and Italy.
We are also very lucky to have 2 international keynote speakers, Associate Professor Ella Cockbain from London on human trafficking and exploitation, and Professor Edward Kleemans from Amsterdam on criminal careers of organised crime offenders.
To our international guests – thank you for travelling to Canberra. The perspectives and research you bring from across borders are not just welcome; they are essential. Transnational crime, by its very nature, demands a transnational conversation.
It is important that we take the opportunity to bring together policy makers and practitioners who work to address these issues to strengthen the collective response to prevent and reduce harm to our communities.
I am here today as both the Director of the AIC and the CEO of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, and the theme of this year’s conference, transnational serious and organised crime, is one that both agencies contemplate daily.
The problem most Australians don’t know they have
If I asked Australians on the street whether they’d been affected by serious and organised crime, most would say no. They would be wrong.
In 2023–24, the Australian Institute of Criminology estimated that the cost of serious and organised crime to Australia reached $82.3 billion – an increase of more than $13 billion in a single year. It is more than our entire Defence budget. And yet, if you asked most Australians whether serious and organised crime affects their lives – many would still say no.
Part of that is on us. For too long, agencies like mine have necessarily operated in the shadows but in doing so we have also left a vacuum in public understanding that criminal networks have been able to exploit. It is critical to change that. To open the books. To share what we know. Because transparency is essential to trust – and trust is essential to the kind of national response this threat demands.
But part of it is also cultural. Popular culture has done criminal networks an enormous favour. They have embedded a particular image of organised crime in the public imagination: shadowy figures, identifiable gangs, violence happening to other people, somewhere else.
The reality is quieter, more pervasive, and far harder to see.
The largest single cost in our analysis – $19 billion – is attributed to the illicit drug trade. Not just the cost of substances themselves, but lost productivity, health treatment and the downstream violence that drug markets generate. In a single year, Australians consumed 22.2 tonnes of methylamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA and heroin – a 34% increase from the previous year, and the highest level recorded since our wastewater monitoring program began in 2016. Methylamphetamine alone accounts for more than half of that volume.
The second largest cost – $13.2 billion – is serious financial crime: organised criminals targeting our banking and investment systems, our superannuation, our tax system – and targeting individuals, businesses and government entities with increasingly sophisticated frauds that erode not just finances, but trust.
And then there are the costs that don’t show up neatly in any spreadsheet. The family that lost their retirement savings to an offshore scam centre, the small business owner who watched a fire bomb destroy a neighbouring shop because they refused to stock illicit tobacco, the person with a disability whose NDIS funding was siphoned by a criminal network colluding with allied health professionals, or the young person recruited online and now embedded in a criminal network that will be very difficult to leave.
The general public: from unwitting participant to empowered actor
I want to spend a moment on something that might seem counterintuitive for a conference of this kind: the role of the general public. Ordinary Australians are not outside this problem. In many cases, they are inside it – without realising it.
Criminal networks don’t announce themselves. They operate within legitimate systems – through the same banks, the same logistics networks, the same digital platforms that all of us use every day.
They embed themselves in legitimate industries – construction, finance, healthcare, logistics. They recruit trusted insiders who provide privileged access – in one case baggage handlers at Sydney airport were prosecuted for using that access to deliver up to a tonne of cocaine.
They also deliberately target the vulnerable and the unwitting – NDIS participants coerced into fraudulent schemes, young people recruited through social media with promises of easy money, grandparents deceived by sophisticated investments scams run from offshore call centres.
Organised crime groups are deliberate, sophisticated and highly practised in the art of making their activities look normal. People who are unknowingly exploited are not complicit – they are targeted.
But awareness matters, knowledge matters, and one of the underutilised assets in the fight against transnational serious and organised crime is an informed Australian public.
Because when people know, behaviour changes.
When a retiree recognises the hallmarks of an organised investment scam and pauses before transferring funds – that’s disruption.
When a small business owner knows that an offer to move cash through their accounts is money laundering, not a business favour and refuses – that’s disruption.
When a consumer makes an informed choice about where they buy tobacco, who they hire or which supply chains they support – that’s disruption too.
None of these individuals are intelligence or law enforcement officers but every single one of them, armed with better information, makes criminal operations fractionally harder.
One of the commitments I made when I came into this role was to be more transparent – to talk openly about what we know, what we face as a nation, and why it matters to everyday Australians. Not to create fear, but to create clarity.
Research presented as this conference – on drug markets, on scam centres in Southeast Asia, on the shadow economy, on human trafficking – is not just for policy makers and practitioners. It has to find its way to the public, in plain language that prompts a simple but powerful thought: that could happen to me – what should I do?
That translation – from research to public understanding to public action – is one of the great challenges in our field.
Industry: partner, not bystander
Criminal networks don’t operate in a parallel economy. They operate in ours. They use our banks, our ports, our logistics networks, our digital platforms, our professional services. They launder money through real estate and luxury goods. They exploit the gaps in supply chains.
In many respects, the private sector is not a backdrop to organised crime – it is the operating environment.
And industry has capabilities that government simply doesn’t: real-time visibility into transactions at scale; data on network anomalies; technology that can flag behavioural patterns in milliseconds; and the ability to design – or redesign – systems so that criminal exploitation becomes harder.
Many organisations – particularly in the financial sector – have invested heavily in anti-money laundering controls, and that work matters.
The technology sector, in particular, faces a maturing responsibility. Encrypted communications platforms, cryptocurrency infrastructure and digital marketplaces are not inherently criminal – but criminal networks have adopted them with speed and sophistication that has, in some areas, outpaced both regulation and enforcement.
Industry built these systems and industry has the capability to design their systems and services with exploitation risk in mind from the outset, and we can all play a part in helping them understand risks to their sectors.
The private sector does not face a choice between profit and protecting Australia. They’re the same thing – because the $82.3 billion that organised crime costs this country comes out of the same economy that funds business growth.
Research and evidence: the foundation everything else depends on
Everything I have spoken about, public awareness, industry partnership, the scale and nature of the threat, rests on one foundation – rigorous, independent evidence-based research.
The Australian Institute of Criminology was founded more than 50 years ago on a simple but enduring principle – reducing crime requires understanding it. Good policy, policy that works, is built on evidence.
Holding the dual roles of CEO of the ACIC and Director of the AIC, I see daily how these 2 organisations reinforce each other. Intelligence without research context can misdirect. Research without operational insight can miss what is really happening. Together they create something neither can produce alone – a genuinely clear picture of the threat landscape. What drives it, what disrupts it and what works.
Over the next 2 days of this conference, you will hear from some of the sharpest minds in criminology, from Australia and internationally. You will hear about criminal careers and what they tell us about entry, escalation and exit points. About illicit tobacco and the shadow economy. About firearms trafficking. About the role of money laundering as the oxygen that keeps criminal enterprise alive. About scam centres in Southeast Asia and the human networks that make them function. About wildlife trafficking – a crime that connects environmental destruction to organised crime in ways that still surprise people when they hear it stated plainly.
Each of these research streams matters, because policy that isn't grounded in evidence will miss the mark. And when policy misses in this space, the consequences are real for everyday Australians.
Let me give you an example. If we don't understand the economic logic of illicit tobacco markets – who participates, why, how the supply chain functions, what enforcement pressure does and doesn't achieve – we will design interventions that displace the problem rather than solve it. Evidence tells us where to look and what to do.
Similarly, if we don't have robust research on the lived experience of trafficking victims – not just the legal framework, not just the criminal network, but the human experience – we will design support services and legal responses that fail the people they're supposed to serve.
And if we don't understand the criminal careers of organised crime offenders – the pathways in, the social structures that sustain involvement, the circumstances that enable exit – we will focus almost entirely on enforcement and miss the upstream prevention opportunities that could be transformative.
Good policy is downstream of good research.
The AIC's mission is to promote justice and reduce crime by undertaking and communicating evidence-based research. The word 'communicating' in that mission matters as much as the word 'undertaking'. Research that reaches policy makers, practitioners, industry and the public, changes outcomes.
What I’m asking of this conference
Transnational serious and organised crime is a whole-of-society problem. It demands a whole‑of-society response. That response starts with the kind of work happening in this room.
So, what is being done – and what do we have to do?
Every day, Commonwealth agencies and our state and territory partners work together seamlessly to detect and disrupt these criminal networks. Major drug and illicit tobacco seizures, arrests, scam centre takedowns and the dismantling of violent syndicates are not isolated successes – they are the product of persistent, coordinated, intelligence-led action. And these determined efforts will continue to foil the activities of criminal actors, deprive them of their illicit profits and make it more difficult for them to succeed.
However, the scale and complexity of the threat does mean that law enforcement response, alone, is not enough.
To further harden the environment against serious and organised crime, we need collaborative, non-traditional interventions in addition to ongoing enforcement. This means:
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strengthening partnerships across government, industry and the community
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continuing to invest in intelligence, technology and data analytics to stay ahead of criminal innovation
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building public awareness and resilience so that individuals and businesses can recognise and resist criminal exploitation
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continuing to enhance legislative and regulatory frameworks to close loopholes and disrupt criminal business models
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supporting victims and vulnerable populations to raise awareness of the risks and ensure that those harmed by crime are not left behind.
All of you here today have a role in supporting the national collective response to the serious and organised crime threat impacting our communities, and I thank you for taking the time to join the conference and share your knowledge and to hear from others.
Thank you.