​SUBJECTS: Home Affairs Portfolio, Anti-money laundering counter-terrorism financing act amendments, Visa cancellation rules, Immigration numbers

TONY BURKE: Thank you very much, Tom, and join in acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we’re on and elders and ancestors.

I want to also, in thanking the National Press Club, acknowledge the leaders of the number of organisations that report to me who are here today, some of the most professional and impressive people I’ve worked with in my life: Stephanie Foster, the Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs; Mike Burgess, the Director-General of ASIO; Krissy Barrett, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police; Heather Cook, the Director-General of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission; Brendan Moon, the Director of NEMA; and Gavan Reynolds, the Commissioner of Australian Border Force. They are just a few of the names, and could I also, in acknowledging them, acknowledge the more than 25,000 people who work to them in different ways, making sure every day that Australians are being looked after and working with all the sense of what you would want the term “Home Affairs” to mean.

I wanted to have a chance just to be able to explain a Labor approach to Home Affairs and to be able to give a bit of an insight as to how this portfolio is seen. A lot of the changes that were made after the last election have been seen very much in the context of, “Oh, is this a response to the Coalition? And I just want to get back to a first principles approach to Home Affairs and why we’ve structured things the way we have and then go through a little bit on national security as to how we’ve used that structure. And a little bit on the immigration part as to how we’re using that structure as well, as well as responding to some of the debate that’s been out there in the community of late.

So the concept of a Home Affairs portfolio is not new. It’s a federation portfolio. It’s not something owned by one side of politics or the other. It was established by Barton. It existed until 1932, when it was abolished by Lyons. It was not brought back for some time, but Home Affairs actually came back when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in 2007. And the abolition of the Home Affairs portfolio was done by Tony Abbott. It was then, in 2017, that it was brought back in an incarnation.

So the history of the Home Affairs portfolio is not owned by any side of politics, but the concept is very much in the name. It’s on the lid. You think of what you would want the principles to be at home, and that for me gives the mission of this portfolio. Just as people would want to be at home, people want to be in their country. They want to be able to be safe, to feel safe, to be welcomed and to feel at home. And those four principles govern everything that the portfolio seeks to do.

Now, to explain how the threat environment and the challenges to those principles has changed, I first take you to 1997. Steve Jobs gives a speech at Apple about convergence. Back then the phone was - the mobile phone was something quite exciting because it meant you could talk to somebody without having to carry a cable, and you could occasionally not have to remember every phone number that you dialled. But that was still the job of a phone. We had different things called cameras. We had photo albums. We had tape recorders and DVD players, and – not DVD players - VHS at that point. We had CD players. You had a series of different devices. We had encyclopedias, we even had something as, you know, what you used to go to for good news called a letterbox. And we were told that that was all going to start to converge.

The convergence that we’ve seen on our phone is similar to the convergence that we’ve seen in our threat environment. Some threats always overlap, so there’s always been an overlap, for example, between organised crime and the drug trade. But many areas of Home Affairs we used to look at and think about back in 1997 as not being overlaying or converging in any way. We would have largely separate conversations about terrorism, about foreign interference, about espionage, about child exploitation, people smuggling, human trafficking, cybercrime or money laundering. There might be occasional overlap, but you could have a sensible conversation on each one in isolation. That is no longer the threat environment in Australia.

The Dural caravan investigation involved overlaying work between the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, the NSW Police and the NSW Crime Commission. The Adass Israel Synagogue ultimately involved the intersection of a whole lot of principles that we had in general conversation, not seen overlaying with each other before – characteristics that we would previously associate with terrorism, with foreign interference, with community violence, with social cohesion and with organised crime. All of those converging and overlaying with each other.

Organisations facing international threats like Scattered Spider, see a merging of cyber with artificial intelligence, with child exploitation, with money laundering. The illegal tobacco trade involves cooperative work between Border Force, the Federal Police, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC as well as our state enforcement authorities.

So, for each of the different challenges now, this concept of convergence, just as we saw with our phones, is what we have as a threat. So when we have a convergence of threats we need to have a convergence of protection. And there are four key elements that have characterised how we have now set up the Home Affairs portfolio.

The first – and this was done as soon as we came to office – was to bring cyber security squarely within the Home Affairs portfolio. Cyber security had had a history of moving around different parts of government, sometimes being in communications, moving in and out of Cabinet at different points in time. Cyber security and cyber attacks now intersect with almost every one of the examples that I have gone through, and it belongs in Home Affairs.

Secondly, the agencies which had been tested in different parts in different portfolios, have now moved back with a home in Home Affairs. So obviously the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC and, by virtue of the Criminal Intelligence Commission coming in, the Institute of Criminology comes with that as well because of the way that they’re structured.

The third thing is keeping a total portfolio of national security and immigration within the same department. Now, doing that at the time that it happened was quite controversial because there is a legitimate argument that we need to make sure we don’t get to a point where we are constantly securitising all of the language about immigration and multiculturalism. That’s not good for social cohesion, and it’s not accurate about what we do. But it’s also true that while not everything in national security is about immigration and not everything in immigration is about national security, there is an overlap between the two, where there is a huge advantage in having them in the same portfolio.

And if you were to try to separate them, where would you put Border Force, which does both immigration compliance and does all the compliance of goods at the border and critical to interception of a whole lot of illegal products coming into Australia as well. So the logic of keeping that together was thought about and decided that there was an advantage in making sure that we were delivering what the Australian people want in that third element of keeping national security and immigration in the same portfolio.

And then the fourth thing was to say, “But how do we send a message of making sure that we are not securitising the conversation about immigration and multicultural affairs?” And for that reason we established the Office of Multicultural Affairs, which has been up and running now for a few months and gives a direct interface which makes sure that when we engage with communities throughout Australia we’re engaging quite clearly through a celebration of the value of modern Australia and respect for modern Australia rather than every conversation being questioned – “Is it within a security frame or is it not.”

So that effectively is what we’ve done with the portfolio. That’s an interesting structural conversation and important for me to explain. But the next question is, what do you do with it? Once you’ve got that architecture in front, how do you take advantage of it for the protection of Australians? How do you take advantage of it for the cohesion of the nation?

Now, I want to focus on one element that goes through almost all of the different threats that we deal with in the national security environment, and that’s the movement of money and money laundering. And there are two areas of money laundering on each of them, where having everything in the same portfolio has enabled me to make decisions that I’ll announce today, that go a long way towards resolving some of the weaknesses that are in the system right now.

Let me start by explaining what we have with crypto ATMs. Now, a whole lot of people will engage in cryptocurrency as an economic tool. A whole lot of people will engage with it in terms of different purchasing methods. It is a form of currency that is in the world now. Crypto ATMs are not everywhere. And Australia comes third in the world rankings of crypto ATMs. And we’ve got there pretty quickly. Six years ago, Australia had 23 of them; three years ago, Australia had 200 of them; now we have 2,000 of them. It’s grown, and grown rapidly.

And if you think about the normal purchase of crypto, if it’s done online through a bank account, that first transaction we have a direct line of traceability. But when it’s crypto being purchased with cash, while there is some identity work done to varying extents, the reality is our capacity to trace is much less than what it is with crypto being purchased on online through a bank account.

Now in 2024, AUSTRAC, their taskforce linked this to money laundering, to scams and fraud, to illicit substances and to child exploitation, with every one of those a link was found to the use of crypto ATMs. When they looked at the top users, the top users who are putting the most money into crypto ATMs, 85 per cent of the money going through for the top users involved scams or money mules. I’m not pretending for a minute that everybody who goes in and uses a crypto ATM is a problem, but proportionately, what’s happening is a significant problem in an area which is much harder for us to trace.

And the scale of this? We’re talking about 150,000 transactions a year. We’re talking about $275 million. And if you think about a normal ATM that we use, where people will go in, some people will make deposits, some people will take money out – it’s actually pretty hard to find a deposit machine these days – the crypto ones, 99 per cent of their transactions are deposits. 99 per cent.

A quick case study: a 77-year-old woman, widowed, downloaded a dating app and met a Belgian man online. Without ever physically meeting for eight months, they were what they would describe as dating. Once the relationship had been established, he then talked about how he’d been able to make a whole lot of money through crypto. And this woman, an Australian citizen, started turning up to different crypto ATMs depositing her cash. The first one, he was on the phone telling her exactly what to do, exactly what account to put it in. She would go to different ATMs to withdraw the cash, different places to withdraw the cash in quantities that didn’t alert anyone. And at one point, she said she was carrying $20,000 in cash around.

Because we don’t get the same alert at the deposit because of the nature of cash going into these machines, we did end up getting on to it - $430,000 later. You can only imagine the difference for that individual. But it’s also the case that when you think about the way these are being used, it is an easy point of entry for some of the worst elements in our country to be able to transfer cash into currency in a way that is harder for us to be able to find.

For that reason, I’m now having drafted legislation amending the Anti-Money Laundering Counter-Terrorism Financing Act to give AUSTRAC powers. I want AUSTRAC to have the power to restrict or, if it decides, prohibit high-risk products. And be with no doubt, crypto ATMs are a high-risk product.

The second example that I want to tell you about that I’m announcing today goes to mule accounts. Now if you’ve been near a university, particularly in a capital city, you’ll find signs all over the place – promising to make a heap of money, you don’t have to do much, grab the phone number, and you do the tear offs. This has been raised with me by my security agencies and by the Australian Banking Association.

What increasingly has been happening has been overseas students in particular have been told, “Okay, you’re leaving the country soon. Before you leave give us your bank account details, we’ll give you a heap of money. You’ll be out of the country, we’ll use your bank account.” What then happens in terms of our organisations trying to track and trace is an account that has been completely legitimate for three years, for five years, sometimes for longer is now in the hands of organised crime.So instead of the different points where we know to be able to look for financial transactions, we have accounts that have never been previously used for these purposes, but have received international deposits because they’re overseas students, suddenly being used to fund some of the worst examples of organised crime.

The extent to which these mule accounts exist – in the last financial year, our banks had to close 22,000 mule accounts being used in this way. Overseas students need to be warned. Part of this is public messaging, which is why I wanted this speech to be at the National Press Club and this announcement to be here. We need the public messaging to get through to international students the fact that if you are offered to hand over your bank details, not only are you breaking the law in doing that but you are also creating a situation where you are probably providing a means for child exploitation, for drug trafficking, for some of the worst elements of organised crime. And getting that public message out to overseas students in particular is a really important part of the messaging. And I’ve written to the university peak bodies with that exact message to seek their help in being able to get this message out.

But public information is not the whole of the task. The banks want to help with this, but at the moment, the banks, if they think there’s something suspicious, don’t have access to the immigration data to work out if this account that’s behaving quite differently belongs to somebody who’s meant to have left the country. For that reason, I’m updating the visa entitlement verification online terms and conditions. Financial institutions will, as a result of this, will be able to get access to visa information if they believe that they’re dealing with a mule account to determine whether or not someone, in fact, is likely to have left Australia.

It's a simple passing of information, but with each of these, the combination of my policy role with Home Affairs in the first one, with respect to the crypto ATMs, having AUSTRAC within the portfolio makes that conversation seamless. In the same way as having the Home Affairs responsibility directly in the same department as the immigration responsibility allows us to look at this particular national security problem and be able to merge the two with a change to those regulations that I referred to.

All of this gives me more tools to try to deliver on the first two parts of those objectives – for people to be safe and to feel safe, but I also have the obligation for people to be welcomed and to feel at home.

A whole lot I said with respect to immigration earlier – a whole lot of immigration has absolutely nothing to do with national security. A whole lot of national security has nothing to do with immigration. But it is also the case that there is a crossover, often in visa cancellation.

I want to say something quickly about visa cancellation before I talk about the migration debate broadly. The first thing I’ll say is there are some things I do in visa cancellation that I think are utterly indifferent to what’s happened beforehand, but there’s a couple where it is different and I want to say something about them.

The first, when you’re given advice from national security agencies or intelligence agencies that a visa should be cancelled, I think I do the same as any minister would do, no matter which side of politics. In the history of this portfolio, when you trust your security and intelligence agencies and when they advise to cancel, you cancel.

You always act on the side of caution. But I’ve also gone further, as has been reported recently, on some issues of criminal behaviour where the behaviour has either fallen short of full convictions or the convictions and jail penalties have fallen short of mandatory cancellation. And that’s in cases of family and domestic violence.

With the challenges in getting convictions up in this area, I do err on the side of caution. I do err on the side of caution. And the test for visa cancellation is a test of character, not necessarily a test of criminality. And for family and domestic violence cases, I have been willing to go further than where it has always gone previously in erring on the side of caution in making sure that the people who have had the courage to speak up about their treatment are in a stronger position to make sure that they are being kept safe.

The final one is the inciting of discord. Some of you would have seen written today a rare point of solid alliance between myself and Andrew Bolt over a visa cancellation with respect to Candace Owens. My view, as I’ve said before, is when someone applies for a visa, they are asking to be a guest in your country. If their purpose for coming is to start an argument and to incite discord, we don’t have to say yes. If someone knocks on the door to your home and the reason they are turning up is to disrupt everything, it’s up to you whether you let them in. And my approach is with all the challenges we have to social cohesion, I’m very proud for Australia to draw a line and say, “Yep, Australians have freedom of speech. But people who come here wanting to cause harm in different ways, people who come here wanting to disrupt, people who come and want to promote their own brand of bigotry, we don’t need to say yes.” We can refuse, we can cancel. And I have, and I’ll continue to do so. I think there is a strong case for the national interest of Australia being well served by Candace Owens being somewhere else, and she is not alone in that category.

But in the general debate that we’ve had about national security, we haven’t had in the political debate a lot of honest discussion. I am very conscious that an argument about immigration can be had in a civil way, can be had in a decent way, but it is impossible to have a civil and decent argument about immigration in a fact-free way.

Now, many people, many people have used the term over the years about dog whistling in debate. I’ll never forget the Laurie Oakes article some years ago – it would have been in the 90s in The Bulletin – where he referred to dog whistle politics and explained the capacity for something to be said that will be heard one way by everybody and will be heard differently by the exact people you were trying to reach.

I think it’s fair to say the days of dog whistle politics are well and truly over. When people want to play cards designed to divide people, everybody hears them. It’s no longer a dog whistle; it’s now a set of bagpipes that you can hear from the other side of the hill. People are on to it, and when individual communities are singled out, they hear exactly what’s being said.

Because I’m at the Press Club, I should mention I was amused when one publication -- when I called out my political opponents for being specific in their criticism and suspicion of people whose heritage was China, India or the Middle Eas -- that was written up by one publication as me playing the race card. Which I must say I had respect for the creativity of that particular argument. But our language matters. Our language really matters. And I am glad at least in the argument that seems to be happening within my political opponents that for some communities I had thought they were starting to move away from this, although I note in the last two days they appear to have re-embarked on that with respect to one.

The debate, though, about numbers also needs to be had honestly. First thing – after the pandemic, net overseas migration was always going to go up. Always going to go up. It was going to go up for two reasons: first of all, a whole lot of people who had been waiting to come here were all going to come at once. Student visas, for example, first-year, second-year, third-year students who’d left were all going to come in the same year. There was always going to be an increase in net overseas migration.

But also, everybody who was coming, overwhelmingly, some still had life left on their old visa. But a whole lot of people who were coming post-pandemic got a new visa, so the expiry dates were pushed out. So we had a situation where normally you get a natural overlap of expiry dates of a similar amount coming up each year, we had a series of years where that didn’t happen. Which obviously has a huge impact on a net figure.

That’s not to say that there weren’t areas that needed to be addressed. But if you want to have the conversation about net overseas migration, you do need to say where we need to address them. The government did exactly that, and we did that with respect to student visas for a very simple reason. International education, a really important industry for Australia, but one of the only industries in Australia – one of the only ones – where you need to provide a new home for every customer. That’s unusual. And so what had happened for some of our educational institutions was they were not pulling their weight in terms of student housing. They weren’t.

And so we’ve set up a system now where, as different institutions do more with respect to student housing, they will be able to get more students. But they can no longer feel that they can completely outsource that responsibility to the general housing market. That’s not a reasonable business model for international education.

That has had an impact on net overseas migration what we’ve done there, but that’s what you need to do. And if the Opposition want to say they need to get net overseas migration down faster than the 40 per cent drop that the government’s already done, there needs to be a discussion, not simply about what’s the total, but what’s the visa class. What’s the visa class where you’re going to do it?

A whole lot of focus on the permanent migration numbers actually doesn’t get you very far. A huge portion of the permanent migration numbers go to people who are already here, who move from temporary visas to permanent visas have no impact on net overseas migration. A lot of the ones who come from overseas are partner visas who have very little impact on housing because they’re partners – they’re not just in the same house; they’re in the same room. If you want to argue we need to go harder than what the government’s doing, you need to answer the question of where.

In terms of saying that we need to restore manufacturing, it’s a simple case – the story of Australian manufacturing and the story of labour, of workers on visas, has been the same story for the history of Australian manufacturing. In terms of other occupations, last year 21,000 visas for health care workers, 4,300 visas for teachers, 15,524 for construction. We’ve tripled the number of visas that we’re giving for construction.

If these are the areas where people want to cut, then they need to explain which hospitals they’re going to say don’t have to fill every shift. Which education providers won’t be teaching the full range of subjects anymore. Which construction projects they are willing to wait longer for, including housing projects, if we’re not going to have the labour we need to get them built. If they want to turn up for that argument, I am there. But to have the argument about total numbers, without saying where you want to cut, is spin without any substance at all. The simple question of where is something that my political opponents haven’t wanted to deal with, but there is no pathway of being an alternative party of government unless you have that conversation.

Finally, though, that concept of welcome and feeling at home. Everything I’ve gone through so far are things that are always in the public eye. In both national security and in immigration, a lot of the most special moments don’t hit the public eye. And I think they matter for social cohesion. I think they – the work that’s being done by both the antisemitism and Islamophobia envoys, the extraordinary work that they’re both doing, it’s reflected in their reports, but it goes way beyond their reports as well, of their work with community, their work in social cohesion.

I just want to give three quick examples - and I’ll only give these as examples of some of the things that very quietly happen when you welcome people because they’ve each of them in their own way found their way into the public eye anyway. And I think they go a little way to what sort of country we are.

Rabbi Shlomo, the rabbi for the Adass Israel Synagogue. People decided that they – and we now know actors beginning in another country, in Iran – decided that they would send a loud message that you should not be welcomed and feel at home. As it happened, Rabbi Shlomo was waiting for his temporary visa to be renewed and was worried that it wasn’t going to be. Within a few days of that arson attack, I had a video call with him and his whole family – there’s a lot of them – and made them permanent residents and said to them, “Welcome home.”

A couple of weeks ago, there was a mother and daughter who came back to Australia, or came to Australia for the first time, meeting with family, some who’ve always been here, some who’ve come here more recently. That mother and daughter had spent 18 months hiding in a church in Gaza. Before I had the portfolio, just by chance, someone had handed me a phone, and I’d found myself having a video conversation with them while they were hiding. It’s the same church where you would have seen reports at the time of a woman having gone to the toilet and being shot by a sniper, a woman going to help her also being shot. That happened early in those 18 months, and they remained hiding there for those whole 18 months.

When I heard that they had now found their way out and were coming to Sydney, I knew that they had spent 18 months in fear of what might happen with respect to the war and the fighting from the Israeli Defence Force, and they’d spent about a decade before that living in fear of Hamas. They had no reason to know that there was a place where government would keep you safe. I was really pleased to be a minister in the sort of country where I could meet them at the airport and I could say, “You’re welcome here. You’re safe.”

And an HSC student who’d come from Ukraine, who’d been put on a temporary visa. When I first started meeting with Ukrainians, soon after I had the portfolio, she was about to do her HSC last year. And when I met with her and her mum, I said, “How do you think you’ll go?” Like is the case with a whole lot of people who come here on visas, she’s doing brilliantly at school, and it turns out particularly in maths and science. The Ukrainian students are largely blitzing it. But she said, “I don’t know, even if I get the marks, whether I’ll be able to go to uni because I don’t have permanent residence, and even if I paid, my visa expires next year.” And I was able to say to her, “Well, let’s make you a permanent resident. Welcome home.”

Those small messages of welcome are messages that are given in a big public way at every citizenship ceremony. There’s a banner at the big ones that I do that says, “Welcome home.” My citizenship message, which is given at every citizenship ceremony throughout Australia, finishes with the words, “Welcome home”. We are a good country. Modern Australia and multicultural Australia are the same thing. Part of loving Australia, which I do, is loving who we are and who, as a nation, we have become. And I’m really proud, in one of the honours of my life, to lead a portfolio dedicated to all the things that Australians would want in their home – to be safe, to feel safe, to be welcomed, and to feel at home.