Organized Crime in Australia

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Introduction

The Australian Crime Commission’s (ACC) 2011 report (the report), “Organised Crime in Australia”,1 provides a valuable contribution to the public discussion of organised crime in Australia. The report discusses the context against which organised crime takes place and also describes the various forms and enablers of organised crime. In addition, the report asserts two primary points: that organised crime poses a threat to Australia’s national security, and that it is both more complex and more diffuse than ever before. Yet the report could be interpreted as exaggerating both the novelty and level of the threat posed by organised crime. Neither of these is an unforgivable feature of the report and, indeed, are probably to be expected from the government agency saddled with the responsibility for coordinating the Australian Government’s response to organised crime. (It is not breaking any new ground to suggest that government agencies seek to safeguard their financial base and support by “massaging” the import of the problems they each face.) Despite this last fact, the accuracy of the report’s two primary claims is questionable.

Before discussing these two points, however, a further problem with the report cannot go unchallenged, and that is the conspicuous absence of any serious discussion of corruption and the role this plays in both facilitating and entrenching organised crime. The linkages between organised crime and corruption are well-established in the international literature2 and have long been studied by such bodies as Transparency International and the United Nations3. In contrast, the ACC’s brief discussion (amounting to just one page of a 101 paged report) and casual rejection of corruption in Austral...

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...me Commission

Parliament House, Canberra, 2007 accessed 15 August 2011

Rudd, K., The First National Security Statement to the Australian Parliament, Address by the Prime Minister of Australia, The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP, Australian Government, Canberra, 4 December 2008, , accessed 21 August 2011

United Nations Centre for International Crime Prevention, Corruption and Organized Crime, UN, New York, 2000, accessed 15 August 2011

United Nations, “United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocols”, last updated 2011, UN, New York, accessed 15 August 2011

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