Tag Archive for: Borders

‘High rollers’ A study of criminal profits along Australia’s heroin and methamphetamine supply chains

This report helps develop an understanding of the quantum of profits being made and where in the value chain they occur. Australians spent approximately A$5.8 billion on methamphetamine and A$470 million on heroin in FY 2019.

Approximately A$1,216,806,017 was paid to international wholesalers overseas for the amphetamine and heroin that was smuggled into Australia in that year. The profit that remained in Australia’s economy was about A$5,012,150,000. Those funds are undermining Australia’s public health and distorting our economy daily, and ultimately funding drug cartels and traffickers in Southeast Asia.

One key takeaway from the figures presented in this report is that the Australian drug trade is large and growing. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement agencies, methamphetamine and heroin use has been increasing by up to 17% year on year. Falling prices in Southeast Asia are likely to keep pushing that number up, while drug prices and purity in Australia remain relatively stable.

Authors Dr John Coyne and Dr Teagan Westendorf write that, ‘While ever-larger drug busts continue to dominate the headlines, the underlying fact is that methamphetamine and heroin imports continue to rise despite authorities seizing up to 34% of imported drugs’.

As production prices for methamphetamine continue to decline along with wholesale prices, more sophisticated transnational organised crime actors are likely to begin to examine their business models in greater detail. Industrial production of methamphetamine for high-volume, low-profit regional markets like Australia has significant benefits for them.

The data suggests that the more sophisticated transnational organised crime groups will seek to expand their control of the heroin and methamphetamine value chains to include greater elements of the wholesale supply chain as well as alternative product lines, such as synthetic opioids.

The authors note that ‘in the absence of supply reduction, and even with more effective supply-chain disruption, our federal and state governments will need to invest more heavily in demand reduction and harm minimisation.’

Anti-Money Laundering. A case study

The Australian Government’s technological monopolies have ended. Technological developments, especially those that have been disruptive, have been driven primarily by private corporations for at least the past 10 years. Meanwhile, legislative responses to those changes, be they disruptive or otherwise, have been increasingly delayed.

Acceleration in the development and use of technology has been matched by changes in the capability of those who would do us harm. In the face of rapid social change, governments have lost more than a technological edge, as the very conceptualisations of sovereignty and geographical jurisdictions are being challenged. Law enforcement agencies’ traditional business models for dealing with organised crime are under significant pressure from threat actors that are able to operate more agile decision-making cycles and exploit seams between jurisdictions and in law enforcement agencies’ capabilities.

In this context, Australian law enforcement agencies face an increasing number of challenges from emergent technologies. A key policy challenge underpinning these issues relates to the limited capacity of law enforcement to introduce innovative strategies in response to disruptive technology. Another is how to make cross-jurisdictional cooperation simpler and easier.

ASPI’s latest Special Report by Dr John Coyne and Ms Amelia Meurant-Tompkinson, explores technological innovation in law enforcement through a specific crime type case study of anti-money laundering (AML) provisions. It analyses the factors that support or restrict technological innovation in federal law enforcement’s AML efforts and argues that the current ecosystem for innovation for AML needs to be enhanced to engage with the dual challenge of disruptive technology, and the integration of existing pockets of AML excellence into a holistic whole-of-government innovation program. The initial steps for responding to this challenge should include an analysis of the central assumptions that underpin innovation, policymaking, strategy and finance in this space.

In this video, Madeleine Nyst discusses the report with John Coyne and Amelia Meurant-Tompkinson.

The virtual meets reality: Policy implications of e-diasporas

Diasporas are global social formations of people who have been scattered from their country of origin. They carry with them a collective representation, myth or imagined sense of their homeland. The connection between the diaspora and its members’ original ‘home’ was, until the rise of social media, sustained by letters, tapes and print media.

E-diasporas originally emerged as online manifestations of diaspora communities. Although social media are just some of many technologies used by people to communicate, their rise has intensified the articulation and elaboration of diasporic identities several-fold.

With social media, e-diasporas recreate and expand a diaspora’s sense of shared identity and community by providing a virtual venue for affirmation and recognition.

Today, e-diasporas are combinations of self-interest and identity groups that share experiences through online media. The members share their country of origin and, at times—depending on the size of the community—their host country.

People Smugglers Globally 2017

The global drivers for the irregular movement of people, from human security to economics, are growing, not dissipating.

In 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that there were 65.6 million ‘forcibly displaced people worldwide’, 22.5 million refugees and 10 million stateless people.

Globally, there are some 767 million people living below the poverty line. In Africa alone, there are some 200 million people ‘aged between 15–24 and this will likely double by 2045’. While these figures are startling, the fact that in 2016 only 189,300 refugees were resettled highlights the scale of the likely demand for irregular migration.

Much has been said and published on irregular migration from the perspective of the migrant. In the process, it has become politically expedient to homogenise perceptions of people smugglers.

This new ASPI report focuses on people-smuggling syndicates globally.

The report provides a concise analysis of the various people-smuggling syndicates operating in the globe’s people smuggling hot-spots. This authoritative report provides a concise analysis of each people smuggling hot-spot, with accompanying policy recommendations for interventions.

The 2017 independent review of intelligence: Views from The Strategist

Over the past 40 years, Australian governments have periodically commissioned reviews of the Australian intelligence community (AIC). The first such inquiry—the Hope Royal Commission of 1974—was commissioned by the Whitlam government as a way of shedding light on what had hitherto been a shadowy group of little-known and little-understood government agencies. It was also the beginning of a journey that would eventually bring the AIC more into public view and onto a firm legislative footing. The second Hope Royal Commission, in 1983, was partly a response to some dramatic external events, in the forms of the Coomb–Ivanov affair and a poorly judged Australian Secret Intelligence Service training exercise that went badly wrong. But it was also a continuation of the process begun by the previous commission.

Border security lessons for Australia from Europe’s Schengen experience

This Strategic Insights report explores Calum Jeffray’s key observations in his report Fractured Europe: the Schengen Area and European border security and analyses them through an Australian and then an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) border security lens.

It also provides recommendations for Australian border security policymakers based on the lessons learned from the Schengen experience. It examines the implications of Schengen for ASEAN member states in the development of the ASEAN Economic Community.

America’s ‘Maginot Line’: A study of static border security in an age of agile and innovative threats

Borders and border security are once again becoming increasingly important to the nation state. Many take a default position that our coastline is our border and that border security involves merely police, security guards and immigration or customs officials. But Australia’s geography no longer provides the physical barrier from the outside world that it once did.

This strategy provides a case study analysis of post-9/11 changes to US border security policies. It examines each of America’s different borders: the friendly northern borders, maritime borders, and the militarised southern border. It provides recommendations for Australia’s border security.

Australian border security and unmanned maritime vehicles

Protecting the sovereignty of our maritime borders has never been more difficult than it is today. Australia must identify strategies for pre-positioning our finite maritime response capabilities in order to be able to respond promptly, effectively and efficiently to risks across our EEZ.

This special report examines the potential for UMVs to expand Australia’s maritime domain awareness and make the ADF’s and Australia Border Force’s risk management strategies more efficient. It provides recommendations for improving the efficiency of Australia’s maritime border security efforts.

Securing the Australian frontier: An agenda for border security policy

This report explores the key border security concepts and emergent policy challenges that will impact on Australia’s border security policy.

Effective border security allows for the seamless legitimate movement of people and goods across Australia’s borders, which is critical to enhancing trade, travel and migration. The provision of border security involves far more than creating a capability focused solely on keeping our borders secure from potential terrorists, irregular migrants and illicit contraband.

Border security policy deals with a unique operating space, in which extraordinary measures (extraordinary in character, amount, extent or degree) are often needed to provide a sense of security at the same time as creating the sense of normalcy that will allow economic interactions to flourish.

Methamphetamine: Focusing Australia’s National Ice Strategy on the problem, not the symptoms

In this report, law enforcement isn’t focused on arrests, prosecutions, custodial offences or seizures, as none of those will have a guaranteed impact on the problem. The focus is on means to reduce the availability of drugs, the disruption of user behaviour and the integration of education and health initiatives.

The report argues that the National Ice Strategy should consider three key points:

  1. Integration. Drug strategies have a better chance of being successful when each of its initiatives are integrated into a strategically focussed harm reduction strategy.
  2. Innovation. Education, health and enforcement stakeholder should be free from the limitations of wholly quantitative performance measures.
  3. Disruption. Initiatives to tackle the ice problem should be focussed towards the disruption of problems rather than the treatment of symptoms of the problem.

Tag Archive for: Borders

Shut the border! Increasing divisions could have lasting impacts

Much is being said about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the measures used to deal with it, and how Australians are coping as a result.

It’s unsurprising that levels of alarm and disillusionment have risen in our communities, particularly among the young, as we see our society increasingly divided. While our state, territory and national leaders demonstrated a unity of purpose in the early stages of the pandemic, that has now given way to a growing sense that threats lie both within and beyond our borders.

Continuing down a path paved by divisive rhetoric and distrust in our leaders will damage our country, leaving an increasingly difficult situation for future generations to manage.

A clear political self-interest has created an unhealthy ‘us versus them’ mentality. The ‘them’ could be our neighbours, the travellers with the different number plates, or the unknown masses beyond our nation’s border. We are characterising them, making assumptions and asking, ‘Why are they here?’ and ‘What if they’ve got Covid?’

This attitude flows from rhetoric played out daily on social and mainstream media and in our communities, some of it coming from our elected leaders. Australians, especially young Australians, are tired of watching the constant blame-shifting across the country, which minimises and draws attention away from discussion of critical policy solutions. They want our leaders to develop the policy solutions necessary to appropriately deal with these crises, in the short and the long term.

There’s concern that this divisive approach could have lasting negative impacts on our society. It may well contribute to a growth in extremism and the foundation of hate groups. At the very least, it will drive rising distrust in the people and institutions that are there to guide and support our communities, and distrust in democratic institutions and processes.

Our democratic society is built on the common-law notion that citizens are to be allegiant to their nation and in return the nation protects those individuals. Now we’re seeing our nation’s leaders, burdened by the many ongoing and simultaneous crises, struggling to ensure that Australians as a whole feel protected. The reactions of some individuals to lockdowns reflect this distrust. Some, fearful of public health restrictions and the economic impacts on their families, aren’t following government advice and that is contributing to the crisis.

Perspective plays an important role in our lives, influencing our attitudes and beliefs. It is often shaped by our close community, by social media and by what we see on the news.

For instance, you could look at the Olympics and see the inherent nationalism that pits country against country. Or, you could look at it differently and see what many athletes have demonstrated this year—compassion and kindness.

People of all nations are crying out for inclusivity and equality. This is the kind of leadership we need to be seeing from our governments. Although we can give in to our own insecurities, perpetuating the us-versus-them mentality, we crave the good-news story of people looking out for each other, now more than ever.

To ensure that our country doesn’t go down a very dark and harmful path, we need clear leadership and clear communication. This means we need people across the state, territory and national political divides to work together.

We’ve already seen the benefits of state and territory governments using existing mechanisms to work with community leaders in ensuring the needs of minority groups are met during a crisis. Clearly communicating policy, be it through mainstream media conferences, social media posts or information provided in multiple languages, will ensure that every individual has access to the advice our leaders and their experts are providing us.

We also need enduring policies that consider varying perspectives, potential obstacles and the imperative to adjust them as necessary to changing conditions. Australia’s latest wave of Covid-19 demonstrates that we need policies providing both short- and long-term solutions.

While policies focused on the immediate issues are important to address the critical challenges facing communities and individuals, we cannot rely on band-aid solutions to provide enduring assistance in these unpredictable times. Our policymakers will need room to consider the longer-term impacts of these crises on our community and strategic direction, and to anticipate potential obstacles.

Australia’s future will undoubtedly be damaged by continually divisive rhetoric and behaviour. Young Australians are looking to our leaders to provide an example, to demonstrate that while they will make mistakes because they’re human, they are capable and can be trusted.

If our leaders can demonstrate that they are working with and listening to our communities and that they are formulating and implementing enduring policy solutions, and if they can communicate those ideas clearly, our country will be well positioned to turn away from the harmful mentality of ‘us versus them’.

Cheap cigarettes could be funding terrorism

A criminal who wanted to smuggle a shipping container of illegal cigarettes into Australia could expect to make almost $10 million in profit. Of course, these criminals first need to get their products into the country. Both the federal government and big tobacco have tried to estimate how much illegal tobacco makes it through Australia’s borders—with vastly different answers. It’s probably fair to say that somewhere between 10% and 20% of all tobacco consumed in Australia isn’t legal.

The upper figure indicates that the government could be missing out on up to $3.4 billion in tax revenue. I suspect the average smoker in Australia couldn’t care less.

On a positive note, Australia’s large annual increases in tobacco tariffs have done their job. Overall, tobacco consumption is reducing. However, tobacco companies believe that purchases of illegal tobacco as a percentage of total sales are increasing. While big tobacco’s lobbyists talk about lost tax, their concern is really company revenue. It’d be hard to find a member of the public, a bureaucrat or a politician of any flavour concerned about big tobacco losing revenue.

The problem here is that as many as a fifth of Australian smokers seem to be buying illegal cigarettes and tobacco. In the process, these everyday Australians are unwittingly supporting global organised crime groups, possibly even terrorist groups like Hezbollah.

When visiting London’s Metropolitan Police, more than a decade ago, I became aware of what the real problem was: transnational organised crime. At the time, a deputy commissioner mentioned that many of the old intergenerational crime groups in the United Kingdom were no longer moving illicit drugs. Instead, they had switched to cigarettes—because there was more money to be made, less risk of being caught, and significantly more lenient punishments. It’s a situation very similar to Australia’s.

Eight years ago, it became apparent to many officials that Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia Islamist militant group, wasn’t just making money from the global cocaine trade. It was also moving illicit cigarettes across the US and the Middle East, making profits from the wholesale to retail levels.

It was also only a few years ago that tobacconists in western Sydney, raided by Australian Border Force officers, had more than $1 million in cash on their premises. Not a bad effort given the demise of cash sales and the financial struggles small retail businesses generally face.

Lots has been done by the government to tighten regulation on the tobacco industry. Tobacco can’t be grown legally in Australia. However, the legislation doesn’t stop the importation of machines used to manufacture cigarettes, or the tubes in which the tobacco is encased.

While Australia’s law enforcement and policymakers face a broad array of pressing challenges, the lack of priority given to illicit tobacco across the government has health, economic, rule-of-law and national security dimensions. It’s now time, after our tobacco policies have forced down smoking rates, to rethink our strategy.

Stricter border controls and more investigative staff are critical to addressing this challenge. The government needs to consider three other priorities.

Legislative reforms should be introduced that would allow greater use of proceeds of crime provisions to enable the seizure of wealth related to this market.

In addition, a review of tobacco legislation is required, and with it, investigation of specific vulnerabilities such as controls on cigarette-making machines.

Finally, the government needs to change Australian smokers’ mindsets around purchasing illegal products. Average Australians who want a luxury good like a sports car but can’t afford it don’t go to the local criminal group to steal one for them.

The Australian public needs to stop supporting criminals and terrorists. We need to stop buying illegal tobacco. I don’t think fining smokers more will work to achieve this outcome.

We need to make the facts clear for the smoking public. Buying illegal tobacco is not a victimless crime, and those involved in the trade are not ‘Robin Hood’-type characters saving average Australians from the evil taxman.

Suppose you are buying your cheap cigarettes or your loose-leaf tobacco online or under the counter. You are, at best, giving money to a criminal enterprise. At worst, you could be giving money to a terrorist organisation.

The people selling cheap illegal cigarettes online, or over the counter in your local shop, aren’t sticking it to the government and helping locals. Instead, whether they like it or not, they are participating in a transnational organised crime activity.

Australia and Timor-Leste: the Timor Sea conciliation

Image courtesy of Flickr user Geoff Whalan.

The Timor Sea conciliation between Australia and Timor-Leste has already been the subject of some significant developments in 2017. Following a contentious period last year when Australia actively contested the competency of the Conciliation Commission, recent indications are that the conciliation process is going well and may result in a permanent maritime boundary being concluded.

First, a bit of history: Australia’s seabed or continental shelf maritime boundaries in the Timor Sea and adjacent Arafura Sea were negotiated with Indonesia in 1972. The entitlements of both countries were based upon an understanding of the extent of the continental shelf found in the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf and maritime boundary delimitation processes adjudged by international courts and tribunals.

As such the Australia–Indonesia Timor Sea boundary to the east and west of the then Portuguese-occupied East Timor projects north from continental Australia to a point in the seabed adjacent to the Timor Trough—a natural depression in the seabed that sits between 40–60 miles off the Timor coast. Despite Australia’s efforts to also negotiate an equivalent boundary with Portugal at the time, those negotiations broke down. Events radically changed following Indonesia’s 1975 annexation of East Timor.

Australia and Indonesia in 1989 agreed upon a joint development zone in the Timor Sea which was terminated upon Timor-Leste’s independence in 2002. Nevertheless, as an alternative to a permanent maritime boundary, the 2002 Timor Sea Treaty established a Joint Petroleum Development Area (JPDA) which mirrored a portion of the previous joint development zone. Rather than sharing the potential oil and gas revenue equally, a 90/10 split was agreed upon in Timor-Leste’s favour. The Timor Sea Treaty was then supplemented and extended by the 2006 Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) treaty, which included a provision that the treaty would remain in force for 50 years, meaning that no permanent maritime boundary would be concluded during the operational lifetime of any Timor Sea oil and gas field.

After a number of years of Timor-Leste asserting that Australia had engaged in espionage during the CMATS negotiations, and that as a result the treaty should be null and void, Timor initiated arbitration proceedings against Australia in 2013 seeking to overturn CMATS. However, Timor-Leste’s ultimate aim has always been to negotiate a permanent maritime boundary based on an equidistance or median line. Australia’s response to date has been to consistently rebuff these claims by referring to the terms of CMATS. While Australia has opted out of certain adjudication or arbitration mechanisms for maritime boundary disputes, Article 298 of UNCLOS does provide mechanisms for compulsory conciliation which Timor-Leste activated in April 2016. Australia responded by challenging the competence of the Conciliation Commission, which following a hearing ruled in September 2016 against the Australian challenge.

Since that time the Commission has held meetings with the parties in Singapore, most recently from 16–20 January, during which time there were three significant developments. First, Timor-Leste formally notified Australia of its intention to withdraw from CMATS the result of which is that the treaty ceases to be in force on 10 April 2017. Second, Timor-Leste has indicated that it’ll terminate the two arbitrations it had previously initiated as part of ‘confidence-building measures’. Third, Australia has indicated that it’s prepared to ‘create the conditions conducive to the achievement of an agreement on permanent maritime boundaries in the Timor Sea’. This is the first time that Australia has made such a public concession since Timor-Leste’s independence.

What then can be expected during the remainder of 2017? To begin with, the current Conciliation Commission phase will continue. This is the first occasion such a Commission has met under the UNCLOS framework. While then the process is unique, all the signs to date indicate both parties are engaged in the conciliation in good faith. However, the Commission won’t hand down a binding Award or Judgement in the manner of a court of tribunal. Rather, the Commission will prepare a non-binding Report due no later than 19 September which shall include recommendations ‘appropriate for an amicable settlement.’

The second phase will be how Australia and Timor-Leste respond to the report in the latter part of 2017. Article 298 of UNCLOS requires them to ‘negotiate an agreement on the basis’ of the report. However, these procedures do recognise that such negotiations may not result in an agreement being reached. To that end, there’s potential that some issues may prove to be intractable. Those include including whether a permanent boundary is based on a standard equidistance line or alternate modified equidistance line, Timor-Leste’s proposed share of the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field which is currently predominantly part of the Australian continental shelf, or Australian unhappiness with the implications of a permanent boundary for the existing boundaries with Indonesia.

Ultimately, that final factor could prove to be the biggest hurdle. Australia will be mindful that whatever concessions it may make to Timor-Leste could have much more significant ramifications for the stability of the more extensive seabed boundaries with Indonesia. In resolving one maritime boundary dispute with Timor-Leste, Australia will therefore want to ensure that it doesn’t create a fresh dispute with its biggest maritime neighbour, Indonesia.