- Hon Casey Costello
Cabinet has approved the establishment of a Ministerial Advisory Group on transnational and serious organised crime, Associate Police Minister Casey Costello announced today.
“This is an important step to ensuring we have a better cross-government response to fighting the increasing threat posed to New Zealand by international and domestic crime groups,” Ms Costello says.
“We are achieving great results in detecting organised crime, but we can do more.
“These criminal groups are organised as businesses, and we have to respond accordingly – stopping their product and their supply chains and their use of ‘labour’ and targeting their money.
“This means there’s a greater role for agencies like ACC, WorkSafe and Inland Revenue, to work alongside Immigration, MPI and law enforcement.
“We have to disrupt criminal groups with the ultimate objective of making New Zealand the hardest place in the world for organised crime to operate.”
The advisory group will focus on serious crime from a system perspective and identify opportunities to improve disruption and enforcement action and the barriers that prevent some government agencies from working together.
Steve Symon, a senior partner at Meredith Connell who has been advising the multi-agency Transnational Crime Unit, has been appointed chair of the group, which will have four other members with experience across government, law enforcement, regulation and the private sector. The advisory group will be in place for around eight months and be funded through the Proceeds of Crime Fund.
“Organised criminal activity inflicts misery in our communities, and harms legitimate businesses and the broader New Zealand economy,” Ms Costello says. “The illicit drug trade alone is estimated to cost the country close to $1.5 billion in social harm this year.
“We have a range of regulatory and law enforcement levers available to us and we need agencies to more effectively use these to support the dismantling of criminal organisations and the sham businesses that front their activities.
“I’m anticipating that the advisory group will look at information sharing between agencies, the way investigations and prosecutions are managed, and how frontline cooperation can be improved.
“Collectively, we can make a step-change in the way Government agencies think about and respond to transnational and serious organised crime.”
