Why organised crime is now a national security threat

05 February 2026

Why organised crime is now a national security threat

Transcript

Why has serious and organised crime – estimated to cost Australia $82.3 billion each year – become a national security issue? How is the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) responding to this?

What are the linkages between state actors and transnational and serious organised crime in Australia?

What is the role of ACIC and other intelligence organisations in combating transnational crime? How does ACIC work with international partners?

In this episode, Heather Cook joins Rory Medcalf to discuss the evolving landscape of transnational crime and its implications for national security in Australia.

Heather Cook

We are seeing what we're calling crime as a service, where the criminal capabilities that these quite vast criminal syndicates bring to bear are very attractive to state actors who are seeking to remain at arm's length and use these criminal networks and their capability to carry out their dirty work, basically.

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You're listening to the National Security Podcast, the show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-Pacific produced by the ANU National Security College.

Rory Medcalf

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Rory Medcalf, Head of College here at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast has been recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. This week, I'm joined by the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Heather Cook, to discuss the work of the Commission and how transnational crime and the digital environment is altering and affecting Australia's national interests, Australia's national security, and indeed more broadly about the work of the Commission and the threat and the risks of transnational crime and serious crime to Australians. Heather, it's great to have you here in the studio because of course you are a long-standing friend of the National Security College.

Heather Cook

Thank you, Roar. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rory Medcalf

Now you wear a couple of hats here. You're both the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, but also the Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology. And your career has spanned intelligence, policy, governance, leadership, not only across the national security community here in Australia, but also in the private sector. And indeed, I understand your career began elsewhere in the world. Maybe we can hear a little bit about that as we go along. But I really wanted to thank you again because you've been, I think, a strong supporter of the work of the National Security College and we were particularly privileged recently to host your inaugural public address as the CEO of the Commission in which you looked at the modern threat of serious and organised crime and released some major reports. So I want to go back to those issues on the costs and the challenges facing Australia in this space. But first, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more really about yourself and your organisation and in particular what is the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, what does it do and what distinguishes it from other parts of the national security community.

Heather Cook

Yeah, thanks Rory. It is an interesting question because unlike some members or organizations who form part of our national intelligence community, I think the ACIC is probably somewhat less well understood. And I suspect that's a part and parcel because it has not been very forward leaning in terms of coming out and talking about what it does or what it focuses on.

Rory Medcalf

All our secret organisations are coming out of the shadows.

Heather Cook

Yeah, and I think there's a driver for that, very important driver for that. We can certainly get to that as well. But the ACIC has had an interesting history. It has had a number of iterations dating back to 1984, where it was formed as the National Crime Authority, and then moving into the Australian Crime Commission. Then it merged with an organization called CrimTrack in 2016 and became the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. And so it has had a number of iterations, which again is probably why it's perhaps a little less well understood. But as it stands today, the ACIC is a criminal intelligence agency, as the name would indicate. It has a range of capabilities that allow us to collect intelligence, analyse and assess intelligence, and of course produce advice to help inform law enforcement or other enforcement action, policy regulation, strengthening of legislation.

Our focus is transnational and serious organized crime. So again, we're unique in that regard. We are the sole agency that is entirely focused on transnational and serious organized crime. And we work with a variety of stakeholders and partners, mainly law enforcement, but more increasingly across our national intelligence community, and certainly with many areas of industry in the private sector, and lots of overseas partners as well. So we're undergoing a fair amount of transition. There was a government review recently, and again, happy to talk about what the significance of that review means for the agency going forward. But, bottom line is it is really going to position us to be a very strong partner in the fight against transnational and serious organized crime.

Rory Medcalf

Fantastic. A couple of questions spring out of that. I mean one is the other hat you wear, the Australian Institute of Criminology. How do these two relate to one another?

Heather Cook

Yeah, is a bit of an unusual construct. I think it's probably less by design and more by happenstance. The AIC, the Institute of Criminology, is a very small criminal research entity, but packs a very powerful punch. Its focus is criminal justice issues, and it is really the national authority on criminal and criminal justice research. It focuses on a range of high priority policy areas, many that overlap with the ACIC. It focuses on transnational and serious organized crime. It does research into extremism. It does research into cybercrime and victimization, as well as a lot of research into child exploitation, sexual violence, domestic violence, indigenous justice issues. So very broad remit for a small organization but quite a bit of overlap with the focus of the ACRC as well.

Rory Medcalf

So these are some pretty confronting issues and very, I think, close to concerns across the community as well as to Australia's national interests. Your own career that's led you to this, it will be useful for listeners to understand a little bit more about that because not only are these unusual organisations and I think particularly challenging roles, but they're not, if you like, everyday roles in the public service or the security or, law enforcement space. How did you get into this?

Heather Cook

Great question. You can probably pick up from the accent and you alluded to it at the beginning that I probably don't sound like your average Australian. I started my career in Canada and I started my career with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which is the equivalent of ASIO here in Australia. I don't think I had a burning desire, even a knowledge to say this is, you know, at that stage in my career to say I was going to pursue a career in national security. Really fell into it, like I think many people do. But once you're in, you develop a burning passion for the subject. And it's such a privilege to be working in a field where you're surrounded by team members, you know whether that was in my Canadian experience or once I moved my career into the Australian sphere. You are always surrounded by individuals that are just passionate about giving back to the country, protecting them from threats. And it's a very satisfying career. I did stick with it. I came to Australia in 1995. I worked with ASIO for close to 30 years. Culminating in being the Deputy Director General in charge of ASIO's intelligence mission from about 2015 to 2022. But throughout that period, I also had opportunity to work with the Prime Minister and Cabinet in defence, intelligence, and security as a senior policy advisor. And I did that through a very interesting period. It was the 9-11 attacks, an area of profound transformation in national security for many countries around the world. But the pace of legislative reform, policy reform, data sharing, information sharing at a global scale really transformed the national security space at that time. So it was a fascinating area of policy. But I've stuck with it because I just feel passionate about the purpose and the mission. And I enjoy being part of the community here in Australia. We're big enough to have impact, but we're small enough to be agile and nimble and to build very collaborative, enduring relationships across those organizational boundaries.

Rory Medcalf

So 30 years, or 31 years, I think, by the time we release this recording in the Australian security community. And I recall, I think, getting to know you and your deputy director, general role in ASIO, as one of the few ASIO officers who could be sort of publicly named and identified, and really as one of the, I think, very articulate voices of the work that ASIO is doing. And I think ASIO has begun to increase its own. profile in the new security environment. It's great to see your career move on into this space But let's look now at the subject matter of the day serious and organized crime. And of course, there's a very strong transnational dimension to a lot of that, now there was a time where this wasn't considered part of the if you like the national security landscape for Australia always a risk in its own right. But that's changed and as you said your work now is very integrated with rest of the security community. So what has changed in reality on the ground? What are the changes in the threat environment to the way that crime manifests to make it a national security issue?

Heather Cook

Yeah, you're absolutely right. It hasn't always been seen in that through that lens. But what has fundamentally changed in, I would say, increasingly over the past decade is just the scale and magnitude and sophistication of these criminal networks and the way that they operate. And the reports that you reference that we recently released really go to highlighting the fact that that increase in scale and magnitude is having a much broader impact on our society than previously. So when we look at the nature of transnational and serious organized crime and its impacts now, these are highly sophisticated global networks. They embrace and exploit technology in a way that allows them to scale their business, increase their victimization. Circumvent enforcement and regulation in a way that they've never been able to before. Their reach is profound and they are collaborating with each other in a way that they've never done before as well, which again accelerates and enhances their success. And when we look at the impact, and this is really where we get to why this is now converging with other types of threat as a compounding impact on Australia's national security.

It is weakening our resilience. It is attacking our border sovereignty and integrity, by virtue of the ease with which it is moving its illicit commodities across our borders. It is impacting our economy in a profound way. The reports that we have released recently quantify the cost of organized crime on Australia. And the figure is staggering, estimated to be $82.3 billion annually, costing the Australian economy, both in direct and indirect costs. It's eroding our tax base. It's eroding. It's impacting our communities in very profound ways. Again, the violence used to be historically more crook on crook, thug on thug, so to speak. But it is now more brazen and broad daylight attacks on individuals, murders, fire bombings, it's impacting our communities in broad daylight. Impacting our businesses, impacting market fairness, increasing cost of living, you know, cost of living impacts of the cost of crime is quite significant because insurance is going up due to the violence. It simply has a much more pervasive impact on our society. And I think anything that weakens our resilience in the current environment where we have multifaceted threats that we're dealing with becomes part and parcel of the national security threat that we need to address.

Rory Medcalf

This brings to mind a few other considerations about the national security dimensions of serious crime. One is, of course, the scale, as you've mentioned, of the cost to Australia. think that $82 billion, I think, in the space of a year, that is, well, it's a lot more than the Australian defence budget, I should note. Cost to the economy, the taxpayer, the opportunity cost to Australia's ability to be strong and resilient is clearly profound. But the second thing is the role of international state actors, foreign countries, or foreign governments, or indeed of their intelligence services perhaps. What can you say about the linkage between state actors and transnational and serious organized crime in Australia?

Heather Cook

Definitely seeing a convergence of threats in that regard. And there have been some publicly disclosed recent examples of that. For instance, the Iranian government involvement in some of the anti-Semitic attacks in Australia, in Victoria in particular. So we are seeing that. We are seeing what we're calling more as crime as a service, where the criminal capabilities that these quite vast criminal syndicates bring to bear are very attractive to state actors who are seeking to remain at arm's length and use these criminal networks and their capability to carry out their dirty work basically. So we're seeing a lot more of that. I mean we've seen historically nation-state connections to a lot of the cybercrime. Large-scale ransomware type attacks as a revenue raiser, but also as a disruptive impact. So we are seeing far more of that convergence of nation states finding the criminal capability that they can pay for, remain at arm's length, and direct in quite targeted ways is something that is certainly increasing in the environment. And this requires us to work much more closely as a national intelligence community and to make sure that we are identifying these connections using all the capability that we can bring to bear. But we can see this is likely to be a phenomenon that's going to increase rather than decrease.

Rory Medcalf

So that all reinforces the place that you hold in the security community. But you've also mentioned the cyber dimension to all of this. We heard recently, I think it was in late 2025, from the new commissioner of the AFP, Chrissie Barrett, of the Federal Police, and of course, from the Director General of ASIA, Mike Burgess, as well, about Australia's vulnerabilities in the digital environment. What are you concerned mostly about in the digital dimension from a serious and organised crime perspective in terms of Australia's vulnerabilities and the threats.

Heather Cook

Yeah, it's certainly an area where we see massive adoption and exploitation by criminal networks. So in the same way that we all benefit as members of society from advances in technology, every opportunity is also an opportunity for these criminal networks to adopt these new technologies and exploit them for criminal purposes. It is really one of the reasons that we can see these enterprises able to scale their operations, to be able to operate remotely and online, which allows them to obscure their involvement or their activities. We're seeing the impact of fintech and digital currencies being exploited by criminal enterprises at a pace and scale that is really extraordinary. Makes it very difficult to follow the money, which is obviously a traditional way in which organizations investigate crime and they are just very agile and very wealthy and have the ability to invest in these technologies as well. And we're seeing increased sophistication whereby criminal enterprises are able to, we call them online ecosystems, build these quite contained online ecosystems that contain all of the capability and technology they need to launder their money, remittance and payment services, encrypted communications. They're actually engaging technologists to build these ecosystems that allow them to hide in plain sight under a veil of legitimacy while containing their criminal enterprises in these online ecosystems. they're very sophisticated. It's definitely making them more capable and increasing their reach and more difficult to detect and disrupt.

Rory Medcalf

It sounds to me as if any individual nation state, particularly a middle power like Australia, despite all of our capabilities and attention, really cannot meet this challenge alone. perhaps if you can share some thoughts on the international cooperation dimension, I guess, especially in the digital environment. How vital is that to Australia? Are there any examples you can give?

Heather Cook

Yeah, incredibly vital. I mean, as with all the threats that we're facing have that global dimension. International partnerships have never been more important. And the degree to which we work and share with what we would call our traditional partners, we're obviously very familiar with the Five Eyes arrangements and that trusted

Rory Medcalf

Canada's one of them

Heather Cook

A very good example. I always say I almost embody the Five Eyes in that I, you know, it demonstrates the trust between those countries and very enduring relationships. But obviously, certainly if we're looking at transnational and organized crime, we know that the source of drugs, the precursors are produced and disseminated from China, Mexico and Southeast Asia, or huge manufacturing hubs for the types of drugs that are coming through the Australian pipeline. And these illicit commodities transit a full range of countries on their route to getting to Australia and through our borders, including through our near region and through our Pacific neighbour countries as well. You cannot operate in this space or tackle it without the close working relationships with all of those partners and everyone tackling this together. think, you know, following the individuals, the kingpins, you know, the members of these syndicates is one way to tackle it, but increasingly the way we work with our partners and the way that we work nationally is about finding the weaknesses in their business model, really tackling their business model, really making it much more difficult for them to avail themselves of the many enablers that need to exist for them to succeed, taking the profit out of their business, and increasing the risk to their operations. We can't do that alone, domestic partners, but we need our international partners to be working on that with us.

Rory Medcalf

And it's not just, as you said, not just a traditional partner. So countries that we may not have close security relationships in other ways, we will collaborate within this space.

Heather Cook

Absolutely

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Rory Medcalf

There's also the roles and responsibilities of the rest of us. I it occurs to me that the public has a vital role to play in strengthening their own, I guess, hardening their own security and resilience in the online environment. So do you have any reflections on that?

Heather Cook

There is much that the public can do. There is much that the private sector can do in hardening the environment, in making it more difficult for criminality to succeed or any of these things to succeed. And I think the better armed they are with the information, with what bad looks like, with how criminality is conspiring to victimize them, it makes them more aware and more able to put up the defences. Put up the necessary protections to make sure they don't fall victim to these, these sorts of insidious types of crimes.

Rory Medcalf

So in practical terms, what sort of things should we be aware of?

Heather Cook

Well, obviously cyberspace is a very, very dangerous space. Again, we live and breathe in it and are a digitally connected society. But that's where a lot of this criminality lurks. So I think the more that we can do to make people aware about what to look out for. I mean, if you think about the large-scale scamming that is coming out of Southeast Asian scam centres. There is much that people can do to make sure that they don't fall victim to that. The Australian Institute of Criminology does an annual survey of victimization of cybercrime and it's quite an interesting trend to watch. But there is much more information out there that allows people to, if they avail themselves of it, that allows them to better protect themselves so that they don't fall victim to that sort of crime. I think if we look at other types of crime, I mean, the issue of drug addiction is an insidious and very sad fact of Australian life. For whatever reason, Australians are huge consumers of illicit drugs, namely methamphetamine. And the byproduct of that is not only the harm it causes to those individuals, but to those around them. And drug addiction is and drug-related crime is quite a significant thing. I think the AIC, in a recent survey, established that 42 % of murders in the past year had a link to methamphetamine use. So it has a significant impact

Rory Medcalf

In Australia?

Heather Cook

In Australia alone. It is very confronting. So we need to tackle that as a society as well. We need to do more around prevention, to reduce the demand for these sorts of drugs. Because reducing demand will reduce the success of these syndicates and will reduce the amount of crime that's associated with it as well. you know, we talk about these matters openly because the solution is not enforcement or intelligence agency work alone. They require whole of society approaches to tackle them. Everybody's defences have to be up. And we have to make it a lot more difficult for these syndicates to succeed.

Rory Medcalf

So you're talking not only about if you like awareness, but also self-awareness from the community. Let's move to the way in which your organization and the broader security community in Australia are responding to this changed threat environment, particularly again, the digital dimension. again, to go to some slightly crude language, I think you referred to crooks before, so I'm going to refer to the good guys and the bad guys. In principle. If those who wish to target Australian interests and people and values and the bad guys are leveraging technological advances in ways that really threaten our interests, how are you responding? How particularly is the ACIC developing its capability benefiting from digital transformation? To what extent are other agencies that you can speak about doing that? And I guess just to really complicate the question, where do you see artificial intelligence in that space?

Heather Cook

Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. The business of intelligence really is very strongly centred around technology in that digital world. Our businesses are about data, they are about information, and you don't succeed unless you're able to both acquire large amounts of data and exploit large amounts of data. This is about finding needles in the haystack. It's about being able to very quickly identify anomalous behaviour. And that is not a human endeavour anymore. That is very much a technical endeavour. So all agencies working in intelligence and enforcement are becoming increasingly digital in terms of their capability, increasingly using technologies to do the work that used to be done predominantly by human beings. Now, humans are still obviously critically important, but the scale of the issues require us to be quite adept at exploiting technology for our capability purposes as well. I think the trick, of course, is that we are bound by, it's not so much a trick, but we have to be very conscious of how we're applying technology, particularly where our decisions have consequences on human beings.

So you reference AI. Of course, we're all using artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence to help in our work, in our big data work. But where our decisions have an impact or a consequence on a human being, we have to make sure that we can unpick the genesis of those decisions and really know what's behind them. So we're increasingly embracing things like AI and technology, but we do it with caution and with guardrails, I guess is how I would put it. I think the challenges that, and we hear about this all the time is that we have to look at our workforce, we have to look at our capabilities and be able to shift and be as agile as the criminals are. That's very difficult for governments to do or for government agencies to do.

Rory Medcalf

You've got rules.

Heather Cook

We've got rules, there's budgets, there's, you know, constraints. I think we do very well for this and we do have to be more clever about this and, you know, really be thinking about how do we get ahead of the crime or ahead of the curve. And technology is a big enabler of that. I mean, increasingly, my business is about being offshore, online and obviously upstream because we're an intelligence organization. We want to be in that predictive space. To be offshore, online, and upstream, that requires quite a different skill set and capability and technical tools than perhaps what we used 10, 20 years ago. So we're constantly looking at how do we actually upskill our people, how do we recruit to the profile and to the skill sets that we need, and how do we, modernize our capability in a way that allows us to address the criminality head on and the way it's being delivered to us.

Rory Medcalf

That's a really perfect segue to the last question that I wanted to cover, which really is about people. It really is about your workforce. Now, the ACIC is a relatively small organization. I think you use the word agile, and we all want our organizations to be agile, but sometimes it helps, actually, if your scale is not so large. But of course, you're situated in a much larger system of intelligence and law enforcement and security in this country. Can you say something about the people you have, the people you want, the people you need? Very happy to offer you a recruitment pitch here, Heather. And how is this going to change into the future?

Heather Cook

Yeah, it is a great question and it's something we're very focused on as an agency. government last year landed a significant and comprehensive review of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Commonwealth law enforcement arrangements. Out of that review came a very clear direction that the ACIC needs to shift from being what was predominantly a law enforcement focus with quite similar law enforcement capabilities, to being a full-fledged criminal intelligence agency able to use all of our authorities and powers, including our covert collection capabilities and our coercive examination capabilities for intelligence purposes. That's a very different threshold to law enforcement purpose. So this is going to be a very welcome change. But what that means is that we need to move our workforce from being law enforcement purpose-focused to being criminal intelligence-focused. It doesn't sound like a great leap, but it is a slightly different mindset.

It does go to that ability to work in that predictive, preventative space as opposed to that evidence collection enforcement space. So we need to be making sure that we are building our recruitment programs around attracting people with all of those conceptual and analytical thinking skills. We do need digital natives and individuals that are much more comfortable with working in the high tech space and understanding that more so than perhaps some of the people we recruited 10 to 20 years ago. We need to make sure that we are building, we don't have a particular profile in that they need to have a particular degree or an educational background, but we need people who are able to work as HUMINT officers, human intelligence officers, people who are able to build rapport and understand how to collect intelligence from a variety of sources. We need people who are very good at understanding open-source intelligence and how to use that for our purposes. And we need more and more technologists who are able to help with our operational work, but also our analytical work, given that we are now working in big data space and bulk data space.

Rory Medcalf

And just to sort of wrap the ribbon around that, the work's not only Canberra-based, and I think you have a national geographic.

Heather Cook

We do. We have offices in every capital territory and we have several overseas postings in key places where our work converges and where we need that. It is a very eclectic workforce. We need people with language skills. We need people with those technical skills. We need financial, forensic financial analysts. We need people who understand digital currencies and crypto. So it's a very different and eclectic mix of people we need. And I would just encourage anybody who's interested in a career in criminal intelligence to simply keep an eye out for our recruitment campaigns and by all means apply. Because I think traditionally it was thought that you needed to be a law enforcement officer to work in this space. And while we love our law enforcement officers, and they are highly capable, we now need a much broader mix of skill sets and backgrounds to ensure that we're successful going forward.

Rory Medcalf

So I think for many of our listeners, your country needs you, especially dealing with a set of threats that are not only costing the Australian economy $82 billion a year or more, but also pose such serious threats to daily life, to society, to the safety of individuals, and really to the integrity of our nation. So look, I'll wrap up the conversation there. And I just want to say, Heather, thank you very much for your leadership, for your service, for what you do for Australia. Thanks for joining us on the National Security Podcast. Heather Cook, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Heather Cook

Thank you, Rory.

Heather Cook

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Rory Medcalf

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Rory Medcalf, Head of College here at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. This week, I'm joined by the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Heather Cook, to discuss the work of the Commission and how transnational crime and the digital environment is altering and affecting Australia's national interests, Australia's national security, and indeed more broadly about the work of the Commission and the threat and the risks of transnational crime and serious crime to Australians. Heather, it's great to have you here in the studio because of course you are a longstanding friend of the National Security College.

Heather Cook

Thank you, Rory. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rory Medcalf

Now you wear a couple of hats here. You're both the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, but also the Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, and your career has spanned intelligence, policy, governance, leadership, not only across the national security community here in Australia, but also in the private sector. And indeed, I understand your career began elsewhere in the world. Maybe we can hear a little bit about that as we...as we go along, but I really wanted to thank you again because you've been, I think, a strong supporter of the work of the National Security College and we were particularly privileged recently to host your inaugural public address as the CEO of the commission in which you looked at the modern threat of serious and organised crime and released some major reports. So, I want to go back to those issues on the costs and the challenges facing Australia in this space.

But first, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more, really about yourself and your organisation and in particular, what is the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission? What does it do and what distinguishes it from other parts of the national security community?

Heather Cook

Yeah, thanks Rory. It is an interesting question because unlike some organisations who form part of our national intelligence community, I think the ACIC is probably somewhat less well understood. And I suspect that's a part and parcel because it has not been very forward leaning in terms of coming out and talking about what it does or what it focuses on.

Rory Medcalf

All our secret organisations are coming out of the shadows, it seems.

Heather Cook

Yeah, and I think there's a driver for that, a very important driver for that, and we can certainly get to that as well. But the ACIC has had an interesting history, has had a number of iterations dating back to 1984, where it was formed as the National Crime Authority, and then moving into the Australian Crime Commission.

Then it merged with an organisation called CrimTrack in 2016 and became the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. And so, it has had a number of iterations, which again is probably why it's perhaps a little less well understood. But as it stands today, the ACIC is a criminal intelligence agency, as the name would indicate. It has a range of capabilities that allow us to collect intelligence, analyse and assess intelligence, and of course produce advice to help inform law enforcement or other enforcement action, policy regulation, strengthening of legislation. Our focus is transnational and serious organised crime. So again, we're unique in that regard. We are the sole agency that is entirely focused on transnational and serious organised crime.

And we work with a variety of stakeholders and partners, mainly law enforcement, but more increasingly across our national intelligence community, and certainly with many areas of industry in the private sector, and lots of overseas partners as well. So, we're undergoing a fair amount of transition. There was a government review recently, and again, happy to talk about what the significance of that review means for the agency going forward.

Bottom line, is it is really going to position us to be a very strong partner in the fight against transnational and serious organised crime.

Rory Medcalf

Fantastic. A couple of questions spring out of that. One is the other hat you wear, the Australian Institute of Criminology. How do these two relate to one another?

Heather Cook

Yeah, it is a bit of an unusual construct. I think it's probably less by design and more by happenstance. The AIC, the Institute of Criminology, is a very small criminal research entity, but packs a very powerful punch. Its focus is criminal justice issues, and it is really the national authority on criminal justice research. It focuses on a range of high priority policy areas, many that overlap with the ACIC. It focuses on transnational serious organised crime. It does research into extremism. It does research into cybercrime and victimisation, as well as a lot of research into child exploitation, sexual violence, domestic violence, indigenous justice issues. So very broad remit for a small organisation but quite a bit of overlap with the focus of the ACIC as well.

Rory Medcalf

So, these are some pretty confronting issues and very, I think, close to concerns across the community as well as to Australia's national interests. Your own career that's led you to this, it will be useful to listeners to understand a little bit more about that because not only are these unusual organisations and I think particularly challenging roles, but they're not, if you like, everyday roles in the public service or the security or the law enforcement space. How did you get into this?

Heather Cook

You are always surrounded by individuals that are just passionate about giving back to the country, protecting them from threats and it's a very satisfying career. So, I did stick with it. I came to Australia in 1995. I worked with ASIO for close to 30 years, and culminating in being the Deputy Director General in charge of ASIO's intelligence mission from about 2015 to 2022.

Throughout that period, I also had opportunity to work with the prime minister and cabinet in defence, intelligence, and security as a senior policy advisor. And I did that through a very interesting period. It was the 9-11 attacks, an area of profound transformation in national security for many countries around the world, but the pace of legislative reform, policy reform, data sharing, information sharing at a global scale really transformed the national security space at that time. So was a fascinating area of policy. But I've stuck with it because I just feel passionate about the purpose and the mission. And I enjoy being part of the community here in Australia. We're big enough to have impact, but we're small enough to be agile and nimble and to build very collaborative, enduring relationships across those organisational boundaries.

Rory Medcalf

So, 30 years, or 31 years, I think by the time we release this recording in the Australian security community and I recall I think, getting to know you and your deputy director general role in ASIO as one of the few ASIO officers who could be sort of publicly named and identified and really is one of the I think, very articulate voices of the work that ASIO was doing and I think as ASIO has begun to increase its own profile in the new security environment it's great to see your career move on into this space.

But let's look now at the subject matter of the day, serious and organised crime and of course, there's a very strong transnational dimension to a lot of that. Now, there was a time where this wasn't considered part of the, if you like, the national security landscape for Australia, always a risk in its own right. But that's changed. And as you said, your work now is very integrated with the rest of the security community. So, what has changed in reality on the ground? What are the changes in the threat environment to the way that crime manifests to make it a national security issue?

Heather Cook

Yeah, you're absolutely right. It hasn't always been seen in that through that lens, but what has fundamentally changed in, I would say, increasingly over the past decade is just the scale and magnitude and sophistication of these criminal networks and the way that they operate.

The reports that you reference that we recently released really go to highlighting the fact that that increase in scale and magnitude is having a much broader impact on our society than previously. So, when we look at the nature of transnational and serious organised crime and its impacts now, these are highly sophisticated global networks. They embrace and exploit technology in a way that allows them to scale their business, increase their victimisation, circumvent enforcement and regulation in a way that they've never been able to before. Their reach is profound and they are collaborating with each other in a way that they've never done before as well, which again accelerates and enhances their success. And when we look at the impact, and this is really where we get to why this is now converging with other types of threat as a compounding impact on Australia's national security. It is weakening our resilience, it is attacking our border sovereignty and integrity by virtue of the ease with which it is moving its illicit commodities across our borders. It is impacting our economy in a profound way.

The reports that we have released recently quantify the cost of organised crime on Australia. And the figure is staggering, estimated to be $82.3 billion annually, costing the Australian economy, both in direct and indirect costs. It's eroding our tax base, it's eroding, it's impacting our communities in very profound ways. Again, the violence used to be historically more crook on crook bug on thought, so to speak, but it is now more brazen and impact broad daylight attacks on individuals, murders, firebombings. It's impacting our communities in broad daylight, impacting our businesses, impacting market fairness, increasing cost of living. Cost of living impacts of the cost of crime is quite significant because insurance is going up due to the violence.

It simply has a much more pervasive impact on our society. And I think anything that weakens our resilience in the current environment, where we have multifaceted threats that we're dealing with, becomes part and parcel of the national security threat that we need to address.

Rory Medcalf

This brings to mind a few other considerations about the national security dimensions of serious crime. One is of course the scale, as you've mentioned, of the cost to Australia. Think that $82 billion, I think in the space of a year, that is, well it's a lot more than the Australian defence budget I should note. The cost to the economy, the taxpayer, the opportunity cost to Australia's ability to be strong and resilient is clearly profound.

But the second thing is the role of international state actors, foreign countries, or foreign governments, or indeed of their intelligence services perhaps. What can you say about the linkage between state actors and transnational and serious organised crime in Australia?

Heather Cook

Definitely seeing a convergence of threats in that regard. And there have been some publicly disclosed recent examples of that. For instance, the Iranian government involvement in some of the anti-Semitic attacks in Australia, in Victoria in particular. We are seeing what we're calling crime as a service, where the criminal capabilities that these quite vast criminal syndicates bring to bear are very attractive to state actors who are seeking to remain at arm's length and use these criminal networks and their capability to carry out their dirty work basically. So, we're seeing a lot more of that. I mean, we've seen historically nation-state connections to a lot of the cybercrime, large-scale ransomware type attacks as a revenue raiser, but also as a disruptive impact. So, we are seeing far more that convergence of nation states finding the criminal capability that they can pay for, remain at arm's length, and direct in quite targeted ways is something that is certainly increasing in the environment. And this requires us to work much more closely as a national intelligence community and to make sure that we are identifying these connections using all of the capability that we can bring to mirror. But we can see this is likely to be a phenomenon that's going to increase rather than decrease.

Rory Medcalf

So, that all reinforces the place that you hold of the security community. But you've also mentioned the cyber dimension to all of this. We heard recently, I think it was in late 2025, from the new commissioner of the AFP, Chrissie Barrett, of the Federal Police, and of course, from the Director General of ASIO, Mike Burgess, as well, about Australia's vulnerabilities in the digital environment. What are you concerned mostly about in the digital dimension from a serious and organised crime perspective in terms of Australia's vulnerabilities and the threats.

Heather Cook

Yeah, it's certainly an area where we see massive adoption and exploitation by criminal networks. So, in the same way that we all benefit as members of society from advances in technology, every opportunity is also an opportunity for these criminal networks to adopt these new technologies and exploit them for criminal purposes. It is really one of the reasons that we can see these enterprises able to scale their operations to be able to operate remotely and online, which allows them to obscure their involvement or their activities. We're seeing the impact of fintech and digital currencies being exploited by criminal enterprises at a pace and scale that is really extraordinary. Makes it very difficult to follow the money, which is obviously a traditional way in which organisations investigate crime.

And they are just very agile and very wealthy and have the ability to invest in these technologies as well. And we're seeing increased sophistication whereby criminal enterprises are able to, we call them online ecosystems, build these quite contained online ecosystems that contain all of the capability and technology they need to launder their money, remittance and payment services, encrypted communications.

They're actually engaging technologists to build these ecosystems that allow them to hide in plain sight under a veil of legitimacy while containing their criminal enterprises in these online ecosystems. So, they're very sophisticated. It's definitely making them more capable and increasing their reach and more difficult to detect and disrupt.

Rory Medcalf

It sounds to me as if any individual nation, state, a middle power like Australia, despite all of our capabilities and attention, really cannot meet this challenge alone. Perhaps if you can share some thoughts on the international cooperation dimension, I guess, especially in the digital environment. How vital is that to Australia? Are there any examples you can give?

Heather Cook

Incredibly vital I mean, as with all the threats that we're facing at that global dimension, international partnerships have never been more important. And, you know, the degree to which we work and share with what we would call our traditional partners, we're obviously very familiar with the Five Eyes arrangements and that trusted relationship. A very good example, I always say I almost embody the Five Eyes in that I...

Rory Medcalf

one of them.

Heather Cook

You know, it demonstrates the trust between those countries and very enduring relationships. But obviously, certainly if we're looking at transnational and organised crime, we know that the source of drugs, the precursors are produced and disseminated from China, Mexico and Southeast Asia, or huge manufacturing hubs for the types of drugs that are coming through the Australian pipeline.

And these illicit commodities transit a full range of countries on their route to getting to Australia and through our borders, including through our near region and through our Pacific neighbour countries as well. You cannot operate in this space or tackle it without the close working relationships with all of those partners and everyone tackling this together. I think following the individuals, the kingpins, the members of these syndicates is one way to tackle it, but increasingly the way we work with our partners and the way that we work nationally is about finding the weaknesses in their business model, really tackling their business model, really making it much more difficult for them to avail themselves of the many enablers that need to exist for them to succeed, taking the profit out of their business and increasing the risk to their operations. We can't do that alone, with our domestic partners, but we need our international partners to be working on that with us as well.

Rory Medcalf

And it's not just, as you said, not just a traditional partner. So, countries that we may not have close security relationships in other ways, we will collaborate within this space.

Heather Cook

Absolutely.

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Rory Medcalf

There's also the roles and responsibilities of the rest of us. It occurs to me that the public has a vital role to play in strengthening their own I guess, hardening their own security and resilience in the online environment. So, do you have any reflections on that?

Heather Cook

I do because I mean the whole reason that we are out talking about these matters in a way that we haven't before, that our other partners in the national security community are speaking much more openly about what we're seeing and what we're observing. The purpose of that is to raise awareness and in raising awareness that empowers others to act in helping to counter these serious threats. There is much that the public can do. There is much that the private sector can do in hardening the environment, in making it more difficult for criminality to succeed or any of these threats to succeed. And I think the better armed they are with the information, with what bad looks like, with how criminality is conspiring to victimize them, it makes them more aware and more able to put up the defences, put up the necessary protections to make sure they don't fall victim to these sorts of insidious types of crimes.

Rory Medcalf

So in practical terms, what sort of things should we be aware of?

Heather Cook

There is much that people can do to make sure that they don't fall victim to that. The Australian Institute of Criminology does an annual survey of victimization of cybercrime and it's quite an interesting trend to watch. But there is much more information out there that allows people to, if they avail themselves of it, that allows them to better protect themselves so that they don't fall victim to that sort of crime.

I think if we look at other types of crime, mean, the issue of drug addiction is an insidious and very sad fact of Australian life. For whatever reason, Australians are huge consumers of illicit drugs, namely methamphetamine. And the byproduct of that is not only the harm it causes to those individuals, but to those around them. And drug addiction is and drug related crime is quite a significant thing. think the AIC in a recent survey established that 42 % of murders in the past year had a link to methamphetamine use. So it has a significant impact on society. In Australia alone. is very confronting. We need to tackle that as a society as well. We need to do more around prevention to reduce the demand for these sorts of drugs because reducing demand will reduce the success of these syndicates and will reduce the amount of crime that's associated with it as well. you know, we talk about these matters openly because the solution is not enforcement or intelligence agency work alone. They require whole of society approaches to tackle them. Everybody's defences have to be up and we have to make it a lot more difficult for these syndicates to succeed.

Rory Medcalf

So you're talking not only about if you like awareness but also self-awareness from the community. Let's move to the way in which your organization and the broader security community in Australia are responding to this changed threat environment, particularly again the digital dimension. Again to go to some slightly crude language, I think you referred to crooks before, so I'm going to refer to the good guys and the bad guys.

If those who wish to target Australian interests and people and values and the bad guys are leveraging technological advances in ways that really threaten our interests, how are you responding? How particularly is the ACIC developing its capability benefiting from digital transformation? To what extent are other agencies that you can speak about doing that?

And I guess just to really complicate the question, where do you see artificial intelligence in that space?

Heather Cook

This is about finding needles in the haystack. It's about being able to very quickly identify anomalous behaviour. that is not a human endeavour anymore. That is very much a technical endeavour. So all agencies working in intelligence and enforcement are becoming increasingly digital in terms of their capability, increasingly.

Using technologies to do the work that used to be done predominantly by human beings. Now, humans are still obviously critically important, but the scale of the issues require us to be quite adept at exploiting technology for our capability purposes as well. I think the trick, of course, is that we are bound by, it's not so much a trick, we have to be very conscious of how we're applying technology, particularly where our decisions have consequences on human beings. you reference AI. Of course, we're all using artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence to help in our work, in our big data work. But where our decisions have an impact or a consequence on a human being, we have to make sure that we can unpick the genesis of those decisions and really know what's behind them. So we're...increasingly embracing things like AI and technology, but we do it with caution and with guardrails, I guess is how I would put it. I think the challenge is that we have to look at our workforce, we have to look at our capabilities and be able to shift and be as agile as the criminals are. That's very difficult for governments to do or for government agencies to do. We've got rules, budgets, there's, you know, constraints. I think we do very well for this.

Rory Medcalf

rules.

Heather Cook

And we do have to be more clever about this and really be thinking about how do we get ahead of the crime or ahead of the curve. And technology is a big enabler of that. mean, increasingly, my business is about being offshore, online, and obviously upstream. Because we're an intelligence organization, we want to be in that predictive space. To be offshore, online, and upstream, that requires quite a different skillset and capability and technical tools than perhaps what we used 10, 20 years ago. So we're constantly looking at how do we actually upskill our people, how do we recruit to the profile and to the skillsets that we need, and how do we modernize our capability in a way that allows us to address the criminality head on and the way it's being delivered to us.

Rory Medcalf

That's a really perfect segue to the last question that I wanted to cover, which really is about people. It really is about your workforce. Now, the ACIC is a relatively small organization. I think you use the word agile, and we all want our organizations to be agile, but sometimes it helps, actually, if your scale is not so large. But of course, you're situated in a much larger system of... intelligence and law enforcement and security in this country. Can you say something about the people you have, the people you want, the people you need? Very happy to offer you a recruitment pitch here, Heather. And how is this going to change into the future?

Heather Cook

Yeah, it is a great question and it's something we're very focused on as an agency. government last year landed a significant and comprehensive review of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Commonwealth law enforcement arrangements. Out of that review came a very clear direction that the ACIC needs to shift from being what was predominantly a law enforcement focus with quite similar law enforcement capabilities to being a full-fledged criminal intelligence agency able to use all of our authorities and powers, including our covert collection capabilities and our coercive examination capabilities for intelligence purposes. That's a very different threshold to law enforcement purpose.

So this is going to be a very welcome change. But what that means is that we need to move our workforce from being law enforcement purpose focused to being criminal intelligence focused. It doesn't sound like a great leap, but it is a slightly different mindset. does go to that ability to work in that predictive preventative space as opposed to that evidence collection enforcement space. So we need to be making sure that we are building our recruitment programs around attracting people with all of those conceptual and analytical thinking skills.

We do need digital natives and individuals that are much more comfortable with working in the high tech space and understanding that more so than perhaps some of the people we recruited 10 to 20 years ago. We need to make sure that we are building, we don't have a particular profile in that they need to have a particular degree or an educational background, but we need people who are able to work as human officers, human intelligence officers, people who are able to build rapport and understand how to collect intelligence from a variety of sources. We need people who are very good at understanding open source intelligence and how to use that for our purposes. And we need more more technologists who are able to help with our operational work, but also our analytical work, given that we are now working in big data space and bulk data space.

Rory Medcalf

And just to of wrap the ribbon around that, the work's not only Canberra-based. I think you have a national geographic spread.

Heather Cook

We do. We have offices in every capital territory. And we have several overseas postings in key places where our work converges and where we need that. It is a very eclectic workforce. We need people with language skills. We need people with those technical skills. We need financial, forensic financial analysts. We need people who understand digital currencies and crypto. So it's a very different and eclectic mix of people we need. And I would just encourage anybody who's interested in a career in criminal intelligence to simply keep an eye out for our recruitment campaigns and by all means apply. Because I think traditionally it was thought that you needed to be a law enforcement officer to work in this space love our law enforcement officers and they are highly capable. We now need a much broader mix of skill sets and backgrounds to ensure that we're successful going forward.

Rory Medcalf

So I think for many of our listeners, your country needs you, especially dealing with a set of threats that are not only costing the Australian economy $82 billion a year or more, but also pose such serious threats to daily life, to society, to the safety of individuals and really to the integrity of our nation. So look, I'll wrap up the conversation there and I just want to say, Heather, thank you very much for your leadership, for your service, for what you do.

for Australia. Thanks for joining us on the National Security Podcast, Heather Cook, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Heather Cook

Thank you.

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