Casey Costello: Associate Police Minister denies claims that new organised crime plan is a holiday headline

The Associate Police Minister's pushing back on claims her new organised crime plan is purely a holiday headline. 

The newly released Transnational, Serious and Organised Crime Strategy aims to make New Zealand the hardest place for criminals to do business.

Initiatives include options for setting up a new dedicated department, and developing cross-agency data sharing. 

Casey Costello says it's not a rehash of Labour's 2007 plan, which was within Police and petered out without results. 

She says this is a long term sustainable model. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
The government says the way to dismantle organize crime for
goods is through their supplier networks. Casey Costello has set
out her plan for taking gangs on head on with
a potential department or agency tasks with tackling transnational crime
top of a Christmas wish list. Casey is the Associate
Minister of Police and joins her nowccording to your Casey.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Castello, good morning, how are you good?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
So to fight organized crime, we need an organized response.
Is it not already?

Speaker 1 (00:45):
No?

Speaker 3 (00:45):
This is the challenge that we've got. We have great
people doing great things, working in silos and when we
established the Ministerial Advisory Growth in twenty twenty four, it
was to actually get experts to talk to all the
agencies understand what the challenges that we're facing and how
can we do this better. And this is the issue
with New Zealand. We should be the very best in

(01:07):
the world. We have a single border, a signal justice system,
we don't have state boundaries. We should be really good
at it. But our own silos within government agencies prevents
us from being as effective as we can.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
So what will the new department do that we can't
do right now?

Speaker 3 (01:25):
The main thing is around driving accountability. Each of the
agencies have competing priorities and limitations within the legislation, So
we need a cohesive, long term sustainable model where most
importantly there's direct accountability, and that is the part that
needs to be driven. We need to recognize organized crime

(01:47):
as a priority from our response and that there is
someone accountable for not delivering the outcomes. At the moment,
we have each agency doing their bits, but no clear
accountability as to whether we're making impacts.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
You say you want a new system for data sharing
between agencies, and this is a common problem in all
our public service and the cost of fixing up with
the IT system is often huge. So do you have
a budget for system rationalization now?

Speaker 3 (02:14):
I think this is a challenge and we've seen some
really effective systems developed through partnership with a private sector
around how do we use the brand n zinc to
use work with technical providers to deliver solution At the
moment we have the information, we have the systems. There
is some legislation requirement to understand how we can share

(02:37):
intelligence better across agencies. And the other thing is about
the legislation under the Privacy Act. We've kind of restricted
ourselves so much when we should be actually understanding what
can we share and how and what is the system
that we need to ensure that that information is protected
and made available to the agencies for enforcement.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
The Labor Police spokesperson Jenny Anderson says, this move is
very late in the play for this government and it
looks a lot like the program introduced by Labor in
two thousand and seven. So you know, she's almost alleging
that this is a headline in a holiday period.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
No, and this is the part. You know, we started
this work. Actually we started it almost immediately that we
came into government. You know, the reference that was made
was to off cans, which is completely different to this.
Off cans was within police. It didn't drive the amount
of priority and it literally petered out and delivered nothing

(03:33):
over that process because it didn't have those priorities. This
hasn't been done before ever. It's been talked about a lot.
This is a long term sustainable model and you know
we have you know, we've we've had budget increases for
customs to deliver more targeted approach to small goods. We've
got Border Security Bill, we've got an action plan around

(03:54):
MESS that's being delivered as part of this program. So
it's definitely not an announcement of announcement. It's actually groundbreaking
and that's why we established the Ministerial Advisory Group was
ensure that we got the right answers and we were
doing the right things where they needed to be done.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
So what's the next set and when will we see change?

Speaker 3 (04:12):
So the next step will actually the MESS action Plan
is all underway, there's a lot of work that's been
done in that place. The next step will really be
around what does this department or agency look like and
how fast can we establish it? And if you think
this is an unprecedented you know, we established this era's
forward Office back in the eighties in response to a

(04:32):
specific crime type. It's not unprecedented to do this. Recognize
where our greatest threat is and what we need to
do to respond to it. So that that will be
you know, I'm expecting some further advice as soon as
we go back to sitting again in late January February,
and then we'll proceed with that, but the other work
around its mation sharing, other legislation is already underway.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Do you want to put a time target on that.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
Well, I'd really like to have this system designed in
this term of government. Of course, there is a few
wheels that we've got to churn at this point. But
you know, this is an immediate threat to our our communities,
our businesses, our ability to trade, all of those components
are impacted by organized crime. And I think you know,
I want to drive this as being one of the

(05:18):
greatest priorities. We recognize it as a national security threat.
We need to drive it with Gusto.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Katie Cascillo, Associate Minister of Police. So a lot of
talking is still to happen and we still have no
target for action.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
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