September 9, 2025 • 19 mins
The Government’s being urged to create a new ministerial portfolio to focus on organised crime.
It’s the “number one” threat to our national security, and as such, there should be a Government Minister put in charge of tackling it – That's according to a report from experts advising the coalition.
In recent years, there have been record busts at the border, as global crime syndicates – including Mexican cartels and outlaw bikie gangs – have targeted New Zealand as a small, but lucrative, market.
So, why are we losing the fight against drugs and organised crime? And what can be done to give us a better shot at tackling the issue?
Today on The Front Page, the advisory group’s chairman, and Meridith Connell criminal prosecutor Steve Symon is with us to discuss how New Zealand might appoint a Minister of Mafias.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Editor/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Jane Yee
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Kiota.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. The government's
being urged to create a new ministerial portfolio to focus
solely on organized crime. It's the number one threat to
(00:26):
our national security and as such there should be a
government minister put in charge of tackling it. And that's
according to a report from experts advising the Coalition. In
recent years there have been record busts at the border
as global crime syndicates, including Mexican cartels and outlaw biking
(00:46):
gangs have targeted New Zealand as a small but lucrative market.
So why are we losing the fight against drugs and
organized crime? And what can be done to give us
a better shot at tackling the issue. Today on the
Front Page, the Advisory Groups chairman and Meredith Connell Criminal
Prosecutor Steve Simon is with us to discuss how New
(01:10):
Zealand might appoint a minister of mafia's so Steve. This
Ministerial Advisory Group was appointed by Cabinet back in February
to give government advice about how to overhaul the ways
in which law enforcement and regulatory agencies can work together
(01:30):
in this space. Tell me how has that process been.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
It's been especially been quite an exciting process. I've been
a Crown prosecutor at Meredith Connell for twenty years and
so during that time I've done some very serious cases
for the police, and then I migrated to doing lots
of serious cases for different government departments, and during that
time I saw a lot of frustrations that they were
(01:56):
in the covet agencies of could we do more. So
it's actually been quite invigorating to be part of a
group that's just there to finances and I've got a
really good committee, really good crew. We have robust arguments
trying to get to the best outcome we can and
it's been really good so far. We are at this
(02:17):
precipice where we've been doing these monthly reports and we're
about to finish our final report for September and then
we'll be in the hands of the government to see
what they do with that. But we are hopeful because
the support we've had indicates that the government is interested
in being tough on crime, and particularly tough on organized crime.
(02:38):
So we're hopeful that all of our hard work will
pay off.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
And what have some of those discussions been around. What
are some of the themes over the last nearly a year.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, what we were asked to do was to say, look,
organized crime is a big issue, and it's a big
issue now already in New Zealand. But if we look
even across to Australia and see where they are at now,
that kind of the ghost of Christmas future for us.
We can see where it's going to go. And unfortunately
it's a pretty bad picture. Not through anything that New
(03:09):
Zealanders are doing. It's just we are an environment where
we've got a pretty good economy and we are prepared
to pay high prices for things like drugs. We are
vulnerable to things like fraud and so we're a risky market.
And so what we've tried to do is in these
monthly reports kind of break the subject up. And so
(03:30):
our first report was trying to identify how bad the
problem is and so that for you know, your listeners,
your watchers, they could see what we mean when we
say organized crime, not just guys riding around on motorbikes,
but large or international, almost corporatized organized crime. Our next
report in April looked at chasing the money, and so
(03:53):
I'm very grateful that one of our committee members is
Craig Hamilton, who is a former police officer who knows
everything you need to know about organized crime and relation
to money laundering and proceeds. He helped us with that,
and then in May we looked at We've looked at
the role of corruption that being a growing theme. We've
(04:13):
looked at the community, We've looked at information sharing, and
we're just about to reach this report which is about accountability.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
How bad is the problem? Can you quantify it?
Speaker 3 (04:26):
A very good question. No, we can't, and the reason
we can't is because part of our problem has been
although we've recognized organized crime as a problem for New
Zealand and we'll get worse, our difficulty has been we
don't really have metrics. Right. So, in the same way
I could tell you a by the health system by
(04:47):
how long it takes some to get through accident an emergency,
or how are my kids are doing at school based
on how they're grading is and how that meets against
national standards, we don't have the same kind of metrics
in relation to organized crime and what we see from
international experiences. We really need to have that. We currently
have our wastewater testing, which does not paint a good picture.
(05:09):
You know, we saw its spike last year and effectively
double yeah, and so and it's doubled and it hasn't reduced,
its flat lined, and so we're now it seems consuming
twice as much meth and feto men as we were
last year, which is incredibly troubling. So what we see
is we don't have enough metrics to know exactly how
bad the problem is, except when you talk to enforcement agencies,
(05:33):
they will tell you it's bad.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Well, police and customers a routinely intercept massive amounts of
drugs at the border. We're talking hundreds of kilos at
the border. And I spoke to Harold senior reporter Jared
Savage actually about this subject.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Fifteen nine years ago, you know, one kilo of myth
was a big deal, and I was a front page story,
and you know, like literally a front bach story. And
these days, you know, even the smallest of drug dealers
we have far more than a kilo in the back
of the car. We're talking imports of four or five, six,
seven hundred kilograms.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah, I'm showing my age, but I've been around as
a prosecutor since some of the first intercepted drug cases
and we were talking, you know, less than a kilogram
of methamphetamine, whereas now on the bus we're talking about
in the hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine. And Jared Savage,
to show his age, has also been around on those
(06:30):
same cases. It's interesting you look at his latest book
and it's interesting for me reading through it because it
reads more like a yearbook than it does work of fiction.
But what's troubling about that is these are all true cases.
This is what is going on in New Zealand's environment,
and we are seeing this real kind of narco's approach
to organized crime in New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
We as a government, we've done a lot of work
around public facing stuff that people see, the game patches,
the sentence saying but this is what's in behind driving
this prime trend that we need to get on top of.
And the first part is building at public awareness. It's
about a step change in the way we approach. We
(07:17):
have always operated in silos and our enforcement agencies we
work cooperatively at the ground level. We hadn't been very
good at a high level, allowing these leavers to be polls.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
So in the report, the latest one, you said, people
across a range of sectors, industries and roles are working
hard to play that part, but the system is not
optimizing their work in a way that it should tell
me a bit more about about that.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
As a starter, we should say we've got good people
in New Zealand. And it's one of the things you
see when you go over and see other countries, see
how they're struggling, and you come back and by and
large we've got really credible people, hard working, really passionate staff,
and our police force and all of our enforcement agencies.
(08:06):
I've worked with a number of those people over the years.
The difficulty that we've got is it's kind of it's siloed,
and so we'll have the police have got a huge
variety of work to look at, you know, from domestic
violence through to organized crime, through frauds, through a variety
of different sectors. So it's very hard for them to
target the organized crime piece alone, even more so when
(08:29):
they need to rely upon other agencies to help them.
A good example is perhaps mb MB is a large
government organization which has got multifaceted their core business objective
for the last few years has been to be the
easiest place in the world to do business, which is
great and we do want that because we want our
economy to thrive. At the same time, our transnational organized
(08:52):
crime strategy was to be the hardest place in the
world for organized crime to do business. So you can
see the tension for them in terms of how they
play their role in supporting police and customs and other
agencies to target organized crime. And so what we've said is, look,
we need to rather than have this split over a
variety of different ministers, we need this to be brought
(09:12):
under one organized crime minister. One minister is responsible both
to Cabinet for this response but also to the public.
So when your listeners, your watchers come and say, well,
who can we.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Look to us, where does the buck stop?
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Where does the buck stop? We have one minister to
answer that question and then supported so that that minister
can get answers and results from those different agencies. We
still want the police to police, we still want customs
to do their job, we still want mb to do
their job, and we can say the same with all
the agencies. We just need them to have some support
(09:49):
to make sure that they're doing the best job they can.
So collectively, as a team, we can be fighting organized crime.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And what might that ministry look like and how might
it operate?
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Well, the first thing we've said is we want any
We want the Minister to have responsibility for the organized
the transnational series organized crime plan, so they're in charge
of that.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
How about thirteen agencies involved in This is.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
About thirteen agencies and you can play a good pub
quiz game of trying to figure out exactly who they are.
And even amongst them, there's some that are split. You know.
For an example, an MB Immigration has a really important
role to play in terms of trying to address migrant exploitation.
At the same time they have the company's office which
can has been exploited sometimes for money laundering and the likes.
(10:37):
So even within the ministries there's split functions and so
you've got so many different people trying to respond to this.
We're just trying to say, let's align all those us
and put them in one place and the support that
minister with a small team that can help. We don't
want to recommend an agency, we don't want to recommend
a department. They're not trending anyway, but I don't want
(11:01):
to Our committee didn't want to recommend something that means
in a year's time there'll be an office with another
set of staff doing another set of things. We wanted
to see results straight away. So we've said there should
be a small elite team that helps that minister and
really helps energize the agencies to do their job as
best as they can.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
And I know that you've mentioned nor is it holding
to account those who are not meeting expectations. So who
are we talking about there and how do we hold
people to account.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
What we've seen is there are some agencies doing an
incredible job. Police Customs are doing an incredible job. Other
agencies are not doing as good a job. And so
our point is to say we should be in supporting
and encouraging the great work we've got. We should really
be putting our resources behind helping those initiatives, helping those
who are trying to do their best with organized crime. Similarly,
(11:54):
we need to say if people are not coming to
the party and doing as much as they can, we
need to look at that and say, are we best
put our resources there or shall we give it to
someone who will use it. But more fundamentally than that,
what we've heard from these agencies is the guys at
the front line are saying, it needs to be clear
what you want us to do. And so what we've
(12:14):
seid is when we have this organized Crime Minister and
have this secretary to support staff to help them, we
need to help the agencies with a work plan and
much the same you would have in a business, working
through what are our priorities, what are the things we
can do? And so we want to create a shopping
list for these agencies to say, what are all the
things you could do to help the fight against organized crime,
(12:37):
whether it's your agencies direct fight against crime or helping
another agency. How can we provide you a list so
you know what you've got to do and then when
we work through the course of a year, we can
see whether you've done it or not.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
And of course this problem hasn't just popped up overnight
or over the last couple of years. Hey, I saw
that there was an example given about the Organized and
Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand and that was set
up back in two thousand and eight, but that ended
up being a little bit of a failure.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
It started off well, it had some good people on
it had great intentions and was perhaps a symbol of
how even at that stage kind of when methanphetamine was
just really kicking off in New Zealand, we saw the
issue and we saw we needed to get on top
of it, but it kind of fell apart. It fell
(13:25):
apart through a lack of leadership, a lack of resources.
And what that illustrates. The lessons there for us are
one to say, look, we've had to go at it,
then it hasn't worked. What lessons can we learn from that? Now?
What we know is we have to have very strong leadership.
So whoever the minister is, if the government accepts our recommendation,
(13:46):
whoever the minister is, will need to be strong, will
need to be bold. The support team that they have
will need to be bold. And what we need to
do is have followed through. They will need to have
resources to help them achieve what they need to achieve,
and we need to have them be accountable themselves. We're
proposing things like this minister should stand in front of
(14:06):
the government instead of standing in front of Cabinet every
year with a report explaining where we're at in our
fight against organized crime. We've been doing these monthly reports.
We were coming out doing this talking to the public,
and we're saying we should have more of that. The
public is desperate to know what we are doing in
this fight against organized crime. We feel like they should.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Know well because it is a fight that we are
essentially losing at the moment.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
We are and that's not through lack of hard work
and great energy. It's just that the problem that is
coming to us from overseas is so significant. We're seeing
the scale of drug production overseas is overwhelming. Now. Whereas
we once saw small methamphetamine labs happening in New Zealand,
(14:54):
we're seeing large scale uber labs happening in South America
and in Asia, and those drugs are coming to New Zealand.
We're seeing fraud, not being some Nigerian prince calling you
to ask you for your bank account, but large scale
schemes where they're using AI to try and develop profiles
so they can trick you into providing details. So the
(15:16):
scale and complexity we're seeing now of organized crime is growing,
and New Zealand, like other countries around the world, is
falling victim to that, and so we're saying we really
needed to take the fight to organized crime.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Have you had any response from the government this far.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Are The response so far has been really positive. I
have to say Minister Costello, who is the Minister for
Customs Associate Minister for Police, she's a former police officer
and so when she was setting up our minister or
advisory group, she was very clear to us to be bold.
She was very clear to us that's not just rhetoric.
(15:53):
She has through her time during the police and then
her time as a private investigator scene how there's lots
of promises are made but not much follow through and
so for us, her point was you need to be
very clear and come up with bold initiatives and then
leave it for the government to push those through and
see if we can support those. I've had great meetings
(16:15):
with Minister Mitchell, I've had great meetings with Minister Goldsmith.
I'm working my way around a number of the other ministers.
They care and what has been really interesting for me
is to see the passion with which they want to
confront this problem. And what we're trying to do is
create an opportunity to say in our September paper we
(16:36):
will have the solution and what we're looking for is
government getting behind that.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Well, nothing gets more bold, I think than suggesting another
ministerial portfolio. Hey, what do you reckon? The chances are
by say this time next year, we will have a
mafia minister or something so to speak.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
I'm optimistic and I think we could do variations of that.
We could lose lesser degrees of that. You could take
one of the existing portfolios, like the Police, like the
Ministry of Justice and add on to those, but that
would be ignoring the problem we see, which is we
(17:16):
need one place to come to so we know who
is accountable for this. And don't get me wrong, that
will be a big task for that minister. There will
be big issues for them to face now and in
the future, and that's why it's going to have to
be someone who's pretty robust.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Do you see that responsibility lying upon someone like the
police minister, because I know that. You know, in cabinet
reshuffles past, oftentimes ministers do get multiple portfolios, sometimes ones
that interconnect with each other. How important is it to
keep the police minister and say a Minister for organized
(17:51):
crime separate.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I don't think that matters too much. As long as
the minister who takes hold of this portfolio is bold,
and as long as that minister understands the nature of
the organized crime problem and is aware of what's happening
overseas so they can see where it's trending as well,
and so that we can make sure that we resource
it properly. You will oftentimes see ministers hold a number
(18:15):
of different portfolios. What we need now is someone bold.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Thanks for joining us, Steve, You're welcome.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Welcome.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also
our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page
on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune
(18:48):
in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
Kiota.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. The government's
being urged to create a new ministerial portfolio to focus
solely on organized crime. It's the number one threat to
(00:26):
our national security and as such there should be a
government minister put in charge of tackling it. And that's
according to a report from experts advising the Coalition. In
recent years there have been record busts at the border
as global crime syndicates, including Mexican cartels and outlaw biking
(00:46):
gangs have targeted New Zealand as a small but lucrative market.
So why are we losing the fight against drugs and
organized crime? And what can be done to give us
a better shot at tackling the issue. Today on the
Front Page, the Advisory Groups chairman and Meredith Connell Criminal
Prosecutor Steve Simon is with us to discuss how New
(01:10):
Zealand might appoint a minister of mafia's so Steve. This
Ministerial Advisory Group was appointed by Cabinet back in February
to give government advice about how to overhaul the ways
in which law enforcement and regulatory agencies can work together
(01:30):
in this space. Tell me how has that process been.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
It's been especially been quite an exciting process. I've been
a Crown prosecutor at Meredith Connell for twenty years and
so during that time I've done some very serious cases
for the police, and then I migrated to doing lots
of serious cases for different government departments, and during that
time I saw a lot of frustrations that they were
(01:56):
in the covet agencies of could we do more. So
it's actually been quite invigorating to be part of a
group that's just there to finances and I've got a
really good committee, really good crew. We have robust arguments
trying to get to the best outcome we can and
it's been really good so far. We are at this
(02:17):
precipice where we've been doing these monthly reports and we're
about to finish our final report for September and then
we'll be in the hands of the government to see
what they do with that. But we are hopeful because
the support we've had indicates that the government is interested
in being tough on crime, and particularly tough on organized crime.
(02:38):
So we're hopeful that all of our hard work will
pay off.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
And what have some of those discussions been around. What
are some of the themes over the last nearly a year.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, what we were asked to do was to say, look,
organized crime is a big issue, and it's a big
issue now already in New Zealand. But if we look
even across to Australia and see where they are at now,
that kind of the ghost of Christmas future for us.
We can see where it's going to go. And unfortunately
it's a pretty bad picture. Not through anything that New
(03:09):
Zealanders are doing. It's just we are an environment where
we've got a pretty good economy and we are prepared
to pay high prices for things like drugs. We are
vulnerable to things like fraud and so we're a risky market.
And so what we've tried to do is in these
monthly reports kind of break the subject up. And so
(03:30):
our first report was trying to identify how bad the
problem is and so that for you know, your listeners,
your watchers, they could see what we mean when we
say organized crime, not just guys riding around on motorbikes,
but large or international, almost corporatized organized crime. Our next
report in April looked at chasing the money, and so
(03:53):
I'm very grateful that one of our committee members is
Craig Hamilton, who is a former police officer who knows
everything you need to know about organized crime and relation
to money laundering and proceeds. He helped us with that,
and then in May we looked at We've looked at
the role of corruption that being a growing theme. We've
(04:13):
looked at the community, We've looked at information sharing, and
we're just about to reach this report which is about accountability.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
How bad is the problem? Can you quantify it?
Speaker 3 (04:26):
A very good question. No, we can't, and the reason
we can't is because part of our problem has been
although we've recognized organized crime as a problem for New
Zealand and we'll get worse, our difficulty has been we
don't really have metrics. Right. So, in the same way
I could tell you a by the health system by
(04:47):
how long it takes some to get through accident an emergency,
or how are my kids are doing at school based
on how they're grading is and how that meets against
national standards, we don't have the same kind of metrics
in relation to organized crime and what we see from
international experiences. We really need to have that. We currently
have our wastewater testing, which does not paint a good picture.
(05:09):
You know, we saw its spike last year and effectively
double yeah, and so and it's doubled and it hasn't reduced,
its flat lined, and so we're now it seems consuming
twice as much meth and feto men as we were
last year, which is incredibly troubling. So what we see
is we don't have enough metrics to know exactly how
bad the problem is, except when you talk to enforcement agencies,
(05:33):
they will tell you it's bad.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Well, police and customers a routinely intercept massive amounts of
drugs at the border. We're talking hundreds of kilos at
the border. And I spoke to Harold senior reporter Jared
Savage actually about this subject.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Fifteen nine years ago, you know, one kilo of myth
was a big deal, and I was a front page story,
and you know, like literally a front bach story. And
these days, you know, even the smallest of drug dealers
we have far more than a kilo in the back
of the car. We're talking imports of four or five, six,
seven hundred kilograms.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah, I'm showing my age, but I've been around as
a prosecutor since some of the first intercepted drug cases
and we were talking, you know, less than a kilogram
of methamphetamine, whereas now on the bus we're talking about
in the hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine. And Jared Savage,
to show his age, has also been around on those
(06:30):
same cases. It's interesting you look at his latest book
and it's interesting for me reading through it because it
reads more like a yearbook than it does work of fiction.
But what's troubling about that is these are all true cases.
This is what is going on in New Zealand's environment,
and we are seeing this real kind of narco's approach
to organized crime in New Zealand.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
We as a government, we've done a lot of work
around public facing stuff that people see, the game patches,
the sentence saying but this is what's in behind driving
this prime trend that we need to get on top of.
And the first part is building at public awareness. It's
about a step change in the way we approach. We
(07:17):
have always operated in silos and our enforcement agencies we
work cooperatively at the ground level. We hadn't been very
good at a high level, allowing these leavers to be polls.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
So in the report, the latest one, you said, people
across a range of sectors, industries and roles are working
hard to play that part, but the system is not
optimizing their work in a way that it should tell
me a bit more about about that.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
As a starter, we should say we've got good people
in New Zealand. And it's one of the things you
see when you go over and see other countries, see
how they're struggling, and you come back and by and
large we've got really credible people, hard working, really passionate staff,
and our police force and all of our enforcement agencies.
(08:06):
I've worked with a number of those people over the years.
The difficulty that we've got is it's kind of it's siloed,
and so we'll have the police have got a huge
variety of work to look at, you know, from domestic
violence through to organized crime, through frauds, through a variety
of different sectors. So it's very hard for them to
target the organized crime piece alone, even more so when
(08:29):
they need to rely upon other agencies to help them.
A good example is perhaps mb MB is a large
government organization which has got multifaceted their core business objective
for the last few years has been to be the
easiest place in the world to do business, which is
great and we do want that because we want our
economy to thrive. At the same time, our transnational organized
(08:52):
crime strategy was to be the hardest place in the
world for organized crime to do business. So you can
see the tension for them in terms of how they
play their role in supporting police and customs and other
agencies to target organized crime. And so what we've said is, look,
we need to rather than have this split over a
variety of different ministers, we need this to be brought
(09:12):
under one organized crime minister. One minister is responsible both
to Cabinet for this response but also to the public.
So when your listeners, your watchers come and say, well,
who can we.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Look to us, where does the buck stop?
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Where does the buck stop? We have one minister to
answer that question and then supported so that that minister
can get answers and results from those different agencies. We
still want the police to police, we still want customs
to do their job, we still want mb to do
their job, and we can say the same with all
the agencies. We just need them to have some support
(09:49):
to make sure that they're doing the best job they can.
So collectively, as a team, we can be fighting organized crime.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
And what might that ministry look like and how might
it operate?
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Well, the first thing we've said is we want any
We want the Minister to have responsibility for the organized
the transnational series organized crime plan, so they're in charge
of that.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
How about thirteen agencies involved in This is.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
About thirteen agencies and you can play a good pub
quiz game of trying to figure out exactly who they are.
And even amongst them, there's some that are split. You know.
For an example, an MB Immigration has a really important
role to play in terms of trying to address migrant exploitation.
At the same time they have the company's office which
can has been exploited sometimes for money laundering and the likes.
(10:37):
So even within the ministries there's split functions and so
you've got so many different people trying to respond to this.
We're just trying to say, let's align all those us
and put them in one place and the support that
minister with a small team that can help. We don't
want to recommend an agency, we don't want to recommend
a department. They're not trending anyway, but I don't want
(11:01):
to Our committee didn't want to recommend something that means
in a year's time there'll be an office with another
set of staff doing another set of things. We wanted
to see results straight away. So we've said there should
be a small elite team that helps that minister and
really helps energize the agencies to do their job as
best as they can.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
And I know that you've mentioned nor is it holding
to account those who are not meeting expectations. So who
are we talking about there and how do we hold
people to account.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
What we've seen is there are some agencies doing an
incredible job. Police Customs are doing an incredible job. Other
agencies are not doing as good a job. And so
our point is to say we should be in supporting
and encouraging the great work we've got. We should really
be putting our resources behind helping those initiatives, helping those
who are trying to do their best with organized crime. Similarly,
(11:54):
we need to say if people are not coming to
the party and doing as much as they can, we
need to look at that and say, are we best
put our resources there or shall we give it to
someone who will use it. But more fundamentally than that,
what we've heard from these agencies is the guys at
the front line are saying, it needs to be clear
what you want us to do. And so what we've
(12:14):
seid is when we have this organized Crime Minister and
have this secretary to support staff to help them, we
need to help the agencies with a work plan and
much the same you would have in a business, working
through what are our priorities, what are the things we
can do? And so we want to create a shopping
list for these agencies to say, what are all the
things you could do to help the fight against organized crime,
(12:37):
whether it's your agencies direct fight against crime or helping
another agency. How can we provide you a list so
you know what you've got to do and then when
we work through the course of a year, we can
see whether you've done it or not.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
And of course this problem hasn't just popped up overnight
or over the last couple of years. Hey, I saw
that there was an example given about the Organized and
Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand and that was set
up back in two thousand and eight, but that ended
up being a little bit of a failure.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
It started off well, it had some good people on
it had great intentions and was perhaps a symbol of
how even at that stage kind of when methanphetamine was
just really kicking off in New Zealand, we saw the
issue and we saw we needed to get on top
of it, but it kind of fell apart. It fell
(13:25):
apart through a lack of leadership, a lack of resources.
And what that illustrates. The lessons there for us are
one to say, look, we've had to go at it,
then it hasn't worked. What lessons can we learn from that? Now?
What we know is we have to have very strong leadership.
So whoever the minister is, if the government accepts our recommendation,
(13:46):
whoever the minister is, will need to be strong, will
need to be bold. The support team that they have
will need to be bold. And what we need to
do is have followed through. They will need to have
resources to help them achieve what they need to achieve,
and we need to have them be accountable themselves. We're
proposing things like this minister should stand in front of
(14:06):
the government instead of standing in front of Cabinet every
year with a report explaining where we're at in our
fight against organized crime. We've been doing these monthly reports.
We were coming out doing this talking to the public,
and we're saying we should have more of that. The
public is desperate to know what we are doing in
this fight against organized crime. We feel like they should.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Know well because it is a fight that we are
essentially losing at the moment.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
We are and that's not through lack of hard work
and great energy. It's just that the problem that is
coming to us from overseas is so significant. We're seeing
the scale of drug production overseas is overwhelming. Now. Whereas
we once saw small methamphetamine labs happening in New Zealand,
(14:54):
we're seeing large scale uber labs happening in South America
and in Asia, and those drugs are coming to New Zealand.
We're seeing fraud, not being some Nigerian prince calling you
to ask you for your bank account, but large scale
schemes where they're using AI to try and develop profiles
so they can trick you into providing details. So the
(15:16):
scale and complexity we're seeing now of organized crime is growing,
and New Zealand, like other countries around the world, is
falling victim to that, and so we're saying we really
needed to take the fight to organized crime.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Have you had any response from the government this far.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Are The response so far has been really positive. I
have to say Minister Costello, who is the Minister for
Customs Associate Minister for Police, she's a former police officer
and so when she was setting up our minister or
advisory group, she was very clear to us to be bold.
She was very clear to us that's not just rhetoric.
(15:53):
She has through her time during the police and then
her time as a private investigator scene how there's lots
of promises are made but not much follow through and
so for us, her point was you need to be
very clear and come up with bold initiatives and then
leave it for the government to push those through and
see if we can support those. I've had great meetings
(16:15):
with Minister Mitchell, I've had great meetings with Minister Goldsmith.
I'm working my way around a number of the other ministers.
They care and what has been really interesting for me
is to see the passion with which they want to
confront this problem. And what we're trying to do is
create an opportunity to say in our September paper we
(16:36):
will have the solution and what we're looking for is
government getting behind that.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Well, nothing gets more bold, I think than suggesting another
ministerial portfolio. Hey, what do you reckon? The chances are
by say this time next year, we will have a
mafia minister or something so to speak.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
I'm optimistic and I think we could do variations of that.
We could lose lesser degrees of that. You could take
one of the existing portfolios, like the Police, like the
Ministry of Justice and add on to those, but that
would be ignoring the problem we see, which is we
(17:16):
need one place to come to so we know who
is accountable for this. And don't get me wrong, that
will be a big task for that minister. There will
be big issues for them to face now and in
the future, and that's why it's going to have to
be someone who's pretty robust.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Do you see that responsibility lying upon someone like the
police minister, because I know that. You know, in cabinet
reshuffles past, oftentimes ministers do get multiple portfolios, sometimes ones
that interconnect with each other. How important is it to
keep the police minister and say a Minister for organized
(17:51):
crime separate.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I don't think that matters too much. As long as
the minister who takes hold of this portfolio is bold,
and as long as that minister understands the nature of
the organized crime problem and is aware of what's happening
overseas so they can see where it's trending as well,
and so that we can make sure that we resource
it properly. You will oftentimes see ministers hold a number
(18:15):
of different portfolios. What we need now is someone bold.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Thanks for joining us, Steve, You're welcome.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Welcome.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also
our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page
on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune
(18:48):
in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
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