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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 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 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 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 in this space. Tell me how has that process been.
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 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 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. So we're hopeful that all of our hard work will pay off.
And what have some of those discussions been around. What are some of the themes over the last nearly a year.
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 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 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 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 looked at the community, We've looked at information sharing, and we're just about to reach this report which is about accountability.
How bad is the problem? Can you quantify it?
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 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. 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, they will tell you it's bad.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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. 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 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 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 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.
Look to us, where does the buck stop?
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 to make sure that they're doing the best job they can. So collectively, as a team, we can be fighting organized crime.
And what might that ministry look like and how might it operate?
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.
How about thirteen agencies involved in This is.
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.
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 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.
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.
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, 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 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, 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.
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.
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 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, 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 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.
Know well because it is a fight that we are essentially losing at the moment.
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, 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 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.
Have you had any response from the government this far.
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.
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 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 will have the solution and what we're looking for is government getting behind that.
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.
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 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.
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 crime separate.
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 of different portfolios. What we need now is someone bold.
Thanks for joining us, Steve, You're welcome.
Welcome.
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 in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.