AUSTRAC muzzled in Peter Dutton’s ministry as Australia defies global money-laundering authorities

When federal parliament, under prime minister John Howard, handed the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) a suite of new powers in 2006, it had no idea it was unleashing a legislative nuclear weapon.

Parliament had certainly not anticipated theoretical trillion-dollar penalties against banks for compliance failures, which is where Westpac found itself after breaching a law, with $21 million penalties, on 23 million separate occasions, .

The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CTF) Act 2006  took a Chatswood-based financial intelligence unit and turbo-charged it by giving it regulatory oversight of 14,000 of Australia’s largest and most influential companies across the banking, finance…