The new AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, would not be the first AFP Commissioner or statutory head to think that she can reinvent her job and its functions with the help of a savvy media unit.

Mere mortals would be terrified to doubt her mission – now projected as being a national security agency while being Australia’s first line of defence in keeping its children safe from sexual exploitation, violent extremism, nihilism, Nazism, and, believe it or not, sadism.

Hers is a formula for becoming Australia’s first and least accountable officer of the law. Not, apart from her ACT Police duties, very much responsible for fighting ordinary crime as we know it. Nor old-fashioned crime against the Commonwealth, such as defrauding the revenue, imposing on the taxpayer, or protecting federal politicians and civil servants and their buildings from assault, sabotage or malicious damage. These tend to be crimes of a sort one can measure or count, or where police performance, or the lack of it, is reflected in public satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

Over the past 25 years or so, however, the AFP has been creating new federal roles for itself. It can do this only by reducing a good deal of the unglamorous work it presently does, or with massive new subventions based on mere assertion of problems she will find impossible to fix.

“Because of the challenges and new threats before us, I have shifted the AFP’s mission statement to ‘Defend and protect Australia and Australia’s future from domestic and global security threats. This new posture requires [her words] the AFP to supercharge our global operations and emphasise that the AFP is a national security agency’.”

With ice-like determination, and with ever fewer controls than America’s ICE, she says that “the AFP will be unwavering in protecting Australia’s sovereignty”.

The old mission was to fight crime and win. But enforcing Commonwealth law now seems to take a distinctly second place in the new zeal. Traditional police roles are being de-emphasised compared with combatting hate crime and antisemitism, fighting terrorism, working against human trafficking and people-smuggling, and detecting espionage and acts of foreign interference, if not, based on the record of prosecutions, ones by agents of our allies.

Keeping Australians safe from crime, radicalisation, nihilism, sadism and satanism

No mission could be more important than keeping our children safe. Safe from sexual molestation and exploitation, and from being led into crime, radicalisation, nihilism, sadism or Satanism by others.

But sex-assault crimes against children are largely the responsibility of state police forces, who do not much appreciate the AFP’s empire building, grandstanding or the sort of assistance which sees state forces do the work and AFP officers claiming the glory. Strictly, the AFP is responsible for child-sexploitation matters with an international angle, such as the import of child porn – often the online trade and solicitation of images of appalling acts against children in places such as the Philippines, sex tourism by Australians or the exchange of images of abuse of Australian children.

But they have parleyed this function into promoting themselves as the clearing house for all information about child sexual exploitation and the headquarters of action against it. All very commendable, if in the face of evidence that most child sexual abuse occurs in or near the home (at the hands of close relatives, including minors, and neighbours) and within institutions, schools and sporting clubs, at the hands of teachers, coaches and, it now seems, childcare workers. The AFP and state forces seem to have very little interest in attacking such crime, and, on the evidence, very little expertise in knowing what to do about it.

The AFP expertise, assisted by the Australian Signals Directorate, is in intercepting online material exchanged by paedophiles, a task now being assisted by AI search methods, and modern intelligence systems including the pursuit of meta-data to find suppliers and associates of those they catch. Apparently, AI is now producing child-sex material equally revolting to real material.

The AFP claim to have a general remit to deal with child-sex matters may have been recently bolstered by the Commonwealth’s involvement in new measures to protect preschoolers and children in childcare from staff and each other.

But I do not expect that it will become too engaged, other than from a PR standpoint, preferring to have any involved Commonwealth agencies pass on their references, after some investigation, to local authorities. This is probably as it should be, given that the AFP has no expertise in interviewing childcare providers, staff or very young children.

Such dull routine could not possibly be as exciting as Commissioner Barrett’s new functions against online crime, including online material focused on children.

The AFP children’s crusade is made to sound urgent and essential, but is mostly a PR campaign

Dealing with financial scams, extortion rackets with online data, illegally accessing data, and online credit card fraud is apparently embraced in this new Taskforce Pompilid, but seems, from her speech at least, to be merely incidental to her crusade to make children “safe”. A good many of us would prefer the old task and doubt she will make much impact with the new one.

“We will protect victims, we will arrest offenders, we will expose facilitators, and we will remove anonymity that shields offenders from law enforcement," she promises. “Additionally clever AFP members, working with Microsoft, are developing a prototype AI tool that will interpret emojis and Gen Z and Alpha slang in encrypted communications [in, say, WhatsApp and Signal] and chat groups to identify sadistic online communication. This prototype aims to make it quicker for our teams to save children from harm much earlier.

“Together we must work together to protect our kids from a range of influences and influencers, including those radicalising our youth.”

She pointed to 48 youths aged 12-17 having been investigated by joint counterterrorism teams, with 25 charged with one or more terrorism offences. Four have been charged this year. More than half of the 48 seem to have been religiously motivated, 22% ideologically motivated, and 11% with mixed or unclear ideas.

“We are now recording a growing trend towards ideologically motivated, mixed or unclear motivation,” she said. That seems strange to me. She just said that 33% of 48 youths were thought to be ideologically motivated, or unclearly motivated. Averaged over five years, that seems to be 16 young people, or about three a year. Discovering four this year does not seem indicative of a “growing trend” to any statistically significant extent.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics, incidentally, records 1,837,476 Australians aged between 12 and 17. Having to sort through a haystack of 114,823 potentially ideologically motivated terrorism suspects for every youth-needle must be a daunting task, but whether it justifies Barrett’s extreme alarms and urgent-sounding zeal is another question altogether.

Anyone expressing scepticism must be in favour of child sex exploitation

Of course, anyone who manifests scepticism about noble efforts to curb child sex exploitation, terrorism or anti-radicalisation programs directed by police forces must cope with accusations of being in favour of paedophilia or terrorism or whatever. But I must bear that risk with all the fortitude I can muster given that the Commonwealth — indeed the nation — has many other public interest objectives and noble intentions, many even concerned with the safety and welfare of children. With some of these, those deciding the priorities of things must be judged by the results, not the nobility of intentions, or the fact that thesauruses are ransacked for emotive words for tales full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

A good many police tasks assigned by legislatures and ministers, rather than “suggested” by commissioners, produce results which may mean something. One can, for example, look at murder resolution rates, or the number of sexual assault cases or burglaries cleared up.

But my burglary reference might be an indication of why some police statistics should be viewed with suspicion. The AFP, like most police forces, no longer much bothers to attend scenes of housebreakings or thefts, preferring that victims report them online, at least if they mean to file an insurance claim. As a result, many people don’t bother and burglary statistics may indicate a declining burglary rate, even if it has in fact increased or stayed the same. On the other hand, if politicians, the media, or the police unions want to complain of a collapse of law and order, whether for political purposes or in support of more cops, they may promote greater reporting of crime, and statistics may rise, even if they have not changed. I have no idea whether crime has increased in Victoria at all, but I know a PR campaign when I see one.

The AFP is a force of limited jurisdiction, except in the ACT where it has the powers of a state force. Mostly, criminal law is a matter of state law, but the Commonwealth has laws to protect its own interests. Sometimes the AFP will act only if asked by a Commonwealth department, as with social security fraud, tax fraud, or most espionage cases, or cases where leaking of Commonwealth secrets is alleged. In matters such as drug offences, the AFP has a wide remit to investigate and charge over imports.

The AFP has long had ambitions to be some sort of Federal Bureau of Investigation, with elite investigators working to secure federal interests, including, in theory at least in these days of Donald Trump, the prevention of corruption, bribery and fraud against the state. The Commonwealth has tried to put reins on such ambitions, in part, because the force has never seemed to have reached the levels of professionalism or skills such tasks would require.

AFP Rambos in foreign jungles

However, they have indulged the AFP with some of its offshore ambitions. Thus, AFP officers participate, along with ASIS, the Navy and Border Force, in what are euphemistically called “disruption operations” against overseas asylum seekers wanting to arrive by boat. Harmless stuff, at least if a total veil is thrown over any discussion of what it is that they do. Likewise, AFP officers in various Southeast Asian capitals, liaise with overseas police forces in work against drugs, Australian sex tourism, illegal money transfer and scammers. They also help with natural disasters or terrorism. This is justified, as Barrett puts it, because she wants to “stop criminality in the country it originates in”.

Sometimes it is more eyebrow-raising. She mentioned that AFP-Colombian co-operation had seized more than eight tonnes of cocaine. This has, admittedly, had next to no impact on the availability of cocaine in Australia (the chief market for which is said to be in legal, financial and advertising circles) but has helped sustain the profits for those involved in importation.

But now “we will also protect those law enforcement agencies [in areas such as Colombia] for helping us’.

“The AFP in Colombia has expanded its operations to target narco-terrorist groups responsible for violent attacks on Colombian police and military personnel who are engaged in counter narcotic efforts.

“In one operation, the AFP helped authorities seize 295 military-grade grenades, 200 detonators, two firearms and ammunition – weapons typically used to target and kill Colombian law enforcement officers.”

I think we are meant to draw an impression that Australia is sponsoring Rambo-like activity of destroying crops, working under surveillance and sowing disruption and confusion among the Colombian drug lords. It might be more mundane. There are probably more guns in the average Queanbeyan street. I don’t know about grenades, but detonators are not hard to find either.

Barrett says she has set up Taskforce Thunder, [if we must have manly and virile sounding names, why not Lamington after the tallest mountain in our region?] a standing operation with Pacific countries, targeting cybercrime, drugs and human trafficking in our region.

“In the Pacific, there are 29 transnational crime units supported by the AFP… the network that provides central co-ordination of all transnational crime intelligence.”

Dang, that means another mega Mike Pezzullo-style intelligence agency inside Home Affairs, this time co-ordinating regional crime instead of people smuggling., That means jobs. I remember one head of a legitimate spy agency once complaining to me that all the extra millions granted to intelligence in one Morrison-era grandstand had been swallowed up by new liaison arrangements required for dealing with Home Affairs empires.

Commissioner Barrett, no doubt, means well. But we should not assume that her focus will probably do more good than harm. For one thing, no one will be able to judge. The AFP is already strongly FOI-resistant and will now seek even more layers of a national security blanket to prevent the public knowing anything of what they are doing. Some of it seems highly sinister, and in need of close and independent supervision.

One must also view with alarm her engaging “in the never-ending battle to protect our curious kids from, mis- and disinformation and the dangerous on-line echo chambers that offer few alternative views”. Neither she nor the AFP are well equipped by training or experience for this.

The very way she phrases this makes me wonder if she and the AFP will be throwing themselves with enthusiasm into the enforcement of laws supposed to prevent children from accessing social media before the age of 16. After all, surveys suggest that about a third of all parents will help their children get around any controls, the sort of universal criminality all police forces love.

No doubt that will explain why the AFP has such a low profile, and even lower success rate, in fighting the involvement of organised crime in the illegal tobacco industry, now more obvious in the public eye than the sale and use of illegal drugs. Commissioner Barrett identified one person, conveniently overseas as the Public Enemy number one in organised crime, and a national security threat because of alleged involvement in the bombing of a Jewish synagogue. But the very poor police performance in combating a newish crime, that is costing the federal revenue perhaps $20 billion a year, did not much seem to stir her indignation to any great extent. Or at least she doesn’t use purple prose.

Republished from The Canberra Times, 2 November 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.