The situation is dire, but there is hope. 

It sounds like something Gandalf would have said to Frodo as they left the shire to confront the dark forces of Mordor, and in some ways the challenges facing New Zealand in the sphere of serious organised crime are equally daunting.

Grim warnings like the above, coupled with hopeful solutions, are embedded in the final report of the Ministerial Advisory Group on Transnational, Serious and Organised Crime (TSOC), released in October 2025. 

Even its title, “Lead Boldly, Act Decisively”, has the ring of an action hero slogan. 

The independent ministerial advisory group (MAG) makes no apologies for its dramatic tone as it urges the Government to act quickly to address the spread of organised crime, which it says is now the No 1 threat to New Zealand’s national security: “The international trends tell us that things can and will get a lot worse if we do not throw everything we have into the fight.”

The hard-hitting report was presented to Cabinet at the end of 2025 and has approval to assess the costs and resourcing for its wide-ranging and, in some cases, potentially controversial recommendations around information sharing and accountability. 

Casey Costello says she came up with the idea of the advisory group in 2024 as a result of her portfolio responsibilities. “I had delegation for organised crime under my Associate Police Minister portfolio, but also Customs and Refugees…  I could see that we were working in silos and that we could do better.”

She could also see the obvious – existing strategies to combat organised crime are not working. 

The MAG was launched with a line-up of big hitters (see sidebar), including Police representation. 

New portfolio proposed

The tone of the MAG’s final report is that it is already past time to grab the horns of the bureaucratic bull that is inter-governmental oversight.

Key proposals include the appointment of a minister of transnational, serious and organised crime, instead of the current spread of responsibility over 13 ministries and portfolios, and an inter-agency executive board. 

One portfolio is envisaged with a horizontal view across a whole-of-government response, including enforcement, economic regulation and social sector agencies. 

It’s an idea backed by Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, who heads Police’s National Organised Crime Group. “We don’t have time to muck around coming up with a solution,” he says in the report. “One minister who is accountable, supported by a team, that’s our best chance in our fight against organised crime.”

MAG chairman Steve Symon says Police has been one of the biggest supporters of the group’s work, “because they recognised from the start that we were identifying gaps that needed to be filled”, and crucially, the group was not criticising Police work. 

What’s tended to happen in the past, he says, is that problems were identified and several agencies began work on them, but the bulk of the work inevitably ended up being done by Police. “We want to assure Police that is not what is happening here.” 

Last year, Steve told Police News that the focus of the group’s work would be “kicking down doors and coming up with robust answers” to the challenges that are well known to Police – illicit drug importation and manufacture, cyber fraud, migrant exploitation, black-market tobacco, gangs, corruption and insider threats.

Systemic failures

The MAG has now ramped up the alarm bells. It warns that New Zealand is at the precipice of even greater threats from criminal activity. The country is losing the fight, not from a lack of effort, but because of systemic failures:

• siloed agencies, with unaligned priorities
• lack of accountability, such as no-one being responsible for system-wide performance
• fragmented information sharing and outdated privacy practices
• insufficient prevention focus – New Zealand is trying to “arrest its way out” of the problem
• weak financial disruption tools, despite organised crime being profit-driven
• regulatory and enforcement systems not aligned with the speed of technological change (AI, encrypted communications, cybercrime).

A significant barrier to the fightback, identified by the advisory group, is the lack of information sharing between agencies, public and private, because of a risk-averse culture that prevents proactive distribution of critical information. 

“It is time for a mature conversation about our privacy settings as an enabler, rather than a barrier,” the report says. A shift was needed from a “culture of need to know, to a culture of need to share”.

It’s a potentially radical idea but it’s based on research around gaps in the system. 

Casey Costello plans to report back to Cabinet this month on the implementation and costs of the report’s recommendations, including accessing Proceeds of Crime funds. 

Funding a new portfolio might be a big call in a tight fiscal environment, but it links directly to one of the Government’s core platforms – law and order. It is also not without precedent to respond in this way to a serious and significant issue, the minister says. An inter-agency border executive board was set up during the Covid pandemic to manage border controls over that period. 

The advisory group has challenged other norms that inform existing organised crime strategies, which it says are patently not working, including the idea that such crime is primarily a law enforcement issue. 

Agencies such as the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) could also support the response to crime with its responsibilities for immigration, the Companies Office and the Labour Inspectorate. Similarly, social agencies had a key role to play in a prevention-led approach.

NZ drops down corruption index

Meanwhile, as New Zealand’s standing as one of the least corrupt countries in the world slips for the fourth year in a row (Corruption Perceptions Index), the MAG also recommends establishing a central authority to manage system-wide corruption and insider threat risks. 

Apart from the refreshed TSOC strategy, the report’s “solution” proposes an executive board made up of members from Police, Customs, MBIE, MFAT and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to provide guidance, and a TSOC business unit. 

A funding model draws on a baseline of dedicated funds for the board and business unit, a joint approach to Budget funding and a call for Proceeds of Crime resources to be invested into the TSOC system. 

The goal is not to restructure agencies, but to improve how they work together, and with urgency. The group has set out a comprehensive list of recommendations that can be viewed in the report on the NZ Customs website.

Steve says he is optimistic about the outcome. “The Government is interested in doing the most it can to fight organised crime and these recommendations provide them with a roadmap of how to do that.”

He’s also pleased that work is under way to consider making funding available in this year’s Budget. “It means that money can be set aside for these tasks and not be draining the already exhausted resources of, for example, Police.”