Chris Minns’ new organised crime laws may sound tough, but evidence shows they may not be effective
- Written by: Weekend Times
The NSW government has announced another legislative crackdown on organised crime after the suspected mistaken-identity killings of 23-year-old student Marco Tapia and 40-year-old Joshua Macdonald.
It is the government’s third major
organised crime package in recent years.
The political spur is understandable. Multiple gangland shootings in 2026 have left Sydneysiders shaken, and 14 innocent people have died in Sydney since 2021.
But will tougher laws actually reduce violence?
Issues with the new laws
NSW Premier Chris Minns’ legislative package would introduce:
- new offences with potential life imprisonment
- interim Serious Crime Prevention Orders
- expanded youth offending provisions
- $15 million for expanded NSW police technology capabilities.
A key feature of the proposed laws is a new aggravated offence for conspiracy and attempted murder linked to gang violence, carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment – up from 25 years.
Minns declared:
If you conspire to arrange a gangland murder, you should face the prospect of spending the rest of your life behind bars.
This is classic deterrence logic: make the punishment severe so potential offenders think twice.
The problem is, most research shows increasing the severity of penalties has little or no deterrent effect.
A review by the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council of whether imprisonment actually deters noted:
the evidence from empirical studies of deterrence suggest that the threat of imprisonment generates a small general deterrent effect. Increasing the severity of penalties, by increasing the lengths of imprisonment, do not produce a corresponding increase in deterrence.
This is especially true for children. The young people being contracted by criminal networks to allegedly carry out firebombings and shootings – some reportedly as young as 14, sometimes paid only hundreds of dollars – are not making rational cost-benefit considerations of possible penalties.
As NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon acknowledged, these children are acting “for a very small amount of money without thinking about what the consequences are”.
If offenders are not thinking about consequences, longer sentences will not deter them.
The only well-evidenced deterrent effect relates to the perceived likelihood of being caught, not necessarily the severity of the sentence that follows.
What about the prevention orders?
The more defensible part of the legislative package is arguably the introduction of interim Serious Crime Prevention Orders. These allow police to impose restrictions on suspected organised crime figures, limiting their associations, movements and access to devices, before a full order is considered by the NSW Supreme Court.
The government argues these orders will disrupt criminal networks before violence escalates. This is a stronger argument than simple deterrence.
Disrupting communications and links between offshore kingpins and local operatives may effectively impede organised crime. But these measures also deserve scrutiny.
Australian control-order mechanisms have moved steadily from counterterrorism efforts to countering organised crime since they were introduced in 2005 following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
What began as extraordinary and temporary anti-terror measures have become normalised features of Australia’s criminal laws. Governments compete to be the toughest on crime, and these preventive powers expand even further.
For example, the federal government has recently expanded post-9/11 terrorism proscription powers to “prohibited hate groups” following the 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attacks.
The proposed new orders in NSW represent the latest expansion of these powers. They could now be extended to people suspected of involvement in serious crimes without convictions.
This raises legitimate concerns about the erosion of procedural fairness and people’s rights, especially when these new orders can be imposed on a person before a court orders it.
The laws may not help vulnerable young people
Finally, the expansion of indictable offences for children linked to organised crime is particularly problematic. The new laws would allow children to be tried in adult courts and face adult penalties for a wider range of conduct.
Criminal networks exploit vulnerable young people precisely because they are easy to groom and disposable. Prosecuting those children more harshly does not address the root cause: why and how they are being recruited.
Read more: What can Australia do about reports of child criminal exploitation?
The evidence consistently points toward a combination of approaches rather than tough laws alone.
Targeted intelligence-led policing (which the $15 million technology investment supports) has been documented as effective in disrupting crime. And programs aimed at diverting young people away from criminal recruitment address the pipeline that feeds the violence.
These deserve more emphasis than the headline-grabbing laws and penalties.
Sydney’s organised crime problem is real and serious. But the political tendency of announcing tougher laws after each tragedy doesn’t necessarily deliver results.
The Minns government needs to invest heavily in what works – not just what sounds tough.
Derick M. J. Luong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
