Bonny Hills-based criminologist John Walker discusses his extensive career exploring the economic impacts of crime

The Charles Sturt University (CSU) adjunct professor and associate professor of the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security has toured the globe immersed in the statistics of money laundering and proceeds of crime.

Over the years he's worked for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, International Monetary Fund, Victorian Department of Justice, Australian Crime Commission, Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC).

Mr Walker has also been employed by Ministry of Home Affairs Singapore, Financial Intelligence Centre South Africa, Chinese People's Public Security University, Unicatt Milan and the universities of Melbourne, Wollongong and Utrecht.

The Bonny Hills resident began his career in local government research after migrating from England as one of the last 'ten pound poms' in 1973.

"I've had such a bloody lucky career by being so naive that I didn't know things couldn't be done, so I did them. People may have followed on since and done it better, but I happened to get there first," he laughed.

"Originally I was a number-cruncher involved in urban and regional planner for metropolitan planning in Melbourne. I became involved in looking at the impact of crime on population and housing prices, going directly to the cops to get information about crime.

"At the time I wrote a report for public exhibition and started to realise that as an economist by education, no one was looking at the economics of crime.

"The police didn't collect that sort of data because they were incident focused and the economists couldn't then get the data they needed."

Mr Walker began pushing for more information from victim impact surveys to help estimate the economics of crime.

He was promoted into urban regional planning in Canberra for the Federal Government in November 1975, later seizing the chance to join the Australian Institute of Criminology in 1978.

"Working on the cost of crime to the economy became a regular thing for me and in 1993 I'd been there for 15 years. When I decided to leave the phone started to ring with people asking if I would do some consultancy work," Mr Walker said.

"I would forecast trends in crime by using the demography, technology and portability in the area. It's not like clockwork but demography is something you can know for certain.

"I left the institute on the Tuesday, by Wednesday I was in New Zealand to forecast prison populations and while there I got a call from London about another consultancy job."

Adventure came calling again with a new job offer to investigate money laundering with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre in 1994.

"There were a few attempts at estimating money laundering and they previously went on the figures added up by banks of suspicious transactions. Unfortunately that measured how busy the banks are in reporting those transactions," he said.

"I didn't look around at nonsense theories and try to prove them, I just looked at the data and the aggregates. I used my own surveys to determine how much was being spent and how much hidden away to find what proportion would be laundered."

Word had spread of his efforts and one morning at 2am the phone rang with an offer to join the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as a project director in 1996.

They were interested in The Walker Gravity Model created for estimating the proceeds of crime and the extent and distribution of money laundering.

"This was for an international survey of firearm legislation but while I was there I talked about the money laundering model I'd created and lots of other things came from there," he said.

"There was an annual world drug report being commissioned and that was the first time anyone had attempted to estimate how much the global illicit drugs trade was worth and where that money was going.

"Surprise surprise, all the drugs are largely generated in desperately poor countries and all the money ended up in European, USA and the richer countries of the world.

"I don't think the average person has any idea about how much money is floating around. There's $36 billion per annum as the costs of serious and organised crime in Australia, according to Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission reports released in 2015.

"It's a game, the law enforcement wins for a year or two but eventually the bad guys will work it out and come up with a plan B. If they get out of drugs, then they go into people trafficking and you'll find that the only trend over time is that it changes."

Mr Walker said the future trends of crime in Australia would depend on technology and the age of the population.

"You might say that the ageing of the population could lead to increasing rates of elder-neglect and inheritance frauds," he said.

"The increasing spread of internet technology will continue to facilitate massive levels of organised crime and corruption, until countermeasures are implemented by those who control the world wide web."

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