Where this law came from · Episode 1
Every rule you will follow traces back to a body most people have never heard of. Not Australian. Not elected. And yet it shapes money-laundering law in over two hundred countries. Meet the FATF.
An inter-governmental body
The Financial Action Task Force. Born in 1989, it is a table where governments agree on how to fight dirty money. It writes standards — and its members turn those standards into their own national law.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 … The mandate of the FATF is to set standards and to promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering, terrorist financing and the financing of proliferation …
The Forty Recommendations
Its rulebook is famous in the trade — the Forty Recommendations. First drawn up in 1990 to chase drug money, and expanded ever since. They are not law themselves. But they become law, country by country.
That is the trick to understand. FATF cannot bind you. Australia can. So FATF sets the standard, and Parliament makes it real. Follow that thread, and Australia's law stops feeling arbitrary.
So when a rule seems to come from nowhere, it didn't. It came from a table of governments, agreeing to raise the floor — together. That is the FATF.