Roles and Functions
The ACC has a range of statutory functions centred on intelligence collection and dissemination and criminal investigations. Among the ACC’s functions is recommending national criminal intelligence priorities (NCIPs) to the ACC Board and providing strategic intelligence relating to these priorities. The ACC Board determines NCIPs, provides strategic direction to and determines priorities for the ACC among other functions. The ACC works collaboratively with state and territory police forces and Commonwealth agencies from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Furthermore, the ACC has ongoing powers similar to a Royal Commission including extensive coercive powers. This includes the power to examine witnesses in a "star chamber", with the witnesses being compelled to answer questions of the Commission. These witnesses are served with a summons, which includes a prohibition of telling anyone about the summons. The punishment for telling anyone about the summons is contempt of court, with a penalty of 8-9 months imprisonment.
These powers have been the subject of challenges in the Federal Court of Australia and in the High Court. All of those challenges have failed.??
Read more about this topic: Australian Crime Commission
Famous quotes containing the words roles and, roles and/or functions:
“It was always the work that was the gyroscope in my life. I don’t know who could have lived with me. As an architect you’re absolutely devoured. A woman’s cast in a lot of roles and a man isn’t. I couldn’t be an architect and be a wife and mother.”
—Eleanore Kendall Pettersen (b. 1916)
“There is a striking dichotomy between the behavior of many women in their lives at work and in their lives as mothers. Many of the same women who are battling stereotypes on the job, who are up against unspoken assumptions about the roles of men and women, seem to accept—and in their acceptance seem to reinforce—these roles at home with both their sons and their daughters.”
—Ellen Lewis (20th century)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)