Distance was never Australia’s defence against cocaine

For Australia, New Zealand, and their Pacific Island neighbours, the line is direct. It rises and falls with the choices of the country that makes most of the world’s cocaine. An Australia-Colombia drug sea lane must pass straight through Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand, all major transit hubs.

For Australia alone, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s latest wastewater analysis puts cocaine consumption at a record 7,985 kilograms in 2024–25, up from 6,835 the year before (Opens in new window). Australians pay more than $300 a gram, roughly three times the American price, and more than 20 times the Colombian. Yet the market has kept expanding regardless. In just the last four years, it has grown from $1.4 billion to $2.79 billion.

The stakes are larger than street prices. Latin American transnational serious and organised crime should not be read as a policing problem. It is a geopolitical one. Colombia’s narco-terrorists and the region’s syndicates sit at the intersection of crime, terror and, more worryingly, foreign interference. Australia has seen how that works. Canberra expelled Iran’s ambassador last year after ASIO concluded Tehran had directed arson attacks on Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne through local criminals. Hostile states do not need to build networks here. They rent the ones the drug economy paid for. And they do it precisely to destabilise Western democracies at their edges.

Read that way, de la Espriella’s promise is not distant news. It is upstream of what happens in the air and seaports of Sydney, and in the small Pacific Island towns where cocaine is arriving in increasing numbers. The choice Colombians made in June, and what El Tigre does from here, will set the volume of cocaine moving through Australia’s region until 2030.

Canberra should welcome the new government and work closely with it. It should bring something Colombia cannot supply on its own. Australia has deep standing across the Pacific. Colombia has none. Convening its island neighbours and Latin America’s producer states around the same table is the one contribution only Australia can make. The demand pulling this cocaine across the Pacific is partly our own.