Australia: Victoria's Premier calls for national strategy to tackle bikie gangs

An Australian lawmaker has called for a coherent national strategy to deal with 'bikie' gangs, which are believed to control nationwide drugs distribution networks.

A national anti-bikie gang taskforce has been operating since September however states including Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia have introduced their own anti-consorting and control laws to tackle the gangs, reports ABC.

Victoria's premier Daniel Andrews said that a joined-up national strategy was necessary.

"We need to have a much better national approach," he said.

"Many of these crime outfits, they don't respect state borders, they don't respect anything. The last thing we can do is have patchwork quilt, different arrangements in different states.

"A more consistent, national approach - that's how we'll fight crime and keep Victorians safe and keep Australia safe.

"I think that's common sense."

Australian police have launched a crackdown on bikie gangs, including the Rebels, Hells Angels and Bandidos, after a surge in gang-related crime in the last few years.

In Queensland, 1,165 people suspected of gang affiliation have been arrested on almost 3,000 drug related charges since June, the Courier Mail reports.

Australia's national anti-gangs squad said, in December 2014, that it had charged 360 people with 836 offences in its first year of operation, and seized assets including $1.6 million, gold jewellery and pill presses.

Superintendent Nigel Ryan, head of the unit, said that Australian biker gangs had recently extended their operations into southeast Asia.

"The areas of operation of bikies know no boundaries. They work interstate and increasingly internationally," Supt Ryan told the Herald Sun.

"The more we can work together with state police to combine our capabilities in the national and international sphere the better we are equipped to stem the flow of what bikies do both here and abroad."

He said that bikie gangs were setting aside traditional rivalries to co-operate and work with other international crime syndicates.