Australian Magazine

Reece Kershaw’s journey from AFP recruit to Australia’s top cop was marked by major crime-fighting wins, global cybercrime operations and national security breakthroughs. Yet his leadership also faced intense scrutiny over the PwC scandal and the Dural “fake terror” caravan plot. His early resignation in 2025 leaves a legacy shaped by both landmark successes and lingering controversies.

Who is Reece Kershaw?

Reece P. Kershaw APM is an Australian police officer who was in charge of two of the country’s most controversial police departments. He was the Commissioner of the Northern Territory Police from 2014 to 2019. After that, he was the 8th Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) from October 2019 until he retired on October 3, 2025.

Reece Kershaw was born in 1967 or 1968 and started working for the AFP as a police officer in 1988. He worked in law enforcement for more than 37 years. When he left, he was one of the most well-known people in Australian law enforcement. He was praised for major crackdowns on organised crime and cybercrime, but he was also criticised for handling a “fake terror” caravan plot and for conflicts of interest.

The AFP officially said goodbye to him as a leader who had “37 years of distinguished service to the Australian community.” This made it sound like he was leaving after a long, hard career instead of being forced to leave.

The Early Years of Reece Kershaw in the AFP

In 1988, Reece Kershaw joined the AFP and began working for ACT Policing in the Woden district. He went from working on the front lines to doing specialised work in close personal protection, victim-based crime, high-tech crime operations, and serious and organised crime that crosses borders.

He also went abroad during those early years. Kershaw worked in The Hague, East Timor, and the Solomon Islands, and he was sent to work for the National Crime Authority and the Australian Crime Commission, which are the two agencies that deal with the most serious cases of organised crime and corruption.

When he was named AFP Commissioner, coworkers would later point out that he had a background that included both local community policing and high-stakes international operations.

The Northern Territory Years with Reece Kershaw

Reece Kershaw was the head of the AFP in Canberra for almost ten years before going back to the Northern Territory. He joined the NT Police Force in 2011. In April 2015, he was named Commissioner of Police and Chief Executive Officer of Northern Territory Police, Fire, and Emergency Services.

After the last commissioner, John McRoberts, left in a scandal and was later found guilty of obstructing justice, he got the top job in Darwin. People said that Kershaw’s arrival would be a chance for the force to start over after dealing with problems inside and outside the organisation.

In the Territory, he had to deal with a lot of different problems that come with policing in the north, like remote communities, high rates of family violence, alcohol-related harm, and a long-running debate about how police and Aboriginal Territorians get along. At the time, media profiles said he was pretty low-key but would stand up to his bosses if he thought the organization’s integrity was at risk.

Reece Kershaw is now the AFP Commissioner

In July 2019, the federal government said that Reece Kershaw would be the 8th Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, taking over from Andrew Colvin. On October 2, 2019, he officially took on the job.

His appointment came at a bad time. The AFP had just been heavily criticised for raids on journalists at the ABC and News Corp. These raids were done under national security laws, but many people saw them as an attack on press freedom. Commentators said that Kershaw would take over an organisation that was under pressure to be tough on the job and follow democratic rules.

Kershaw was also the Patron of Neighbourhood Watch Australasia while he was Commissioner. The organisation that works to keep communities safe later thanked him for being a “strong advocate for safer, more connected communities” and talked about the work he did to stop cybercrime and make homes safer while he was in charge.

Reece Kershaw, Cybercrime and the Medibank Hack

As AFP Commissioner, Reece Kershaw made cybercrime one of the most important issues of his time. That focus became clear in November 2022, when private health insurer Medibank had a major data breach that exposed the private medical information of millions of Australians.

Kershaw told reporters that AFP intelligence had found hackers with ties to Russia at a press conference. He told the criminals directly, “We know who you are,” and added that the AFP had “significant runs on the scoreboard” for bringing foreign suspects back to Australia to face justice.

During his time in charge, there were a number of high-profile cyber investigations, including the Medibank case. Under Kershaw, the AFP developed specialised skills, such as the Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre and operations aimed at global online fraud and ransomware groups. Official summaries of his career say that he started programmes like Operation Dolos, which gave back hundreds of millions of dollars to people who had been scammed online.

The Medibank response helped Kershaw become a public face of Australia’s fight against cybercrime. It was firm in tone, clear in messaging, and determined to show that law enforcement could still catch criminals who were using computers and crossing borders.

Reece Kershaw, Operation Ironside and the Fight Against Organised Crime

If cybercrime gave Reece Kershaw one pillar of his public profile, organised crime and drug trafficking provided another.

Operation Ironside was one of the most well-known AFP operations while he was in charge. It was a global sting that used an encrypted messaging platform called AN0M, which was secretly run by police. Hundreds of people thought to be involved in organised crime were arrested in Australia and other countries as a result of the operation. It was called a historic blow to transnational crime networks.

Career overviews that came out when he retired say that Kershaw put “disruption” of major crime groups at the centre of AFP strategy. Some of these groups were:

• Creating a Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team to find fugitives who are very important
• Using the Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce to stop more than a billion dollars in suspected criminal profits
• He also led the Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group, a collaborative effort involving police from Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.

The AFP’s story about his time as Commissioner was built around those accomplishments. They painted him as a leader who pushed for big, intelligence-driven operations that would hurt organised crime structures in the long term, not just make individual arrests.

Reece Kershaw, Child Protection and Community Policing

Reece Kershaw said that child protection and community safety were two of the AFP’s most important jobs, along with fighting organised crime.

He was a big supporter of the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE), a national centre that helps victims and coordinates investigations into online child abuse. According to official reports, the centre found more than a thousand child victims between 2019 and 2025. This shows how big the damage was.

Kershaw also backed programmes like the National DNA Programme for Unidentified and Missing Persons, which helped solve cold cases by identifying human remains and giving families answers they had been waiting for.

He was still visible at symbolic events like laying wreaths at the National Police Memorial in Canberra and promoting Neighbourhood Watch projects like “National Secure Your Home Day,” which were meant to make crime prevention feel more real.

Politics, pressure, and PwC on Reece Kershaw

Reece Kershaw’s time as AFP Commissioner was not without controversy, even though he did a lot of good things for the agency.

He appeared before a Senate committee in 2023 to talk about the PwC tax scandal, which is a long-running story about how the consulting firm PwC misused private government tax information. Parliamentary investigations showed that Kershaw had been texting Scott Fuller, a senior partner at PwC, in a friendly way while the company was trying to get AFP contracts.

When asked why he hadn’t formally declared the relationship as a possible conflict of interest, Kershaw said it was “strictly professional” and that the current governance processes were good enough.

People who didn’t like it saw it differently. Because of the PwC scandal, which a Senate report called a “calculated breach of trust” that involved the misuse of government secrets, any idea that the AFP Commissioner might be too close to the company was politically sensitive.

The AFP stopped signing new contracts with PwC while they looked into the matter internally. However, the extra scrutiny made it seem like Kershaw was working in a very charged political environment, where questions about independence and perception could be just as harmful as operational failures.

The Dural Caravan Hoax and Things to Ask Reece Kershaw

The most dramatic test of that environment came in early 2025 when a caravan full of explosives was found in the Sydney suburb of Dural. Early reports called it a possible terrorist plot that could kill a lot of people. This was especially scary because a list of synagogues was said to have been found with the car.

But just a few weeks later, AFP Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett told the public that the event was really a “fake terrorism plot” connected to organised crime. She said that the police thought criminals had set up the caravan to scare people and mess with the justice system, maybe to get a break in other cases.

The episode quickly became political. The government said that Peter Dutton, the leader of the opposition and a former home affairs minister, was making the threat seem worse than it was and using the event for political gain. There were a lot of questions about who knew what and when, especially since it came out that high-ranking police officers had suspected a hoax fairly early on.

The caravan story put even more pressure on Reece Kershaw. Barrett was the one who gave most of the public explanations, but commentators said that the AFP Commissioner was ultimately responsible for how the investigation was handled and communicated, especially since there was a growing concern about hate crimes and antisemitism.

Why Did Reece Kershaw Quit So Soon?

Reece Kershaw told the government in August 2025 that he would resign as AFP Commissioner, about 18 months before his contract was set to end in 2026.

Kershaw publicly talked about family when he made the decision. He said he wanted to spend more time with his grandchildren after a long career in law enforcement. Reports in the media, on the other hand, said that he resigned just a few months after the Dural hoax scandal and in the middle of other questions about PwC. Some people wondered if the political storms that had been building up had made it harder for him to keep his job.

When rumours first spread that he might have quit, the AFP first said in a statement that he had not “submitted his resignation.” The story changed within days: Kershaw said he would leave but denied that the move had anything to do with the fake terrorism plot.

On October 3, 2025, the AFP held a ceremony in Canberra to officially mark his retirement. They called his 37 years of service “distinguished service.”

How Reece Kershaw’s Legacy Will Look

To judge Reece Kershaw’s legacy, you have to weigh the big operational successes he had against the scandals that marred his last years in office.

On one side of the ledger are:

• Big efforts to fight organised crime, like Operation Ironside
• More cyber-crime tools and high-profile cases like the Medibank investigation
• Better coordination between national agencies on child exploitation, such as the ACCCE
• Work that took hundreds of millions of dollars from suspected criminals’ assets
• The Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group leads the world in law enforcement.

On the other hand, there are the problems that made people doubt their judgement and perception:

• Not saying that you were friends with a PwC partner while the company had big contracts and was at the centre of a national scandal
• The AFP’s handling of public messaging about the Dural caravan, such as going from talking about a possible “mass casualty” event to confirming it was a hoax
• Critics say that the AFP under Kershaw sometimes got too involved in political fights instead of staying above them.

Supporters say that every AFP commissioner has to deal with the difficult job of balancing politics and law enforcement, and that Kershaw made a big difference in the fight against organised crime and cyber threats. People who don’t like PwC and Dural say that these cases show how easily people can lose faith in the police when the country’s top cop is involved in the same scandals that the police are supposed to be looking into.

Reece Kershaw leaves behind a legacy that future commissioners will have to live up to. This is especially true in the areas of cybercrime and organised crime, where his strategies set a high bar.

What Will Happen to the AFP After Reece Kershaw?

When Reece Kershaw left, Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett, who was in charge of national security at the time, was named his successor. She was the first woman to lead the Australian Federal Police. On October 4, 2025, she officially took over.

Barrett’s rise means that things will stay the same and change. She was already a key part of AFP responses under Kershaw, leading briefings on the Medibank fallout and publicly calling the Dural caravan a “fake terrorism plot.” At the same time, she has promised to put more effort into fighting antisemitism, hate crimes, and threats to social cohesion. This shows that national security priorities are changing.

People will probably judge the AFP in the post-Kershaw era by how well it:

• Keeps up the pressure on networks of organised crime and cybercrime
• Restores or strengthens public trust after recent scandals
• Handles political scrutiny without getting involved in partisan fights

It demonstrates the transparent and open decision-making process regarding conflicts of interest and large-scale operations.

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