The fight against cross-border financial crime is shaping up to be a political battlefield in Australia, as the major parties prepare their policy platforms for this year's federal election. The election will be held against the backdrop of the financial services Royal Commission, a cooling property market and revelations that Chinese kleptocrats have washed billions in the proceeds of corruption through Australian real estate over the past decade.Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen has made it clear that financial regulation and anti-money laundering policy will feature heavily in Labor's 2019 election campaign. On Friday, Bowen gave Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence an insight into the financial crime platform that Labor will take to voters.Crucially, Bowen has committed to push ahead with the "tranche two" AML/CTF laws for real estate agents, lawyers and accountants if Labor wins the next election. A Shorten government would also reverse funding cuts to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to help tackle serious and cross-border financial crime.Australia's financial crime laws have become a pre-election policy minefield, following revelations about "dirty money" in the Project Dragon investigations on ABC's Four Corners and Regulatory Intelligence last week.Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen said the reports about Chinese money laundering and potential foreign interference were concerning. The investigations unearthed evidence of "bounty hunters" operating in Australia with orders to recoup illicit assets on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS)."According to the government's own work plan, real estate agents should already be covered by our money laundering laws," Bowen told Regulatory Intelligence.The incumbent government, meanwhile, has said it will begin to move on the issue as soon as the parliamentary timetable allows. Peter Dutton, the Home Affairs minister, has been sitting on transitional "Phase 1.5" legislation since late last year. The Coalition government said it could not set a firm timetable for laws enacting the second tranche of the AML regime, which has been a bipartisan federal policy since 2006.The Project Dragon investigations showed that Australia's failure to crack down on laundering through real estate agents, lawyers and accountants had attracted a tsunami of flight capital to the country's shores.China's unprecedented moves to engage bounty hunters reflect the scale of the problem, as well as Beijing's frustration. These private sector "civil recovery agents" are skirting dangerously close to Australia's new foreign interference laws, experts said.Neil Jeans of Initialism, a Melbourne based AML/CTF consultancy, described the civil recovery agents acting on behalf of China as unprecedented and "operating in a very grey area of what is legal and what is illegal in Australia."Bill Majcher, a civil recovery agent based in Hong Kong, said real estate agents, lawyers and accountants had become central to the major laundering activities in Australia. The former undercover agent for the Canadian Mounties said it was well known that illicit funds flowed to the path of least regulatory resistance.The Chinese MPS is concerned that tens of billions of dollars have poured into Australia from China over the past decade, as corrupt