Australia news live: Government fined $140,000 after child’s hands caught fire at Questacon; unemployment at highest rate since pandemic
Department fined $140,000 after child’s hands caught fire at Questacon
The government department that overseas Questacon has been fined $140,000 for work health and safety failures after a child suffered serious burns from an exhibit at the science centre.
The Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) pleaded guilty in the ACT to a single charge, admitting it exposed visitors to a risk of death or serious injury. Comcare’s investigation into the matter found a nine-year-old child visiting the centre in 2022 had applied alcohol-based hand sanitiser provided by Questacon.
The child then touched a plasma globe in a gallery before their hands caught fire, causing second degree burns to their wrists, hands and fingers.
DISR admitted it had failed to comply with its safety duties under the Work Health and Safety Act and should have taken other measures to eliminate or minimise risk.
Colin Radford, the CEO of Comcare, said in a statement:
This was not an isolated event. The child’s injuries marked the sixth safety incident in five months involving the globes. …
Questacon’s response to these incidents was inadequate. It’s a large, interactive facility with inherent workplace health and safety risks that require a proactive approach and constant vigilance.
Key events
Petra Stock
Last-minute decision to protect endangered birds from SA space project
Conservation groups have welcomed an 11th-hour decision to protect “precious and important habitat” on South Australia’s Eyre peninsula from plans for a rocket launching facility.
The Whalers Way “orbital launch complex”, which could see as many as 42 rockets a year take off from conservation land, had already been approved under federal and state planning and environment laws.
But a recent decision by the state’s independent Native Vegetation Council could scuttle the space project, located about 32km from Port Lincoln.
The 23-hectare site is protected under a longstanding heritage agreement, a type of covenant on private land designed to protect native wildlife and habitat in perpetuity.
The chief executive of BirdLife Australia, Kate Millar, welcomed the council’s decision to protect “one of the most precious and important habitats in the state”, which was a stronghold for one of Australia’s tiniest birds, the endangered Eyre Peninsula southern emu-wren, and home to 80% of the endangered mallee whipbird population.
Read more here:
Wong pays tribute at UN to Australian aid worker killed in Gaza
Foreign minister Penny Wong has paid tribute to Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in Gaza in a 2024 drone strike, at the UN summit in New York.
Wong said:
Australia remembers the death of Zomi Frankcom and her six World Central Kitchen colleagues, killed by an IDF strike in 2024.
And we will not stop – I will not stop – pressing for transparency, accountability, and justice for the Frankcom family.
Friends, no humanitarian worker should ever be a target.
Nine’s TV and streaming exec departs amid company ‘restructure’
Nine’s managing director of streaming and broadcast, Amanda Laing, will depart the company after just two years following a “restructure”.
Nine’s chief executive officer, Matt Stanton, who will be overseeing the department in the interim, said her role would “not exist in its current form” amid a company restructure.
In a statement, Stanton said:
[The] industry is changing at pace and we are operating in an increasingly competitive market.
Amanda will sadly be departing the business.
Laing, who also worked at Nine from 2006 to 2017 before a stint as a senior executive at Foxtel, said:
I leave Nine with immense pride in the team I have had the privilege to lead and everything we have achieved together. I’ll forever be a champion of their work.
It comes after the departure of the Australian Financial Review’s editor-in-chief, James Chessell, to join independent media website Rampart.
Achol Arok
What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is software designed to perform digital tasks on behalf of humans with a high degree of independence. They’re built on different models, depending on their specific purpose or the task assigned by a human.
They’re often used for tasks such as writing code, conducting online research, generating reports based on that research or even booking a restaurant reservation.
They’re not the same as commonly used chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, because they take actions and make decisions rather than just responding to prompts.
Developers can include guardrails, such as strict access controls, in the instructions to reduce privacy and security risks. However, as we’ve seen this morning, some agents can bypass those safeguards by finding loopholes in their instructions or the systems they interact with.
Aria nominations are out – Genesis Owusu and Tame Impala up for top album
Nominations for this year’s Aria awards were released this morning, just under a month before the body’s 40th anniversary ceremony.
Genesis Owusu and Tame Impala lead the nominations with eight each, followed by Ecco Vandal with seven.
Music legends including Kylie Minogue, Paul Kelly, Keith Urban and Vika & Linda will also be celebrated, as will newcomers Way Dynamic, Wilsn and aleksiah.
Take a look at the full rundown of nominees here.
Achol Arok
NSW Greens call for audit of government website cybersecurity in wake of breach
The NSW Greens have called on the state government to immediately audit all government websites and datasets after an OpenAI agent was confirmed to have accessed state crime data agency.
Greens NSW industry spokesperson Abigail Boyd said the state is in need of an “urgent, forensic, and wide-ranging digital audit”.
Bocsar is not the only vulnerable source of potentially sensitive information, the NSW government hosts highly sensitive information through public-facing websites like the HealthStatsNSW website, as well as the Data.NSW website, which is an open data portal hosting 17,164 NSW public sector datasets.
The NSW government is extremely vulnerable to these attacks from malicious artificial intelligence products.
Boyd said the government could not rely on major technology companies to comply with Australian laws and safeguards.
We clearly cannot rely on these multinational big tech companies to comply with even the most minimal of social obligations such as notifying when, or even taking enough care to notice if, their products are hacking government systems.
We are told to believe that OpenAI only became aware of this egregious breach of Australian’s data in August, and then waited until well into September before sending a notification email to Services Australia in September. By all accounts, there has been no attempt by OpenAI to notify the NSW government of the potential breaches of our state systems and databases.
Department fined $140,000 after child’s hands caught fire at Questacon
The government department that overseas Questacon has been fined $140,000 for work health and safety failures after a child suffered serious burns from an exhibit at the science centre.
The Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) pleaded guilty in the ACT to a single charge, admitting it exposed visitors to a risk of death or serious injury. Comcare’s investigation into the matter found a nine-year-old child visiting the centre in 2022 had applied alcohol-based hand sanitiser provided by Questacon.
The child then touched a plasma globe in a gallery before their hands caught fire, causing second degree burns to their wrists, hands and fingers.
DISR admitted it had failed to comply with its safety duties under the Work Health and Safety Act and should have taken other measures to eliminate or minimise risk.
Colin Radford, the CEO of Comcare, said in a statement:
This was not an isolated event. The child’s injuries marked the sixth safety incident in five months involving the globes. …
Questacon’s response to these incidents was inadequate. It’s a large, interactive facility with inherent workplace health and safety risks that require a proactive approach and constant vigilance.
Luca Ittimani
Interest rate rise next week only a little less likely after jobless rise
Financial markets are pricing in a greater (but still small) chance the Reserve Bank might leave interest rates on hold after a surprise rise in unemployment.
As we reported earlier, an unexpectedly large number of people started looking for work, pushing up the jobless rate.
The Australian dollar has fallen from US70.36 cents to 70.22, as traders account for the lower chance of an interest rate rise here. Bond markets also dropped a little, predicting lower interest rates in future.
Sharemarkets are up, with the benchmark ASX200 up from 8,656 points to 8,691.3 points, still down from yesterday.
The RBA is still more likely to raise rates than not when its board meets next Tuesday, in part because the labour market is still very strong. Since the end of last year, Australia has added 110,000 full-time jobs and 66,700 more part-time jobs. The workforce now includes a record 14,836,000 people.
Surprise rise in unemployment to 4.6%
Luca Ittimani
The unemployment rate has unexpectedly risen to 4.6%, the highest since November 2021, August data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows.
The jobless rate rose both in seasonally adjusted and trend terms, from 4.5% in July.
The rise was mostly due to more people looking for jobs, with an extra 28,000 unemployed Australians in August. An extra 46,000 people took on part-time jobs but 6,000 full-time jobs disappeared.
Markets were expecting a much smaller change in the number of people employed and looking for work, predicting a steady 4.5% unemployment rate.
The higher jobless rate is unlikely to stop the Reserve Bank from raising interest rates next Tuesday. The RBA governor, Michele Bullock, said on Tuesday she thought the jobs market was still tight while unemployment was near 4.5%, adding:
I think between 4.5 and 5 will probably take enough heat out of the labour market that it’ll ease pressure on inflation.
Achol Arok
Marles says no individual medical data accessed by Open AI agent
Government services minister, Katy Gallagher, said the AI model accessed only publicly available, aggregated information from the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service Portal.
On the website that it accessed, the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service Portal is a standalone website. It’s public–facing, and it is not in any way related to Medicare in terms of claims, payments, and processing individual information.
It’s a completely different system, and the two shouldn’t be conflated. It’s a public website. It’s most often used by researchers and academics, who get that aggregated data about benefits statistics, prescribing statistics, to use in their own research.
Deputy prime minister Richard Marles said the incident was “very serious”, but its impact was “relatively minor”.
We are talking about aggregated medical statistics. No individual’s medical data was accessed here. The system itself has not been in any way compromised. The impact of this event is minor, but it is a very serious incident because, in an unintended way, an AI agent has entered into an Australian government website in a way which is unauthorised.
Minns says OpenAI agent infiltrated NSW crime data agency
Achol Arok
NSW premier Chris Minns says OpenAI agents may have also accessed information held by the state’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Bocsar).
Minns said he was first alerted to the incident after a call from the PM.
The prime minister called me late last night in Sydney, it was early morning in New York, and he told me about this breach and his real concerns as it relates to safety and security of information held by government agencies, particularly the circumstances relating to it.
Minns described the incident as “a big concern for us in New South Wales”.
We do believe there’s been access to a New South Wales government agency as well.
Not private information, not personal information, but a similar example of what is generalised information but was not released to the public, being accessed by an open AI agent.
Minns said an investigation into the incident and the government’s cyber-security vulnerabilities will be launched.
We need to and will examine its impact, both the technology and the vulnerabilities in our confidential information.
New South Wales will be working with commonwealth intelligence agencies to get to the bottom of it, firstly to identify how this happened and secondly to breach the gap so that it doesn’t happen again.
Marles says many ministers have known of hack ‘less than a week’
Marles is getting pressed on the timeline surrounding the breach and when Australians were told, saying many government ministers have only known about the hack for a “less than a week”.
Making this public has its own consequences. We needed to do it with a certain amount of information at hand.
The incident itself is obviously very serious. It’s very serious that we’ve got an AI agent having gained unauthorised access into an Australian website. Now, the moment that we felt that we were in a position to have that information at hand and to responsibly inform the Australian public, we have.
Marles ‘grateful’ to OpenAI for engaging after Medicare hack
Richard Marles, the acting prime minister, is speaking in Sydney about the OpenAI hack. He said the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet will institute a taskforce to look at the incident and examine Australia’s posture with respect to cyber threats.
“It will look at the security of government networks, it will look at the legal arrangements that we have in place in respect of an incident of this kind,” Marles said.
I want to say and acknowledge that OpenAI have been working with us very cooperatively here. They have clearly notified us of this and engagement with them has been critical to understanding what has occurred. We are grateful for that. That said, what has occurred here is obviously completely unacceptable.
All of this, I think, we can take as a warning in relation to the development of AI itself. It is so important that this technology, which represents such an enormous opportunity for humanity, is nevertheless being developed in a way where the guardrails, the safeguards, are well ahead of the capability itself.
The government services minister, Katy Gallagher, said she has requested a fast-tracking of funds earmarked in the federal budget to safeguard Services Australia and other government websites.
I’ve also asked whether the $160 million we had in the last budget to do a cyber uplift of Services Australia essential infrastructure, can or should be accelerated.
And also that legacy public–facing websites, I’ve asked that the information there be moved to data.gov.au, or put on alternative existing secure platforms, or they get decommissioned. This is a legacy system. It dates back decades.
‘We want big tech to take accountability,’ Wells says after Medicare hack
Anika Wells, the federal communications minister, just spoke in Brisbane. She was asked about OpenAI, and had this to say:
We want big tech to take accountability. We want an unregulated industry to implement some basic safety standards here on Australian shores, and that’s what I’ll be trying to do when I introduce the digital duty of care in October.
Wells said an investigation into the matter is ongoing, confirming the Australian Signals Directorate is still looking into whether there had been any criminal breaches here, and if so, if there should be repercussions.
Tom McIlroy
Greens call for US ambassador to be grilled over Medicare hack
The Greens have called the OpenAI incident “a serious attack on Australia’s sovereign interests”.
The acting Greens leader, Mehreen Faruqi, has called for the new US ambassador, David Brat, to be called in by the government over the incident revealed this morning.
“This breach by a foreign AI company on an Australian government database is deeply alarming and brings home the risks that these out of control tech corporations pose. The fact that the government did not even know it happened is disturbing,” she said.
These billion dollar corporations will not take taskforce investigations or statements seriously. They will respond to strength. Now is the time for the prime minister to fight for Australia’s interests and implement a moratorium on data centres in Australia until we have regulations protecting people and the country.
If hacking Medicare and taking two months to alert the government doesn’t push Labor to treat AI with the seriousness it deserves, what will?
Pocock says OpenAI hack ‘very concerning but ultimately unsurprising’
Independent senator David Pocock put out a statement this morning, saying the breach highlights “how slow the Australian Government has been to implement appropriate safeguards for AI in high risk settings”. He went on:
This begs the question about why the Albanese government shelved plans for a National AI Safety Act and why they are so slow to develop legislation to implement new standards.
We have these companies warning of existential threat and hacking critical government infrastructure and the Labor government’s response is “We’ll get to that next year”.
Pocock said there remained a “big question” as well about why “we aren’t holding these big tech companies liable for this kind of data breach”.
If it was an Australian who hacked the system they’d likely be heading for jail, yet there’s no accountability for AI companies developing this technology.
