Tag: australia

Every Bad Idea Australia Ever Had About the Internet, Now in One Bill

A “safety net upstream” – that’s how Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells described the intent behind the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, introduced to the country’s Parliament on Thursday.

Wells was making the announcement hours before she was to address the National Press Club. The bill, which is 90 pages long, carries a civil penalty of up to 60,000 penalty units, or $109.2 million, for failing the duty.

In Parliament, Wells said, “It moves the safety net upstream to the people who design the product to stop the harm before it ever reaches an Australian.”

At the Press Club, she put it this way: setting “basic safety standards for the online services we use every day” will see the platforms regulated “just like we have in every other industry.”

Wells said that the goal is to “shift the burden from the shoulders of victims to the companies that are creating the environments where harms occur.”

She added: “To make this abundantly clear, we have removed the ministerial rule-making power to define new harms in the final bill.”

Instead, she said, “New harms can be added by parliament through legislative amendment.”

The takedown changes in Schedule 1 kick in the day after Royal Assent, while the duty of care itself comes into force 12 months later.

In September, the exposure draft gave the minister the power to add, by instrument, any material “that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.” That power is now gone.

The bill does not at any point ask platforms to balance their “duty of care” with the need to protect freedom of expression and privacy of users.

Section 26 sets the duty: a platform “must take appropriate action to ensure a safe online environment, including by taking effective measures to mitigate risks.”

Section 26A spells out what counts as “appropriate” and “effective.” The matters to be taken into account “include” how far the measures achieve “a safe online environment,” how much they reduce the risk of harmful material, “the impact on the security of the online service,” and “whether the action or measures are or would be proportionate to the level of risk.”

Section 26A(3) states: “The cost of the action or measures must not be taken into account.”

Nowhere in this is freedom of expression or privacy mentioned. The word “encryption” does not appear at all in the 90 pages, nor do the phrases “freedom of expression” or “free speech.”

In the UK Online Safety Act – which is no friend of free speech, either – there is at least a section (22) that imposes on platforms, when deciding on safety measures, “a duty to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law,” and a matching duty on privacy.

The Australian bill has no such provision.

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Government-Funded Group Helped Push Australia’s Digital Censorship Bill

Teach Us Consent, a group whose latest financial statements show it is nearly 90 percent funded by the Australian government, was one of those who supported the government’s Digital Duty of Care bill, and even stood beside Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as he presented it.

The bill, that the group lobbied for privately and publicly, is a censorship law. It will force platforms to police content more stringently, and gives a minister the power to add to the list of “harms” that they must protect against. The eSafety commissioner will be able to issue removal notices, and can even create “sock puppet” accounts to patrol the internet, and fine platforms up to A$109.2 million.

Teach Us Consent wrote to the Prime Minister’s office on March 30, 2026, in a “private letter” that was co-signed by Digital Rights Watch and Reset Australia, to ask for a meeting to discuss the bill. An adviser replied the next morning, and a meeting was set for April 9. On September 8, the group was by the Prime Minister’s side as he announced the censorship bill, calling it “an example of change from the bottom-up, my Government listening and acting.”

Teach Us Consent then announced that the government “heard our calls and committed to the #FixOurFeeds campaign.” And: “We did it.” But the group did not do it on its own: in the 2024/25 financial year, it had “total revenue of $2,738,561, representing a substantial increase of approximately 975% from the previous financial year’s total of $254,807.” Of that, $2,436,156 was “government funding” – 89 percent.

This is not money the group received to lobby – the government gave it for “Consent resources” aimed at people 16 and older. But the grant guidelines, released under freedom of information, shows that the Department of Social Services approved the content strategy.

The government also gave Teach Us Consent $4.4 million for a porn literacy campaign. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet grant was approved on March 6, 2026.

The bill’s exposure draft was released on September 8, and it reveals that the duty to protect against “harm” will be imposed on social media, games, apps, and AI chatbots.

The eSafety commissioner will have the power to issue removal notices to companies, and the minister will be able to add any material “that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.”

The eSafety Commissioner may assume a “false or fictitious identity” – a sock puppet – and “generate material using an online service (including by means of artificial intelligence).”

Those powers apply “despite anything to the contrary in any other law.” Penalties will reach A$109.2 million.

Opposition communications spokesperson Sarah Henderson said: “It provides the minister with unfettered powers to make any regulation into what she would describe as serious harm.” And: “The government could shut down any content or material that they deem to be harmful.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “It’s not about censorship. It’s about giving people control themselves over what they see.”

Network Affects called the feed-choice framing “a ruse,” finding the only explicit reference in the draft is “by providing control over the kind of content that is recommended for the user”: 

“Fourteen vague words in a Bill containing more than fourteen thousand.”

The group had a specific proposal for the legislation, the “Fix Our Feeds” campaign. The page for the campaign on the group’s website states that “it takes just 23 minutes for a social media account mimicking a 16-18 year old boy to be fed misogynistic content, regardless of the account’s viewing preferences.”

The claim was repeated by Minister Tanya Plibersek on ABC Insiders, and it is based on a study conducted by Dublin City University. But the study used only ten accounts, and no real teenagers were involved. Instead, the researcher “watched and liked the video” when shown problematic content.

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Sydney man becomes first jailed under Nazi salute laws

A Sydney man has been jailed for performing a Nazi salute and publishing offensive online posts under new mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Nathan Ballesty was arrested in December after the Australian Federal Police (AFP) launched an investigation into a post in which he called for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to be kidnapped.

After searching his home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, authorities found Nazi paraphernalia, including a uniform and a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and seized his electronic devices.

Among the content found on his devices were violent messages aimed at Mr Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, and a recording of a video call in which he performed a Nazi salute.

Ballesty pleaded guilty to performing a Nazi salute, as well as six counts of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend and one count of contravening a police order after he refused to provide investigators with his device passwords for weeks.

On Friday, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment — including a non-parole period of 18 months — backdated to January, when he was first remanded into custody.

The sentence includes a mandatory minimum of 12 months’ imprisonment for performing a Nazi salute, making Ballesty the first person to be sentenced under the laws introduced in February 2025.

He will be eligible for parole in May 2027.

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OpenAI Claims Rogue AI Agent Hacked Australian Government Site, Prime Minister Warns of ‘Legal Consequences’

An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government statistics website in June, in what is believed to be the first known incident of its kind anywhere in the world.

BBC News reports that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent “infiltrated” the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, a site holding “non-sensitive” data and statistics from Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. He raised the matter directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a “very frank discussion” in New York, telling reporters the company had taken “too long” to disclose the breach and warning there would be “legal consequences”.

OpenAI said it only discovered the incident in August, while reviewing “misaligned model activity” internally. On September 10, the company emailed a general inbox belonging to an Australian government agency. Five days later, Services Australia escalated the email to Australia’s cybersecurity center. A government minister was notified, and the prime minister was alerted soon after.

Speaking in New York, Albanese said he had conveyed “Australia’s extreme concern about this incident” to Altman. He described his “disappointment” over “the nature of the way” OpenAI disclosed the breach and the months it took to come forward. According to Albanese, Altman acknowledged there were “issues with protocols” within the company.

A forensic investigation led by Australia’s cybersecurity agency is now under way to determine whether other government systems were compromised, and whether police need to get involved. Albanese said there “will obviously be legal consequences” depending on what the probe finds. The breach itself involved “public and non-public files” on the Medicare portal. Three other government bodies may also have been affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health.

“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said. He added: “Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

OpenAI, in its own statement, said it had “identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.” The company said, “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”

Dr Hammond Pearce, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC the incident was significant precisely because it was the first of its kind. “I expect that these kinds of attacks will keep occurring,” he said.

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US Shipment Of F-35s Goes MIA In Shocking Detour To Hong Kong

Lawmakers and the Trump administration are investigating the odd disappearance of a U.S.-bound shipment of F-35 fighter jet components from Australia, which were originally meant to be repaired on U.S. soil, according to new reporting by Politico.

The report, published Friday and citing three anonymous sources, noted that an intermediary was transporting the equipment on behalf of American defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin through the Pacific Ocean before it was diverted to Hong Kong.

The three unnamed sources suggested that neither the Pentagon nor Lockheed Martin knows why the shipment ended up in Hong Kong.

The current whereabouts of the components remain unknown, triggering concerns over whether China may have gotten its hands on them.

China, which has tightened its control of Hong Kong in recent years, has long sought to gather intelligence on the F-35 program.

The missing components were part of the F-35 Lightning II, which Lockheed Martin describes on its website as the “most lethal, survivable, and connected fighter aircraft” for America and its allies.

Specifically, among the missing items is an F-35 canopy, a major part of the fighter jet that contains sensitive technology, according to Politico.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has called the F-35 the “most costly weapon system” in the U.S. military, and the Pentagon has already spent between $200 billion and $250 billion on the program, according to estimates.

The State Department and the Pentagon reportedly briefed lawmakers on the matter in June, the report added.

In a statement, the Pentagon office responsible for the F-35 jets said it was “aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components.”

The military office said an investigation is underway to retrieve the missing components and determine what happened.

Headline USA reached out to the office for further clarification but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Lockheed Martin, for its part, declined to provide information on the matter, citing security reasons, Politico noted.

“Our teams handle every shipment with the utmost diligence and safeguards to ensure the integrity of the F-35 program and the security of our allied partners,” the company said.

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Australia Wants to Remake the Internet in the Name of “Safety”

The Australian government has published its proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, a plan that it says will give people more control over their social media feeds, but which opponents fear is a way to introduce more online censorship.

The exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 was published on September 8 for consultation, and it is not yet law. The deadline for submissions is noon on September 22, and Communications Minister Anika Wells said the plan is to formally introduce the bill to Parliament in October.

We obtained a copy of the draft for you here.

In the words of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “This is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.”

And while the proposal is often referred to as My Feed, My Way, it is not about banning algorithms, but giving new and existing users a choice between feeds based on recommendations, and one that shows posts from accounts they follow.

But beneath this choice, there is a broader change to the Online Safety Act 2021 that would be introduced by the Digital Duty of Care bill, and that is to impose a duty on those behind online services to ensure a safe online environment as far as reasonably practicable.

This duty would apply to a wide range of services, including social media, messaging, games, hosting, search, app stores, internet providers, AI services enabling generated material to be shared through covered services, as well as certain equipment providers.

The minister in charge would be able to exempt services that are low-risk or minimally used. The proposal is designed to protect adults from what is described as seriously harmful material and conduct, while under-18s would have additional protection against harmful content and design features.

The list of harmful content and conduct that the draft seeks to protect adults from includes child sexual abuse, threats of violence, encouragement of self-harm, and support for listed terrorist organizations.

For children, the list includes pornography, encouragement of disordered eating, hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality, glorification of crime, dangerous stunts, abuse and bullying.

However, the minister would have the power to add more categories of harmful material or conduct by issuing a legislative instrument.

Wells must first seek and consider advice from eSafety, and the instrument can be disallowed by Parliament.

The draft bill also targets features that the government considers to have negative behavioral impacts, such as recommendation systems, endless feeds, and engagement-feedback tools, as well as time-limited content. Social media services would be required to stop these features for children under 16.

The proposal also includes a system of risk assessment that online services would have to conduct at least once a year, and keep for six years. These assessments would have to be provided to the eSafety commissioner on request.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has a history of censorship demands, would be in charge of enforcing the scheme, which would bring maximum company penalties of A$109.2 million.

The draft bill does contain some safeguards, such as the definition of reasonably practicable, which takes into account the risk, available measures, cost, and the potential for a measure to have a disproportionate effect on privacy.

The duty of care does not extend to lawful communications occurring in private solely between consenting adults, the draft bill states.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor on September 6 said he feared the proposal was “an attempt by the government to censor social media,” while One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said that Australia should be moving away from government censorship, not “building the Orwellian machinery for it.”

The Greens, on the other hand, have supported the idea of making sure users have a choice when it comes to feeds, but they want to make sure that users have to opt in to have their feeds curated by algorithms.

White House spokesman Kush Desai reacted by saying that President Trump “has unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector.”

Desai added that “the administration remains committed to raising these issues with our trading partners.”

Communications Minister Anika Wells sought to downplay the significance of the White House statement, telling News24 that the US was responding to broader questions that also included Australia’s tax arrangements, and not only the Digital Duty of Care proposal.

“We’re a sovereign nation, we have the right to defend Australian parents and kids and we’ll do that,” Wells said.

The government’s proposal has been portrayed as giving users a choice between personalized recommendation feeds and those that show posts from accounts they follow.

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Australia: Officials Ask Parliament to Restrict Social Media Clips of Public Hearing Evidence

Just when you thought Australia’s steamrolling toward censorship couldn’t get any worse, the heads of Australian government departments want new limits on how members of parliament share recordings of officials testifying at public parliamentary hearings.

A new attempt to this end was made last week by the Secretaries Board, made up of the heads of Australia’s government departments. The board is currently chaired by Steven Kennedy, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which advises the prime minister and coordinates policy across the government.

The proposal was contained in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards.

The board is unhappy that politicians are using excerpts of the footage from these hearings, often to criticize the officials, and sometimes to ridicule them, by editing the clips and adding captions to highlight certain parts of the testimony.

Comments left on social media under these posts are also a major concern for the board, as they can be “highly offensive” – and sometimes even defamatory.

As examples, the board cites personal attacks on officials’ physical appearance (especially if they are women), their integrity, as well as comparisons to “Nazis, pedophiles, and other criminal offenders.”

Some of the “highlights” of the comments mentioned in the submission include “despicable,” “filth,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “parasite,” “shill,” “criminal,” “fraud,” “clown,” and “lying corrupt grub.”

The board wants parliament to come up with “guidance” on how to use these recordings on social media, and lists several ways to do it, such as preventing “potentially harmful” use of committee evidence, and requiring that a link to the full hearing or transcript is provided whenever an extract of an official’s testimony is posted.

Another idea is to have MPs disable comments on social media when they post these clips, and make sure that the full, unedited version of the hearing, or the transcript, is made available instead of extracts.

Reporting on the submission described full hearings and transcripts as the preferred approach, with fallback restrictions on editing, captions and posts targeting individual officials.

The submission said that officials appearing at these public hearings “have not consented to a subsequent use of their image, or its use by parliamentarians and their political parties for party-political purposes.”

And the board also complained of “the increasing use of excerpts from committee proceedings on social media, particularly where material is presented without context and exposes officials to ridicule, hostility or abuse.”

The proposal was rejected by Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May, who said that bureaucrats should not be allowed to decide how parliamentarians do their job, and that the proposed restrictions would be an attempt to “take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny.”

“Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Hodgins-May said. “Restricting what parliamentarians can post from public proceedings is not the answer. This looks like an attempt to take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny. Frankly, if this scrutiny wasn’t having an impact, they wouldn’t be so worried about it.”

But the board’s proposal is not the first of its kind. In fact, the previous week, Celia Perkins, deputy secretary of Australia’s Department of Defence, made a similar request to a parliamentary hearing, asking that the committee prevent MPs from sharing video and audio of officials appearing at public hearings on social media.

Perkins said that public servants giving evidence “do not consent to the reposting of our evidence to social media sites or the reproduction of our likenesses for the purposes outside the framework of the parliament and the transparent public proceedings of this committee.”

However, the Senate committee rejected the request on the advice of the Senate clerk.

Professor Luke Beck from the Monash University Law School, who specializes in constitutional law, believes that the latest proposal may be unconstitutional because it would likely violate the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian Constitution by “directly and expressly” burdening political communication.

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49ers’ Dre Greenlaw Asks if Antarctica is a ‘Lie’ During Team’s Australia Trip

Trips to far-away lands can expand one’s horizons – literally and figuratively. The 49ers’ trip to Australia seems to have expanded linebacker Dre Greenlaw’s mind in an unexpected way.

On Tuesday morning, reporters asked Greenlaw whether he had any questions for Australians. His answer did not disappoint.

“Do you have any questions you’d want to ask Australians?” asked ESPN’s Nick Wagoner.

“I mean, how far are we from Antarctica? That’s what I got. We’re right on top of it, huh? Does it snow probably pretty bad here? So, Antarctica, is it a lie?”

Reporters confirmed the continent’s existence, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Greenlaw.

“Y’all been there before?” he asked.

After receiving this challenge, the reporter said he had never been to Antarctica, which sent Greenlaw right into his well-prepared trap.

“Never been there. So how do you know if it’s cold or not?”

Of course, the reporters could have asked Greenlaw why a player with such curiosities and a high bar for proof had not invested any of the $7.5 million he signed for this year in making the trip to the mysterious continent to see it for himself.

After Tuesday’s exchange, perhaps he will.

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Australian Social Media Ban Flops Badly, as Teens Are Returning to TikTok ‘En Masse’

Albanese’s tricks have misfired.

There’s perhaps no more pristine example of a Globalist leader than Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: the guy checks all the boxes.

He is obsessed with Net-zero and Paris-aligned climate targets, of course.

During the COVID crisis, we saw him angling to cede health-policy control to an unelected international body – and in fact, he seems to want to give up sovereignty altogether in favor of a ‘UN-centric multilateralism’.

Albanese has maintained a sustained high level of migration, and is big on ‘identity politics’.

And then, we come to his online-control ideas, which, of course, center around the nefarious ‘Digital-ID’, and have, as a first experiment, his ‘groundbreaking’ under-16 social-media ban.

We all understand Albanese’s online plans to be nothing but attempts at back-door surveillance, and a revival of the rejected and dropped ‘misinformation laws’.

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200,000 Fake AI ‘Victims’ Deployed To Scam-Bait Online Fraudsters

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

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