Industry Insider

  • Bill Would Ban Agencies From Automating Decisions

    Commonwealth agencies would be barred from automating any decision that requires judgement, under a bill now before the House of Representatives. They would also have to publish the rules, weightings and test results behind every high risk system.

  • Chatbots Cave Under Repeated False Claims

    Large language models will abandon a correct answer if a user repeats a false statement often enough. Some will flip back and forth on the same claim within a single conversation.

  • Device Maker Rebuilds Supply Chain After Breach

    A cybersecurity incident that stopped a global medical device manufacturer from making or shipping product has ended with operations fully restored. The one clinical workflow it degraded is working again.

  • Canberra Hands Industry Data Classification Scheme

    Australian organisations now have a common vocabulary for describing how sensitive their data is. The same scheme sets out what protection each category warrants, and how that expectation travels when data is shared.

  • AI Systems Are Showing Staff Data They Should Not See

    AI systems inside Australian and New Zealand organisations are surfacing sensitive information to people who are not cleared to see it. The problem is now the second most common category of AI security incident in the region according to a new report.

  • NAB (Un)joins Global Cyber Defence Call

    National Australia Bank has been removed from the signatory list of an OpenAI open letter on cyber defence, two days after it appeared as the only Australian organisation endorsing the document.

Information & Data Manager

Health Data stolen from National GP Network

Patient records including consultation notes, referral letters and pathology results have been stolen from general practices across five Australian states and territories, in a cyber attack on health services provider Partnered Health.

OpenAI Wins Back the Copilot Default - For Now

Microsoft 365 Copilot has switched from Anthropic’ s Claude to OpenAI's new GPT-5.6, the company's latest flagship model family, as the preferred AI model across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Copilot Chat and Cowork. The change comes two months after Microsoft made Anthropic's Claude the default model in several of the same applications, and marks the latest shift in an ongoing contest between the two AI labs for position inside Microsoft's productivity platform.

Ageing Systems Leave SA Agencies Exposed, Audit Finds

Almost half the ICT hardware devices operating across 10 South Australian government agencies qualify as legacy systems, the state's Auditor-General has found. Incomplete asset inventories and inconsistent risk reporting are leaving agencies with reduced visibility of the security risks these systems create.

Data Breach Notifications Hit Record Highs

Data breach notifications hit record highs on both sides of the Tasman in 2025, with regulators in Australia and New Zealand both pointing to cyber attacks and vendor security gaps as the common thread.

Directors Cannot Rely On Automation as a Legal Defence

Boards need to treat the deployment of agentic AI as a delegation decision rather than a technology purchase, according to a new white paper from the Governance Institute of Australia. Unlike generative AI, which produces outputs for human review, agentic AI systems act on those outputs directly, transacting with customers and executing multi-step workflows with limited human oversight.

Agencies Slow To Apply AI To Records Work

Eighty-seven per cent of Australian Government agencies now use artificial intelligence, but only 15 per cent apply it to information management activities and just 8 per cent use it to create metadata, according to the National Archives of Australia's latest Check-up survey.

AIHW Report Exposes Primary Care Data Blind Spot

Most healthcare encounters in Australia happen in general practice and other primary care settings. Yet this data has historically been excluded from comprehensive, nationally consistent collections, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's flagship Australia's Health 2026 report.

Little Progress on Service Victoria Fixes Five Years On

Victorian government departments have made limited, and in some cases no, progress fixing shortcomings in the state's digital services platform identified five years ago. They also gave the Auditor-General inaccurate reports about the status of their remediation work.

One in Five Firms Blind to Unsanctioned AI Agents

The share of organisations unable to tell whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools has nearly tripled in a year, rising from 6.3 per cent to 17.6 per cent. For AI agents the blind spot is larger still, with 21.1 per cent of organisations unable to account for unsanctioned agent activity.