The Friday Political Panel

0:00Now, it's time to talk politics. And our Friday political panel is assembled. Let's take a listen to the week that was in politics. Police have labelled four alleged domestic violence murders in one weekend as barbaric. Horrific scenes and across my career, I think I can remember a 48-hour period or a weekend like this. I'm very proud today to be launching Australia's campaign for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Australia's voice on the council matters so it can be a part of shaping some of these biggest issues which are facing the world. Whenever the price of oil hits US $100 a barrel will make sure we step in half the exercise to provide that sensible cost of living relief. So much of what is in the intergenerational report

1:02justifies and validates and I think we'll vindicate some of the difficult steps that we're taking. Cost of housing continuing to rise is direct correlation between that and of course family formation and part of the challenges the government and the Labour Party continues to prioritise superannuation over home ownership. Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve lives, to strengthen our economy and productivity and to massively advance science and medical breakthroughs but humans need to be in control of it. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a global scheme to control for the artificial intelligence. What we have seen is an unauthorised access into an Australian government website and that is completely unacceptable and we've made that clear to OpenAi. Some of the sounds of the week in federal politics

2:02while our Friday political panel is here, let me introduce the panel members to your poll. Carp is the Canberra Playbook editor for a political poll. Great to have you here, welcome. Thanks very much. Sarah Ison is senior political reporter at the Australian. Sarah, always good to have you here. Thanks for having me. And a very unsteffany boroughs is here as well. Steffi, welcome back. Hello again. I'll start with you. We'll do the week backwards in a way. This OpenAi intrusion into a Medicare data portal. What kind of legislative questions does this throw up? It seems like the laws that we have at the moment really don't cater yet for this kind of situation. Yeah, well, I think it shows we need two things. Firstly, better notification. I think everyone agrees that flinging in an email to a generic inbox at services Australia to be fished out and then work its way up to AST is not good enough. So expect to hear more from Albanese at the UN about that and in a bill before the end of the year.

3:04The other thing is what responsibility does the company have and how can you impose penalties that therefore deter it? And taking a look at what the criminal law says, it requires intention. It can be corporate responsibility, but you have to find a human that intends something at some point and that it doesn't seem that this answers that description. And I think the government's talked tough, but Richard Maul sort of gave the game away yesterday where he says, well, it was clearly unintentional that there aren't going to be criminal penalties, but you've already had ideas like David Schubert from the Greens arguing, you know, civil penalties finds for this sort of thing. So that's where the conversation's going. Sarah, there's been a lot of focus as well on the timeline here, both for open AI, notifying the government and the way in which it did, but also the government then escalating this and then making it public. Yeah, I mean, because the Prime Minister announced this in New York in a big press conference right after his AI framework

4:05was sort of undermined by Donald Trump, this really did add fuel to the fire of his argument that we need an AI framework. And so the convenience from the coalition's point of view of that definitely raised questions early on, but as we were stepped through the timeline as well of getting the notification on September 10 or 11, that's when services Australia did. That's a Friday, September 11, and then the Tuesday following is when they raised it with ASD. And then ASD took five more days. So there's also the questions around who acted there. Richard Miles was quick to say, we've responded less than a week. We wanted all the information first. So there's a lot of questions with both open AI and services Australia and the government. And I agree with Paul, it definitely was a generic email and that doesn't seem at all the way that you do things. Though the only thing I suppose to mention is the email was a disclosure's email that goes to vulnerabilities of the network. And so it has been raised for such an email

5:06that's intended to have vulnerabilities identified why there needs to be checked only once a day. Why doesn't it have more priority? Stephanie, the other question here is getting notification is one thing. Why didn't the Australian government's cyber protections pick this up in the first place? Look, the world of cyber is such a complicated area, right? And there are so many different elements that go into this. There are experts that are looking at cyber breaches on a daily basis, then you've got other elements like AI coming into it as well. This is a whole new space. We heard earlier today in the program about the AI safety group that was set up by this government, a little bit of funding there, maybe not enough. Governments, not just here in Australia, but around the world are trying to catch up to a technology that is, is streets ahead of everyone and everything. And it's incidents like this that are showing that there is need for more regulation and changes needed. But whether we can keep up with that change is a question that remains to be unanswered. Paul, this has all happened while the Prime Minister

6:08is at the UN General Assembly. There were other events going on, giving his speech, also the meeting with the Ukrainian leader, Vladimir Zelensky. How is all this crashed over the top of what the Prime Minister was hoping for in New York? Well, I think it marries quite well with his message as Sarah pointed out about needing more safeguards, but yeah, other things have been achieved on the trip. We have a new defence agreement with Ukraine. Obviously, Donald Trump is meeting his Chinese counterpart and they're having the same debate about the level of oversight of AI that Anthony Albanese is trying to steer a path for middle powers to say that we need more oversight of it. But yeah, I think he's done well. Got the selfie with Donald Trump. Obviously, he's very good at tickling his ego despite the US Embassy in Canberra, releasing a very salty statement criticizing

7:10the Albanese government's proposed digital duty of care. So yes, there's a few balls in the air. Sarah, we also almost channeling a bit of Mark Carney in Mr. Albanese's speech at the UN General Assembly. He said the Indo-Pacific is not a chessboard on which superpowers move the pieces. What kind of message is the PM sending there? Yeah, I mean, I think that goes very much to the middle power sort of point that Mark Carney was making as well in terms of the strength of middle powers and to be taken seriously. And that's, of course, what the prime minister's trying to do with the Pacific. But of course, China looms large in every international forum. And when we're talking about the Pacific, we so often talk about it in the sense of people trying to gain influence, in a competing of priorities and so on. And so in terms of these countries and these people being treated as a way to, from countries to muscle against each other, gain influence, get advantage. For the prime minister to drive home that it's more than that.

8:12And particularly as he and Labour is always trying to make itself the friend of the Pacific and the Pacific family, it's so important, particularly, head of COP, to really show how Australia is being that family member and really expressing all of that on the world stage. You're listening to Radio National Breakfast. I'm joined this morning by our Friday political panel, Paul Karp from Politico, Sarah Ison from the Australian and our own Stephanie Boros. Stephanie, the intergenerational report was released. One of its starkest findings is that there will be more deaths than births within 40 years. Both the Treasurer, Jim Charmers and the Nationals have ruled out doing anything major about it as in a Peter Costello baby bonus. What's been put forward is the solution. The government's arguing it's more about providing support once people have kids. So they're referring to the fact they're trying to make child care more affordable and provide more parental leave. So it's more about looking at the programs in place

9:13and the support mechanisms in place to let people have a look and say, do I want to kid or not? Oh, OK, yep, there's support once I have the kid there for, yes, I do. And these are ways that will bring the cost of having a kid down instead of just a lump sum at the get-go. I think the bigger debate in this at the moment now as well is the migration element because this shows to us that we do need migration. Migration is good for Australia. And while we're having this migration debate, then we've got the intergenerational report coming out kind of backing up the need for migrants longer term. And it's been interesting to see the government and the coalition sort of walk this fine line of saying, oh, we need migrants, but maybe we need to reduce the numbers a bit. But then when you look at these long term reports, you can't cut migrant numbers too much. So that's part of the mix of this when looking at how we, you know, go forward as a nation. And also the scary part is that a lot of us are going to be

10:13having to work much longer than, you know, maybe what our parents did. I don't like the sound of that. I do love work. But what's the value of these intergenerational reports? Is some value in looking beyond an election cycle? But we do see them drop and change quite a bit. Trying to predict how Australia will be in 40 years' time is pretty challenging. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, artificial intelligence wasn't in the last one three years ago. And, you know, Donald Trump back in the White House, I think, has also had an impact if you read the most recent one talking about, you know, retaliatory tariffs and how the world has changed. It really does seem like that trajectory is baked in. But the value of these reports is, you know, if no changes are made, where would we end up over the extreme long term to prompt conversations about what sort of, what we want Australia to look like in 40 years? And, yeah, in this case, the surprising finding

11:14that the population would be under 40 million, even in 40 years' time, lower birth rate. And, you know, I think that should prompt a conversation about the economic impact of deep-of-migration cuts and Jim Charmers, who has credited that by arguing that negative migration or zero migration over the long term would be diabolical, which is quite strong language when you're both trying to achieve the short-term cut to address people's anxiety to point out the long-term economic harm of that. How hard is it to look that far out, Sarah? Yeah, I mean, I think it was interesting that you could see Jim Charmers trying to both put this report down while also responding to a question about the sort of issues we're facing today by saying, oh, we can do both. We can look really far out, but we're not going to lose focus on the political cycle. It's all about elixious. Yeah, and I think it is so caveated with, should this happen and should that happen and so on? And a lot of Jim Charmers' speech also went to everything Labour is doing right now.

12:14It was like one of the kind of spree, and we all of the policies that we've done in the last two years. And it's like, I thought we were talking about the next four and the kind of thing, you know? So I think it is very kind of vision statement sort of thing. It's a way to show that we are a government, does look ahead and have ambition, but then when it comes to the substantive point as to what it genuinely offers is interesting, it does start these debates about the, I mean, the migrant debate is a really, really good one. Also, the aged care debate, there'll be triple the number of people over the age of 85. I'll be 95 by then. Yeah, some, some, I'll come and give you a cup of tea. It is off from the letter to the quid, from the quid or king. And that age, not now. You made it to Alex. Alex, you're making me, it's a triple over this. Yeah, but the aged care system now, we hear every other week from states about how it's completely mismanaged. There's so many elderly people in hospitals, we can't cope. And you're hearing that as then the generation of reports says in 40 years, they've been triple the number of people over 85.

13:16Well, a big thank you to our Friday political panel. Paul Carp is the camera playbook editor for Politico. Paul, great to have you here. Thank you very much. Thank you. Sarah, Ison is Senior Political Reporter at The O's. Sarah, thank you. Enjoy your weekend. Cheers. And Stephanie Boros, thank you for coming back in. Enjoy your weekend also. Thank you, you too.