Commonwealth lawyers argue Jarrad Madgwick, whose death by suicide was highlighted at royal commission, ineligible as he only received provisional debt notice

Police allege an e-bike rider returned an alcohol reading more than twice the driving limit and positive tests for cocaine and meth after a crash critically injured a 16-year-old girl near Wollongong.

Consumer advocate Lindsay Owen’s new book, Gouged, traces how corporations use software—from ever-changing prices to opaque algorithms—to squeeze every penny from you.

Having just approved a major coal mine expansion, Australia's climate credentials will be under the spotlight at pre-COP talks in Fiji.

A proposal to increase how much pesticide residue is allowed on berries has angered anti-pesticide campaigners, who say the "forever chemical" poses too great a risk.

If a chatbot prompt like ‘find Australian medicine statistics’ results in a website breach, the responsibility does not lie with a piece of code The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them. This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Climate Change Authority chair says planning commission did not account for climate-related economic damage in NSW

The NSW Independent Planning Commission approves plans that will allow Hunter Valley Operations to continue coal mining at a site near Singleton until 2045.

Sure, it's short for "national conference". But CPAC Australia would be well aware it's also the name of another very prominent European conference for national conservatism.

Young Australians say strangulation has become so normalised in sexual culture it is no longer considered a kink but simply part of the sexual "playbook".

Electricity distributor Jemena has been replacing 7-metre wooden power poles with 15-metre industrial poles rated to carry up to 66,000 volts, but there's been one consistent complaint among the residents where this is happening.

Former One Nation candidates reveal they’re walking away from the party after witnessing its operations behind closed doors.

Behind the stories of bombings and mass deaths, the everyday challenges facing Palestinians living under siege portray a quieter tragedy we rarely hear

Former One Nation candidates reveal they’re walking away from the party after witnessing its operations behind closed doors.

Federal Coalition vows to detonate most of Australia's efforts to decarbonise "within 30 days" of winning power, including the advance of renewables and the emissions-curbing policy it introduced.

OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.

Plans to build a 1,561 km gas pipeline from the NT Beetaloo Basin to south-east Queensland could cost as much as $9.74 billion, a new report has found, adding huge costs to a heavily polluting project.

Human hackers face serious consequences, and so must AI companies. There is no excuse for what happened * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast When you get sick, Medicare exists to take care of you. It sits at the centre of a health system that our prime minister rightly calls the envy of the world. It’s one of the few institutions nearly every Australian still trusts. So when an AI company threatens this system, it couldn’t be more serious. We are at the UN general assembly this week and the OpenAI hack has put Australia in the spotlight during an expanding cybersecurity crisis. World leaders are calling for stronger oversight of frontier models. We know Medicare must be secure or our doctors and hospitals cannot do their jobs. But this breach is also a test of something larger: whether the Australian government can hold a US tech giant to account when its technology goes rogue. If Australia can’t protect our community – if it can’t enforce our laws and prevent such attacks happening again – then we are entering a terrifying period. Continue reading...