Australia news LIVE: PM launches UN Security Council bid, calls for international safeguards on AI; US TV networks refuse to cover Trump press events after White House media ban
Updated ,first published
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news this Tuesday, September 22. Here’s what you need to know today.
- Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has joined a call for international safeguards on AI at the United Nations in New York. Australia is one of 22 signatories to the call for mandatory safety testing, independent evaluations and greater international oversight of so-called frontier AI models.
- Albanese also used an address to the UN to issue a warning that the world can no longer rely on adapting to escalating climate catastrophes as he cautioned Australia was heading into a summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.
- Treasurer Jim Chalmers released the latest Intergenerational Report yesterday. The 40-year economic forecast for the nation predicted Australians will live longer and have fewer children.
- And major American television networks are refusing to cover daily press events with US President Donald Trump after he banned CNN and its reporters from the White House. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News stood in solidarity with CNN and will not participate in the daily “pool” – a small, rotating group of key outlets that film and share footage of the president’s public events.
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One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce insisted this morning that he was opposed to media censorship before he slammed Channel Nine for broadcasting an interview with Thom Robb, the national leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in which he praised Pauline Hanson.
During the broadcast, published by Nine News yesterday, Robb said Hanson’s rise in Australia was “heartening”.
“She’s demonised by the same people who demonise us.”
Joyce called the report “absolutely crazy,” and told News24 the reporter had “pulled this stuff out of their backside”.
The US will reopen a former Cold War-era military base in southern Greenland and set up a military presence at an east coast base now used by the Danish dog sled patrol under an agreement to be signed by the US, Denmark and Greenland today, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Those sites are Narsarsuaq, whose population has dwindled to a few dozen since the US closed its Bluie West One military base in the 1950s, and Mestersvig, an outpost currently used by the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol, a Danish special forces unit, said two of the sources.
Denmark, Greenland and the US are expected to sign their new agreement at the UN General Assembly in New York City overnight.
The text of the deal has not been made public, and the three people familiar with it, speaking on condition of anonymity, said its details were not finalised until it was signed. The governments of Denmark and Greenland did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House also did not immediately respond.
Reuters
The defining moment of 2025’s gathering of world leaders at the UN may have been Donald Trump’s accusation of “sabotage” after his teleprompter blinked out and an escalator stalled while he was on it.
Now the world body is working overtime to make sure nothing similar happens again to distract from its focus on solving the world’s problems this week. Trump is set to deliver his speech at the UN’s iconic East River headquarters in New York City tonight.
“It has been checked and rechecked,” UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told reporters about the escalator at a briefing, ahead of the high-level General Assembly session.
The UN is anxious for everything to run smoothly a year after Trump called for the arrest of the person who purportedly triggered an escalator to shut down just as he and first lady Melania Trump stepped onto it. At the time, the UN said Trump’s videographer may have been to blame.
Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Amanda Rishworth insists Australia is well-positioned to address the issues raised by yesterday’s Intergenerational Report, despite challenges.
“I do feel that there are challenges, but we are in a good position to address them,” Rishworth told the Today show.
“As the report shows, we’re in a better position than many other countries. But what this has demonstrated is that some of the measures that we are taking are critical, making sure that we’re giving tax cuts to workers, getting our superannuation system in the best position possible, so that people can live in a better retirement with more money.”
The Treasury report showed Australia would face rising national debt and a heavier tax burden unless it fixed its productivity crisis.
“Making sure that we are investing in productivity growth, and we have a big productivity agenda as well,” Rishworth said.
“This does outline challenges, but also some really important opportunities that, if we play right in the next number of decades, Australia will be in a very good place.”
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled in the US north-east due to technical problems at a key regional air traffic control centre, halting operations at every major airport in the New York City area for several hours on Monday (US time) just as numerous foreign leaders were flying in for the United Nations General Assembly.
However, President Donald Trump’s flight from Washington to New York was able to depart as scheduled.
The technical problems happened at the same FAA facility in Philadelphia that caused numerous disruptions at Newark Liberty International Airport in the spring of 2025.
On Monday morning, the primary circuit that carries data into that air traffic control facility failed, affecting flights for Philadelphia as well as Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.
Jim Chalmers would not say this morning whether the government would consider nationalising Triple Zero after a Senate inquiry recommended the system be taken out of the hands of major telcos.
“We’ll go through the committee’s recommendations in the usual way,” the treasurer told ABC’s News Breakfast.
“We have taken some very substantial steps when it comes to Triple Zero. You know, we legislated the Triple Zero custodian. We’ve got the ACMA investigation, which has become a court process when it comes to the Optus outage. We’ve increased the penalties for telcos who don’t follow the rules in the Triple Zero system. So we have already taken extremely serious action.”
He said the government would consider any steps that would strengthen the system.
“The most important thing here is that Australians can access Triple Zero when they need it … .”
The government is not considering acting on growing calls for a royal commission into Australia’s domestic and family violence deaths, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said, as pressure mounts on it to address increasing rates of violence against women and children.
“We’ve chosen instead to increase the resourcing for child and family violence, domestic violence. We do acknowledge that this has a number of sources, and we’re trying to deal with the sources of all of this violence,” he told ABC’s News Breakfast this morning.
“Whether it be more security in the housing system, whether it be the monetised misogyny that we see online, there are a whole range of factors feeding in here, and so I work very closely with [Social Services Minister] Tanya Plibersek and [Finance Minister] Katy Gallagher and other colleagues, the prime minister, of course, to make sure that we’re doing the best we can. We do acknowledge that all of this violence is obviously entirely unacceptable. It’s horrific in every way.”
More than 160,000 people have signed a petition calling on the federal government to hold a royal commission into the killing of women and girls.
The killing of four people in separate alleged domestic violence incidents in NSW over the weekend prompted renewed calls for the government to take action on what advocates say is a national crisis.
If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, or 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said One Nation’s migration proposal would be “diabolical” for the Australian economy, both in the long term.
“I think what One Nation is proposing would be devastating for the economy in the near term and absolutely diabolical in the longer term, in the context of a population which is ageing and fertility rates which are falling faster than we anticipated even a few years ago because people are taking the decision to have smaller families later in life,” he told the ABC’s 7.30 program last night.
“Migration is a force for good in our economy and in our society so long as it’s well managed, robustly and transparently managed, and that’s why I think the changes that Tony Burke announced Thursday of last week are just so important, because they are about normalising net overseas migration down to more appropriate levels.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said during his address to the National Press Club last week that the government would seek to cut net overseas migration (the difference between migrant departures and migrant arrivals) to 245,000 a year for the 2026-27 financial year and 225,000 per year from 2027-28 onwards.
One Nation’s migration plan would enforce a net overseas migration number of 130,000 a year.
California: British Columbia has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it could have used ChatGPT logs to warn police and avert a mass shooting in the Canadian province earlier this year.
On February 10, suspect Jesse van Rootselaar allegedly killed five students and a teacher at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in northern BC, as well as her mother, half-brother and finally herself.
Van Rootselaar used ChatGPT before the massacre, which was one of Canada’s worst-ever shootings.
OpenAI internally flagged and banned one of van Rootselaar’s accounts for concerning activity in 2025, but didn’t escalate a warning to police. The company later disclosed van Rootselaar also had a second account that wasn’t detected or stopped.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek said she was “heartbroken” by the spate of alleged family and domestic violence incidents in NSW over the weekend, but that they were proof the warning signs of violence were still too often ignored.
The stabbing death of a preschool-aged child in the Blue Mountains capped a brutal spate of domestic violence-related deaths in NSW over the weekend, when four people were killed in separate incidents.
The deaths have prompted fresh pressure on governments to address what advocates say is a national crisis of violence against women and children.
“In all but one of these cases authorities said the alleged perpetrators weren’t known to police,” Plibersek wrote on Instagram last night.
“That underscores something critical – which is that across society, the warning signs of family and domestic violence are too often missed or ignored until the worst happens.”
If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, or 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
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