Australia news LIVE: PM reveals OpenAI agent broke into Medicare; Unemployment rises to a five-year high

Updated September 24, 2026 — 10:23am,first published September 24, 2026 — 6:31am

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news this Thursday, September 24. Here’s what you need to know today.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed an AI agent from OpenAI accessed public and non-public files from the government’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal. Speaking at a press conference in New York this morning, he said the government believed there was no breach of personal information.
• Albanese will also use an address in New York to declare the post-1945 international order “no longer fit for purpose” and warn Australia must help to replace it as growing strategic competition between the US and China transforms the Indo-Pacific.
• Former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting a former production assistant in 2006. Weinstein was convicted in June 2025 of a first-degree criminal sexual act for assaulting Miriam Haley at his Manhattan apartment.
• And Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian declared his country would not surrender in a defiant address to the United Nations just one day after US President Donald Trump used the same stage to renew threats to “annihilate” Iran.

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Independent senator David Pocock has released a statement following the revelation that an AI agent infiltrated a Medicare website in June, and has said while the breach is concerning, it is not surprising.

The senator has long argued Australia needs to implement comprehensive guardrails around the development of artificial intelligence, and has pushed for an act enshrining AI safety in Australian law.

Here’s what he said.

This is a very concerning but ultimately unsurprising breach of Australians’ data by an AI agent.

It again highlights how slow the Australian government has been to implement appropriate safeguards for AI in high-risk settings.

This begs the question about why the Albanese government shelved plans for a National AI Safety Act and why they are so slow to develop legislation to implement new standards.

We have these companies warning of existential threat and hacking critical government infrastructure and the Labor government’s response is “We’ll get to that next year”.

The draft standards and discussion paper are pretty light on when it comes to addressing potential obligations on AI companies to disclose hacks or other high risk breaches by their AI agents.

There is also a big question here around why we aren’t holding these big tech companies liable for this kind of data breach. If it was an Australian who hacked the system they’d likely be heading for jail, yet there’s no accountability for AI companies developing this technology.

Greens senator David Shoebridge said the break-in of the government’s Medicare statistics reporting portal by an OpenAI agent was not an accident, and that the company had deliberately sent out agents to target health information.

“What we now know is that this wasn’t an accidental escape from one of OpenAI’s agents. They deliberately sent this out into the wild. They sent it out to target information about the world’s health ... So this was an OpenAI agent sent out deliberately into the wild by OpenAI to go out and find out about how governments deal with health expenditure and health systems,” he told News24.

“It came into Australia, went onto the public portal, and then when it wasn’t getting what it wanted through the public portal, decided off its own bat to go around and break through the securities and then rummage around inside the protected data.”

The senator said the incident was a result of “multiple failures”, and that governments had to take accountability for their slowness to act on AI regulation.

Hundreds of Qantas ground workers, freight handlers, and airport security workers have gone on strike at Sydney Airport.

About 500 Qantas Ground Services and Australian airExpress staff have taken protected industrial action this morning in Sydney, the start of a 24-hour strike also affecting Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide airports.

In addition, employees of airport services company Certis, represented by the Transport Workers Union, have also gone on strike for two periods today.

Certis employees work in airport security operations, including passenger and operational screening functions. Those staff walked off the job from 7.30am to 9.30am, and will do so again from 6.00pm–8.00pm.

Victorian Premier Ben Carroll spoke with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about the Medicare AI hack late last night, and said the i nvestigation was still in its infancy.

“His initial advice is there has been no compromise of personal private information, but we are stressed,” Carroll said.

The premier would not say if the Victorian Department of Health was involved in the cybersecurity breach.

“Information is coming to hand literally as we speak. I’ll have more to say on this later.”

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has demanded more details from the government about the OpenAI breach, and said Australians were owed transparency.

“So the government needs to explain when it first became aware of the breach, exactly what information was accessed, what vulnerability was exploited, how they’re closing it”, he told 4BC radio in Brisbane this morning.

Taylor also cast doubt on the timing of the announcement and appeared to suggest Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was using the visit to the US to bury headlines about the breach.

“The timing is interesting, isn’t it? Yeah. Why is he talking about it now when he’s over in the US? I mean, this happened some time back, but we’ve not heard him talking about these issues.”

On Monday, Albanese co-signed a joint statement with 21 other nations at the United Nations General Assembly calling for urgent regulation and guardrails on artificial intelligence.

Australia’s cyber defence systems “are not match fit” for the artificial intelligence age, opposition defence spokesman James Paterson said following news of an OpenAI agent’s unauthorised access of government data.

“Australia’s cyber defences, including of our government networks, are not match fit for an age of AI,” Paterson told News24 this morning.

“In this instance, it was not a malicious actor looking to exploit a vulnerability, but I can tell you that right now, all around the world, there are malicious actors, state and non-state that are using AI to scan our government and critical infrastructure networks to find vulnerabilities that they can exploit either for criminal gain or for the gain of their national interest.

“We need to be significantly scaling up and upgrading our cyber defences,” Paterson said.

OpenAI is undertaking an “extensive review” into its systems after a non-human model infiltrated Medicare in June, the company has confirmed in a statement.

“As we’ve shared publicly, OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity during training and evaluation and notifying third parties when our review identifies potential impacts to their systems,” the statement reads.

“During this review, we 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. In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.

“Our review found no evidence of patient records being accessed. The information accessed included aggregate health statistics and internal file names. We notified the organisations and are providing technical information to support their investigations and help address potential security vulnerabilities. Our overall review is ongoing, and we remain committed to transparency about these issues and to sharing what we learn as that work continues.”

Delays between the breach in June of this year and the government being notified on September 10 are understood to have occurred because the company was investigating what information had been accessed.

Opposition health spokeswoman Anne Ruston has called for a wide audit of government systems after an OpenAI agent breached Medicare data, and the government was not informed until months afterwards.

“The fact that this could happen is serious enough, but the fact that we had to wait for OpenAI to actually advise the government that it had even happened is even more concerning,” Ruston told ABC radio this morning.

“The first thing I’ll be asking this morning is [for] a briefing from the department in relation to my portfolio area, which is health, and obviously the one that’s been impacted by this breach,” the Liberal senator said.

“But I think it goes wider than that. If we can have a breach of this nature into data in Medicare, what’s to say there can’t be breaches in other areas? So that’s why I think it’s incredibly important the government does an immediate audit to understand where its vulnerabilities are, so that Australians can have confidence that the systems that the government has in place are protecting their information and protecting our nation.”

Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said the government was investigating any potential breach of the law by OpenAI, as well as penalties that might correspond. He reiterated that the data accessed was of “lower” sensitivity and therefore had less security protection.

The government has yet to determine whether OpenAI has broken the law or is liable to suffer a penalty for the breach of a Medicare website in June in which public and non-public files were accessed, Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles has said.

Asked about penalties and breaches of the law on ABC radio this morning, Marles said: “That’s a good question, and again, that’s one that we are working through here, and so we will look at what ... is the legal situation in respect of this, and what it means to have gained an unauthorised access, albeit in an unintended way. So that is one of the questions that we’re continuing to investigate through the task force.”

Marles said the investigation would look at why the government had to be informed by OpenAI of the breach, rather than Australian security agencies. The minister reiterated that information accessed was on the “lower end of sensitivity”.

“We’re not talking about the very highly sensitive information that we have in respect of national security, and obviously, in relation to that, we have, you know, enormous security measures which are in place around them,” Marles said.

“This is a portal which would have had relatively low levels of security, which befitted the fact that the information that it contained was not particularly sensitive. So people should be clear about that.”

Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles refused to comment on Donald Trump’s approach to AI, but said Australia held firm in its approach to AI regulation despite pressure from the US to allow the technology to run rampant.

During an address at the United Nations General Assembly this week, Trump said he wanted artificial intelligence to be rebranded “super intelligence”. He has rejected international attempts to regulate AI.

“The last thing I’m going to do is speculate on how Donald Trump makes his decisions. That’s obviously a matter for him,” Marles told Nine’s Today.

“But let’s be really clear about where Australia stands … Australia absolutely believes that guardrails need to be put in place, that the safety measures around the development of AI need to be well in advance of the capability that is being developed itself, and that extreme care needs to be taken in respect of developing artificial intelligence.”

Earlier, Greens senator Hanson-Young called for a moratorium on AI development in Australia and claimed Australians were “rightly worried” about artificial intelligence outpacing regulation.