Government facing growing anger over $3 million super tax
Labor insists the change will only impact a modest number of wealthy Australians.
However, former Labor prime minister Paul Keating has taken a veiled swipe at the mandate.
Sky News Senior Political Reporter Trudy McIntosh claims there is 'no guarantee' the super tax will even be debated at the treasurer's roundtable.
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Perth Now
38 minutes ago
- Perth Now
Labor's big pledge after childcare horror
Labor will introduce snap legislation letting the government cut federal funds to childcare centres that 'aren't up to scratch', Education Minister Jason Clare has vowed. The pledge came after detectives arrested and charged a 26-year-old man in relation to allegations of child sexual abuse at a Melbourne childcare centre. He was a worker at the centre and had a working with children check (WWCC). Mr Clare said on Thursday that if the allegations were proven true, then 'the system has failed these families'. Education Minister Jason Clare wants to cut federal funds to childcare centres that 'aren't up to scratch' on children's safety. Nikki Short / NewsWire Credit: News Corp Australia 'It has taken too long for governments to act,' he told Seven's Sunrise. 'This is sickening and it demands serious action. We've already taken action around mobile phones in childcare centres and mandatory reporting. 'But there's more that we have to do – there's a lot more we have to do.' Mr Clare said he would not hesitate to 'cut off' federal funds to childcare centres that failed to keep children safe. 'Parliament returns later this month – I'll introduce a piece of legislation in the (first) fortnight that will cut funding to childcare centres that aren't up to scratch when it comes to safety of the children,' he said. 'The big weapon that the federal government has to wield here is the funding that we provide to childcare centres. 'It equates to about 70 per cent of the funding that runs a centre and if they're not keeping our kids safe, then we need to cut off their funding.' He added there needed 'to be consequences'. A childcare worker has been charged with more than 70 offences relating to child sexual abuse. David Crosling / NewsWire Credit: News Corp Australia Police in Victoria earlier this week arrested and charged Joshua Dale Brown with more than 70 offences, including child rape and possession of child abuse material. On Wednesday, police charged a second man, Michael Simon Wilson, 36, with offences relating to child abuse material. Court documents showed the two men were known to each other but not how.
AU Financial Review
an hour ago
- AU Financial Review
Agentic automation takes aim at Australia's productivity slump
'It augments things that you could not do with existing automation – especially things that cannot be defined in rules or direct approaches. It's more for dynamic goals, where agents can do a little bit of dynamic planning and decision-making along the way in order to perform the task.' The recent UiPath Agentic Automation Summit in Sydney brought together business and tech leaders to showcase how agentic automation is already reshaping the way Australians work and engage with AI. One summit attendee described agentic automation as a collision of technologies – a convergence of artificial intelligence and traditional automation that's already reshaping how businesses approach cost, quality and decision-making. 'Agentic automation is really the convergence of two trends,' says Dr Chris Marshall, vice president of data, analytics, AI, sustainability, and industry research at IDC. 'You've got generative AI, which is powerful but unpredictable and expensive, and traditional automation like RPA, which is reliable but limited. Together, they're becoming something more useful than either alone.' Improved decision making Marshall says this hybrid approach is helping businesses unlock a broader range of tasks that humans used to do. 'Suddenly you have a degree of reliability and intelligence that covers more work, more consistently, and often with better quality outcomes,' he says. 'It's not just productivity – it's also improved decisions and process quality.' While the efficiencies are compelling, he says the longer term value comes from how agentic systems interact with companies' underlying processes. 'You start to learn where the blockages are,' says Marshall. 'You can simulate improvements, chop up tasks differently, or assign them to different agents or people. That's where innovation starts.' He says the future of agentic automation isn't just advice from a bot – it's systems that act. 'The bot gets stuff done. The agent thinks so that people lead,' says Marshall. 'Combining advice, action and leadership – that's where agentic automation is heading, and that's what sets it apart from older forms of automation.' Marshall says that Australia's approach to these tools may differ from other markets. 'Australians are more sceptical about technology – and that's not a bad thing,' he says. 'Especially in regulated sectors like financial services, that demand for privacy, data sovereignty and compliance is driving better questions and, ultimately, better outcomes.' That's translating into real use cases. Businesses are starting to embed AI agents in the final stages of processes that were already largely automated, removing friction and extending the value of earlier automation programs. While much of the conversation around agentic automation remains abstract, a recent deployment in Australia's energy sector shows what this technology looks like in action – and why businesses are moving fast to scale it. Oil and gas take the lead Resources giant Woodside Energy recently used agentic automation to overhaul its procurement communications, where staff had been manually sorting messages from more than a dozen channels. 'Employees were spending up to 20 hours a week just triaging communications,' says Peter Graves, area vice president ANZ at UiPath. 'With agentic tools, those hours are reclaimed, freeing people up to make decisions rather than sift through noise.' The deployment used Communications Mining, a platform that applies natural language processing to unstructured inputs like emails and text messages and routes them intelligently across systems. 'Where traditional automation stops at structured systems, agentic automation bridges the gap into unstructured data,' says Graves. By combining robotic process automation with AI and human input, the system enabled real-time decision-making while cutting delays and costs. 'It's about people, robots and AI agents working synergistically in the same workflow,' says Graves. 'That's the real shift.' Woodside's implementation was powered by a bespoke dispatcher framework integrated with UiPath's CommPath language model. 'It's all run through a trust layer that makes the system secure and predictable,' says Graves. Graves says the same architecture is already being replicated across other communication-heavy sectors. 'We're seeing this as the new standard for intelligent automation in Australia's energy sector and beyond,' he says. 'That's where the initial success is coming from,' says Graves. 'It could be a final step, or it could be a number of steps inside a process where you needed a human to jump in and make a decision. An agent can do that quite effectively.' Recent IDC research shows strong Australian uptake, with more than half of organisations surveyed saying they are already using AI agents, and a further quarter plan to adopt them within the year. In practical terms, this means fewer isolated bots and more systems capable of context-aware orchestration – taking in unstructured data, making decisions, and collaborating with humans across workflows. The shift is particularly visible in sectors such as healthcare and financial services, where long processes and regulatory compliance create friction that traditional automation struggles to handle. Unstructured data 'In healthcare, there are often human-in-the-loop steps that an agent can now manage,' says Graves. 'And in banking and financial services, there's lots of unstructured data. An agent can review, make a decision and move on – something it would have been impractical to code into a robot.' This pressure is not just about productivity, but also about creating systems that are safe, governable and sustainable at scale. While automation has long been associated with fears about job losses or burnout, early experiences with agentic tools suggest the opposite: by removing low-value cognitive load, they're helping people focus on more engaging work. Removing the stress 'When I look at some of the things we have agents do right now, it's not typically the stuff people enjoy doing,' says Hao. 'It's the next level up from mindless work – stuff where you have to think about what to do next, but doing it isn't that interesting. It's almost always the same four steps, just ordered differently.' Graves says that's having a measurable impact. 'We're seeing the ability for agentic automation to remove that stress, so someone can get their work done in the allotted time instead of staying back for two or three hours.' Still, the shift is not without its barriers. Education, trust and clarity around what agentic AI can actually do remain issues for many organisations. 'It's still a very new area, and not a lot of workers have been exposed to it,' says Graves. 'There's a lot of proof of concepts, a lot of pilots – but not a lot that's gone into production yet.'
West Australian
2 hours ago
- West Australian
JACKSON HEWETT: Qantas cyber hack the latest of many to come
Monday's attack on a Qantas call centre in Manila is the latest in a slew of cyber attacks that appear to be growing in both sophistication and frequency. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, $US1.03 trillion ($A1.57t) was lost globally in 2024, finding nearly half of global consumers experiencing a scam attempt at least once a week. With six million customer records potentially stolen during the breach, Australians were likely to be among those whose personal data could be used to hack financial accounts or to commit identity theft fraud. Australia continues to be a lucrative destination for scammers, drawn by high balances in bank accounts and superannuation funds. In April this year, some of the largest super funds in the country, including including AustralianSuper, Hostplus, REST and Australian Retirement Trust were subjects of a 'credential stuffing' scam, which relies on people using the same password across multiple accounts. AustralianSuper, which has more than 3.5 million customers and $367 billion in funds under management said four accounts in the pension phase were defrauded of a combined $500,000. In many instances the super funds had not turned on multi-factor authentication, which requires users to verify their identity using two or more different factors, such as a password and a code sent to their phone. Australians are becoming better at recognising scams however, and despite it costing an estimated $2b last year, the Government's National Anti-Scam Centre said losses were down by 25 per cent on their peak of $3.1b in 2022. The number of scam reports fell almost 18 per cent over the same period from 601,803 in 2023 to 494,732 in 2024. The top five losses, accounting for 80 per cent of total losses were led by investment scams at almost $1b, followed by romance scams, payment redirection, remote access and phishing. In January the National Anti-Scam Centre launched the 'Stop. Check. Protect.' campaign to encourage Australians to confidently identify, avoid and report scams. But while Australians appear to be getting the message, scammers are using artificial intelligence to become more sophisticated. Matt Warren, director of the RMIT University Centre for Cyber Security Research, said scammers are now using AI to polish their messages, eliminating the spelling and grammar mistakes that used to act as red flags. This makes scam emails harder to detect, especially when people are distracted or in a hurry, with Mr Warren noting 'those warning signs aren't as obvious anymore'. Mr Warren said scammers were already using digital tools to target people at scale, focusing on the 'five per cent or so' of victims who were susceptible to spoof communication. But Daswin De Silva, professor of AI and Analytics and Director of AI Strategy at La Trobe University said AI was enabling scammers with far more impressive tools, such as the ability to mimic recognisable voices, for fooling potential victims. 'The Qantas attack was likely driven by impersonation attacks or social engineering, and with artificial intelligence, we can do this in droves,' he said. 'We already have examples of deep fakes being used impersonate individuals. These attacks are not that sophisticated, but the attack surface and the intensity and complexity of the attacks definitely can increase with AI.' As companies collect more and more consumer data in pursuit of increasing levels of personalisation, the threat expands. 'Companies will use AI to determine certain buying patterns, certain behaviours, but AI can also be used to derive more personalised information than what we would have typically disclosed to a commercial organisation,'Mr De Silva said. 'So there is also that risk that with increased data collection about us and how we live, scammers can develop more ways to trick us.' Mr De Silva said Australia lagged the European Union, which had introduced the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 which gives individuals more control over how their personal data is collected, used, and stored, and imposes strict rules on organisations that handle such data, including third parties. It also makes companies accountable for infringements, with fines of up to 4 per cent of annual worldwide turnover. In the US, which is far more supportive of innovation than regulation, data protection is governed by a patchwork of Federal and State laws. 'We want to be in the middle between the EU and the US, where there is a healthy balance of supporting, enabling innovations, but also securing and looking after the rights, the privacy, the confidentiality of individuals,' Mr De Silva said. It is not just individuals that were at risk from identity theft, with government transfers an increasingly lucrative scam for criminal gangs. Last week the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced it had seized $US245m and charged hundreds of citizens and medical professionals as part of a widespread identity fraud targeting the US healthcare system that may have resulted in as much as $US15b in losses. Mr Warren said Australia's Medicare system would be a valuable target using similar identity theft techniques. The attack on a third party provider also called into question the security processes expected by companies looking to outsource costly activities like call centres, to providers who may not have made the appropriate investment in their systems. Mr De Silva said stronger regulation could help close cybersecurity gaps by requiring third-party technology providers to meet minimum standards, including mandatory audits and system checks, training, and hiring practices. 'There is definitely opportunity for tighter regulation that ensures the safety of data and individuals,' he said.
