Justin Hendry

A new Australia-US critical minerals pact will turbocharge efforts to build China-free supply chains and help weaken Beijing's stranglehold on the sector, former senior diplomat Paul Myler says. But Mr Myler, who served five years as deputy chief of mission at Australia’s Washington embassy, said securing the breadth of elements essential to modern technology will remain a challenge. “The thing we have to acknowledge is we walked away from this area 20 years ago,” said Mr Myler, who now runs Perth-based geopolitical risk advisory firm StratQ.

South Australia has become Australia's first state to ban AI-generated political ads and deepfakes aimed at misleading voters, with the changes coming into effect on Monday. Political parties, MPs and candidates, as well as their representatives, face fines of up to $10,000 for breaches under the changes, which also prohibit intrusive robocalls and robopolls. Other aspects of the state's “world-leading” electoral reforms, including a ban on most political donations and caps on party spending, are already in place, ahead of next year's state election.

The Digital Transformation Agency is continuing to struggle to meet its obligations under the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, three years after it was first pulled up for widespread non-compliance. A follow-up audit by the Australian National Audit Office found the DTA's attempts to reform its procurement practices have been only “partly effective”, while the agency is still failing to demonstrate value for money in its purchasing decisions. The DTA has pushed back against the findings, arguing they “[do not] reasonably reflect the significant efforts applied to improve procurement practices” since the original audit in September 2022.

Six companies each claimed more than $100 million through Australia's research and development tax incentive in the 2022-23 financial year, with new claims totaling $1.2 billion. Newly released Tax Office data shows Atlassian was the top user of the scheme for a second year in a row, claiming $220 million, followed by Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue ($151 million) and hearing implant company Cochlear ($137 million).The other biggest users of the scheme offering tax breaks for eligible R&D activities include flour manufacturer Manildra, CSL and sleep device maker Resmed, together claiming $336 million.

Crypto exchanges will soon be regulated like banks and other financial services providers, with the federal government on Thursday unveiling draft legislation for its long-awaited digital asset regulator regime. Assistant Treasurer and Finance Services minister Daniel Mulino announced the exposure draft at the Digital Economy Council of Australia’s regulatory summit on Thursday. The Treasury Laws Amendment Bill 2025, which has received cautious early praise from exchanges, proposes new requirements for digital asset platforms and tokenized custody platforms to hold an Australian financial services licence.

Australia is backing a small Pacific nation to set up a pilot public cloud environment, as the federal government looks to deepen its ties in the region and head off Beijing’s influence attempts. A select group of “trusted industry partners” were invited to tender for the work this week by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in one of the first examples of Australia brokering a cloud computing contract for the region. The cloud transformation, which will include a total of three phases, will see the unnamed Pacific nation government become “cloud-ready” in the space of 14 months, tender documents show.

American defence technology startup Anduril has secured a $1.7 billion contract with the Royal Australian Navy to build a new fleet of unmanned military submarines with strike capabilities in Australia. The extra-large autonomous undersea vehicles (XL-AUV), known as Ghost Sharks, emerged production ready after more than three years of work on an affordable, long endurance AUV capable of handling a variety of payloads. Defence minister Richard Marles and Defence Industry minister Pat Conroy announced the five-year contract with the Australian subsidiary of American military tech firm Anduril on Wednesday.

Australia must develop its own domain-specific AI models at a minimum if it is to have any chance of combating 'AI lock-in' and building a competitive edge with the fast-moving technology. That’s according to Daryl Plummer, a chief of research at analyst firm Gartner, who has also warned of the impossibility of guaranteeing sovereignty without control over the AI chips that power the models. “Everything’s built on a single point of failure; TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company,” he said on the sidelines of the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo this week.

Australia’s peak tech industry lobby has urged the federal government to adopt an R&D investment target of 2 per cent of GDP by 2035, putting it at odds with other industry groups and the research community. The proposal would shave a full percentage off the 3 per cent target that has become a consensus view among the country's leading science, research and business groups in recent years .But Tech Council chief executive Damian Kassabgi says the goal is a more “realistic” given Australia’s R&D spending has been trending down since 2008 and now sits a whole percentage point behind other developed nations.

Federal government agencies may have barely scratched the surface with artificial intelligence, but those that have are increasingly finding themselves trapped in AI 'PoC hell’. That’s according to the deputy head of the Digital Transformation agency, Lucy Poole, who has flagged the emerging risk across the Australian Public Services as AI experimentation ramps up. Speaking at the ServiceNow Federal Forum in Canberra on Tuesday, Ms Poole said the public sector's natural aversion to risk, as well as the lingering effects of the Robodebt scandal on trust, were dampening public sector confidence with AI.