The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO SYDNEY, MORNINGS WITH HAMISH MACDONALD
FRIDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2026
SUBJECTS: AI cyber incident; Labor ensuring tradies can get free access to mandatory standards; Stronger product safety standards for e-bikes; Rebuilding trust: the future of Australia’s charities and community life
HAMISH MACDONALD: Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Treasury. Good morning to you.
ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Hamish, great to be with you.
HAMISH MACDONALD: When you discovered that this had happened, and the way in which OpenAI had notified the Australian Government via Services Australia was through a public email address, what was your reaction?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, it's clearly inadequate and they should have been notifying the Australian Signals Directorate. This is a company with significant revenue, one of the largest organisations in the world – they should be notifying the Australian Government through the Australian Signals Directorate. They also had meetings with senior Australian officials at which they didn't raise this. So, we're very concerned about the poor way in which it was conveyed and the delay of the breach appears to have occurred in June and the notification took place in September.
HAMISH MACDONALD: Is there also a dimension of this which would indicate that actually Australia's Government standards are not clear or are not up-to-scratch?
ANDREW LEIGH: We've got very clear standards, and of course we've got the Australian AI Safety Institute, the National Cyber Security Co-ordinator, and the Australian Signals Directorate, all of which have responsibility in these areas. We've established a task force to look into this incident. This is, as we understand it, the first incident of this kind in the world and so clearly there will be other countries also watching Australia's response.
HAMISH MACDONALD: Has the law been broken?
ANDREW LEIGH: That's one of the things that the taskforce is going to inquire into. There's, as I understand it, some aspect of intent that's required and so it may be the taskforce makes recommendations about that as well.
HAMISH MACDONALD: Okay, so what, if there was not an intention to break into a government website, then it wouldn't be a crime?
ANDREW LEIGH: The taskforce will go into go into those details, but that's certainly one of the aspects that it's going to be exploring and I guess it's also worth emphasising, Hamish, that this was the Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal. It contains Medicare information that wasn't public but wasn't sensitive and the information has since been made public. So, Australians should not be concerned this morning their personal data has been breached. This is much more about the principle of what happened.
HAMISH MACDONALD: You mentioned the Australian Signals Directorate, which obviously is a cyber spy agency. But what about the federal police? Is this something that would be referred to police, or could be referred to police?
ANDREW LEIGH: That'll be open to the taskforce to consider whether to make a referral to the police. They'll work very quickly and if there are matters to be referred to the AFP, they'll do that.
HAMISH MACDONALD: And can you help listeners understand, when something like this happens under Australia's law, who's responsible? Is it OpenAI, the platform where these agents were operating, or is it whichever institution, research lab, whoever it was, corporate entity that asked these tools to go and seek this information?
ANDREW LEIGH: That is an excellent question and one that the taskforce is going to be looking into.
HAMISH MACDONALD: I know, but do we have – as a country, do we have an answer to that question right now?
ANDREW LEIGH: We don't. So, this is the sort of issue that is going to arise in coming years much more frequently. If agents are being used, it is an issue which will arise with driverless cars. So, getting the clear principles in place on this is absolutely critical…
HAMISH MACDONALD: That's quite – that's an interesting acknowledgement, Andrew Leigh. Our laws are not up-to-scratch when it comes to this stuff, by the sounds of things?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, it'll be open to the taskforce to make law recommendation, Hamish...
HAMISH MACDONALD: This is going to be a busy taskforce, Andrew Leigh!
ANDREW LEIGH: Indeed. Organisations, governments around the world are grappling with the implications of computer systems that have human-level intelligence. Our laws are essentially written for systems which are much dumber than us. For systems that are smarter than us, then it's going to be necessary to update laws, and that'll be true of countries around the world as we deal with these new technologies. We're in a brave new world.
HAMISH MACDONALD: Do we need to have sovereign control of technology that operates within the Australian jurisdiction? So, even if this request was commissioned overseas and the AI tool is based in the United States. Does Australia need to have some capacity to interrupt what it does on Australian shores?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, there's a question of liability and if you're operating within Australia, then you're subject to Australian laws and that's distinct from the question of control. Obviously, Australians every day are interacting with platforms which are based overseas, but those platforms are subject to Australian law as they do so. Simplest example is the social media minimum age, where companies that are operating on servers offshore are subject to Australian law and not allowing under 16s to set up social media accounts.
HAMISH MACDONALD: You're listening to Mornings on 702 ABC Sydney. The Assistant Minister for Treasury, Andrew Leigh is here. You're announcing this morning that tradies and builders can access mandatory Australian standards online for free. What does that mean in practice?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, many of your listeners may not realise but at the moment you have a system where many tradies wanting to access compulsory Australian standards need to pay to do so. Australian standards are just as much part of the law as our road rules and yet tradies are needing to pay in order to access those standards. That might be standards to do with building sites, electrical work, plumbing, workplace safety – all of those standards are now going to be free as a result of the reforms we made in the Budget.
HAMISH MACDONALD: Also wanted to ask you about e-bike standards this morning. The Commonwealth announced back in August that the ACCC would develop a mandatory national safety standard for e-bikes. It's intended to address the high-powered, high-speed devices. Do we know now when those standards will be in place?
ANDREW LEIGH: That'll be in place early next year. This is about regulating what can be sold in Australia. Transport Ministers have already moved in terms of what can be written. It'll be things like speed, power, and the ability to modify the bikes.
HAMISH MACDONALD: And does it deal with the modification side of it? Because I understand that a very big part of the problem here in Sydney is the capacity to just take it into a bike shop or a mechanic and have it tweaked so it goes much faster?
ANDREW LEIGH: Spot on. So what the European standard does, for example, is it makes very clear that if the bike detects modification then it automatically reverts back to factory settings. Some of them even go one better. They go into what's called limp mode. So if they detect a modification, then they'll only move at a couple of kilometers an hour in order to basically punish you for trying to modify them. So that'll be one of the key parts of the standard.
HAMISH MACDONALD: It's 702 Mornings here. Hamish Macdonald through until 11 o'clock. The number's 1300 222 702. Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Treasury. You came up on this program yesterday in a conversation with Waleed Aly. He's written an essay trying to consider some of the disruptions that we're all experiencing globally, you know, witnessing globally but also I suppose feeling here. Our politics is disrupted. Our political discourse is changing; it's fracturing. And he referenced a book that you had written in your sort of academic life and a particular anecdote about more Australians over time joining up to sport, but fewer playing team sports, more playing individual, engaging in individual sports. Why is that example so important do you think? What does it tell us about the world we're living in?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we're seeing increasingly that Australians are becoming disconnected from one another. We're less likely to play in organised sports, to be part of a religious community, to join a trade union or to be part of a community group. Interpersonal trust has gone down and overall, we're becoming increasingly a society less of ‘we’ and more of ‘me’. It's happened at the same time that inequality has risen and so, one of the big priorities for me as the Assistant Minister for Charities is looking at how we can rebuild the strength of Australian civic life. Have more Australians out there engaging in those team sports that you talk about, Hamish and fewer people doom strolling. It’s about…
HAMISH MACDONALD: It's a bit rich for a marathon runner to be saying this, Andrew Leigh!
ANDREW LEIGH: I do love my group training runs, Hamish and I do love, like the time at the end of the race where everyone's just standing around chatting afterwards. That sort of egalitarianism at the end of the race. I did a bush half marathon with Canberra Runners over the weekend and the conversations after it are just delightful when everyone's coming down with the endorphins. So even marathon runners can enjoy the communal feel after the race.
HAMISH MACDONALD: Andrew Leigh, good to talk to you. Thanks for stopping by this morning.
ANDREW LEIGH: Likewise, thanks Hamish.
ENDS