By https://www.abc.net.au/news/kate-ainsworth/12302550
Publication Date: 2026-06-07 18:43:00
A former labor secretary says the federal government “winked” at AI regulation and put on hold plans to make it safer for consumers rather than provoke US President Donald Trump.
When he was Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic planned to introduce “mandatory guardrails” for high-risk AI as part of a standalone law aimed at protecting the community from the technology’s potential harms.
After the election in May 2025, he was released from the ministry in a factional deal. By the end of the year, his political proposal had also disappeared.
“We put AI regulation in the ‘too hard’ basket. We blinked at Donald Trump and decided we just couldn’t get away with our own approach to the matter,” he told Four Corners.
“We’ve already drawn criticism from him (Trump) and Elon Musk about the social media laws. They’ve seen the treatment of our own eSafety commissioner by this administration and prominent figures in the US, and so we just thought we’d walk away from that fight.”
