SUMMARY
The federal Budget is now under two weeks away, and we expect that the related documents have been sent off to the printers. Most of our 226 members and senators have spent the past fortnight on school holidays and attending ANZAC Day ceremonies. The NT government is already releasing details from its upcoming Budget and NSW parliament is set to return in a fortnight.
FEDERAL
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will receive more than $10 million over four years in the upcoming Budget to launch and maintain an Australian SMS sender ID Registry. While the government accepts that the initiative will be “no silver bullet,” it is expected to help prevent scammers from imitating key industry or government brand names – such as Linkt or myGov – in text message headers.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) has released ‘ethical hacking’ policy guidelines, providing security researchers with a point of contact to submit their findings if they believe they have found a potential security vulnerability.
STATE-BY-STATE
The NSW parliament is set to return on May 9 for its first sitting of the new Labor government. As we’ve mentioned previously, the state budget has been delayed until September.
The NT government has begun releasing details of its upcoming budget (which is due to be released on the same day as the Federal Budget, Tuesday 9 May), flagging $2 billion for core services and related infrastructure for the Top End’s health sector, and $200 million for a range of cost-of-living subsidies.
A fire at a South Australian government data centre last week “has thrown its electronic medical records system into disarray”. The fire is believed to have been caused by an electrical fault.
The Tasmanian Government responded to the long-awaited Defence Strategic Review by issuing a media release to express disappointment at the likely impact that a cut to the army’s infantry vehicle program will have on local manufacturing. There are also rumours that the federal government will chip in for the Macquarie Point AFL stadium in Hobart.
INTERNATIONAL
With three weeks to go until the New Zealand Budget, the impact of “flooding and cyclone events” earlier in the year continues to hang over preparations. At 6.7%, inflation is lower than forecast, but cost-of-living remains elevated due to these extreme weather events. We expect that the government will be looking to make significant investments in telco resilience to harden services and facilitate disaster recovery coordination.
In other news from across the ditch, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is off to Harvard, where she will be working on the “emerging challenges of governance to protect against algorithmic harms during a critical moment of the explosive proliferation of generative AI tools” at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, based at Harvard Law School.
I’m sure all readers will be well aware that Space-X Starship SN10 rocket blew up last week. It cleared the launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, then climbed 39 kilometres into the air for 4 minutes, before rotating out of control and exploding. This all happened the day after NASA’s Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) plummeted back to earth over the Sahara Desert. It was launched in 2002 to observe the sun and was decommissioned in 2018, but had remained in orbit since.