The Mandarin

Professor Peter Woolcott, who served as the APS commissioner from 2018-23, has been chosen as the next chair of the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership. A former chief of staff to PM Malcolm Turnbull and Australian ambassador for the environment, Woolcott has also served as UN Final Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty president and led an independent review from 2024-25 into Tasmania’s responses to institutional child sex abuse.

The federal government has revealed a set of AI safety priorities that touch on privacy, consumer protections, and the development of a framework for automated decision-making. It comes after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s major speech last week on the government’s plan to introduce AI policy guardrails. The public service and Australia’s agencies are increasingly using AI for automated decision-making as advocates raise concerns the emerging technology could displace human oversight.

A government-led parliamentary committee is calling on the government to take proposed reforms to whistleblower protections further by creating an independent whistleblower authority. The parliamentary joint committee on corporations and financial services (PJC CFS) tabled a letter yesterday demanding an independent body, and interim protections for whistleblowers while it is established. The committee includes members of the government, cross-bench, and opposition.

More details about how former public servant Jeannie-Marie Blake was treated by her then employer after giving evidence to the robodebt royal commission have been revealed in a lawsuit against the Commonwealth. Blake, a former frontline employee at Services Australia, shared her experience of being “bastardised” by her workplace before a parliamentary committee hearing last year.

Australia’s public sector has no shortage of digital ambition, but the environment in which those ambitions must be delivered has fundamentally changed. The challenge has shifted from defining ambitious transformation agendas to delivering them consistently under sustained fiscal, security, and operational pressure. Success now depends less on the vision itself and more on having the institutional capability to execute it reliably.

The Australian Defence Force has come under extraordinary scrutiny in the past 15 years. Three landmark inquiries — the Broderick review into the Treatment of Women in the ADF, the Brereton report into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide — each examined very different issues. Yet despite their different focus, they all pointed to much the same underlying problem: Defence’s greatest challenge is its culture. And it’s a big one.

When General Motors Holden shuttered its local vehicle manufacturing facilities in Australia in 2017, it seemed the end of the line for the iconic Aussie-made ute (utility vehicle), the revered marque of tradies and circle work connoisseurs. At the apex of the home-grown production tree was the unapologetic and somewhat inelegant Holden Maloo, which, like the now somewhat trendy mullet haircut, was serious business at the front and party-hard at the rear-wheel-drive back.

Tobacco remains the leading cause of premature death in Australia, but trends suggest things are changing for the better. According to new data from the national drug strategy household survey, fewer Australians aged 18 years and older are smoking each day, with an historic low of 5.8%. Rates of daily smoking in the latest data are a marked improvement on the government’s 2025 national smoking target of 10%.

Accelerating the implementation of a hate crimes database is a key part of the federal government’s formal response to Aftab Malik’s report on combating Islamophobia. The national response is based on four themes: education and awareness, protection and support, building social cohesion, and accountability and responsibility.

Almost three-quarters of federal public servants are seriously unhappy with their base salary, and almost half are fed up with their career progression, an Australian Public Service-wide bargaining survey released on Friday shows. In results from more than 39,000 APS employees, the Australian Public Service Commission revealed that its pre-bargaining temperature check drew responses “representing nearly 30% of the APS”, even though “responses were received from employees across 107 agencies”.