A former Labor minister says the federal government “blinked” on AI regulation, shelving plans to make it safer for consumers rather than provoke US President Donald Trump.
When he was minister for industry and science, Ed Husic was planning to bring in “mandatory guardrails” on high-risk AI as part of a standalone act that aimed to protect the community against the technology’s potential harms.
After the election in May 2025, he was dumped from the ministry in a factional deal. By the end of the year his policy proposal was also gone.
“We put AI regulation in a ‘too hard’ basket. We blinked in the face of Donald Trump and decided that we just couldn’t get away with our own approach on this,” he told Four Corners.
“We were already…
