MOTIONS

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (10:28): I rise to speak in support of the urgency of this motion, and I want to associate myself with the comments made by Senator Faruqi, Senator Shoebridge and Senator Pocock, who've spoken before me. It is laughable that the government's response to the highlighting of a possible extinction crisis is a select committee. I note that the crossbench actually proposed that more crossbenchers be allowed to participate in that select committee and have come back with a negative response.

So, noting that the minister made comments that they welcome the crossbench wanting to be involved on this issue, I suggest to the minister and the government that they expand the committee, as the crossbench has requested, to have more crossbench senators on it. The question has to be asked: Why won't you? Are you concerned about the issues that the crossbench is here in the chamber raising?

We saw again, in the last week, people being very concerned and put in very stressful positions because we had an outage with Optus on our triple zero number. We've had that happen three times recently, and people have been hugely stressed and concerned by it. People's health has been put in jeopardy.

We've got the people who work on frontier AI models telling us that we are at risk of even more events like that that are way more serious—AI frontier models creating agents that can cut off our water supply, cut off our electricity supply and cut off our telecommunications in one fell swoop, together. The banking system going down—how on earth would we function as a community if those systems were taken out at once tomorrow?

We are being told by the people who were working on these models—people who have left the companies which are working on these models so that they can speak freely—that that is a very real and near-term risk. You can have a select committee that's going to talk about how the government is going to use AI, whether we are going to let people use people's intellectual property or whether we are going to have AI in our education systems.

Those are use-case questions. What we are talking about here is putting guardrails on frontier AI development to avoid an extinction crisis risk. It is a material risk, and it is a near-term risk.

Imagine—they're talking about that happening in this decade. We know that Australians are concerned about this, and we seem to have a government that is either being wilfully ignorant or sleepwalking its way into a potential crisis. The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: The time for the debate has expired.