Good morning, and what a morning it is. The day’s news arrives with a strange, unsettling hum — the kind you notice when stories that feel distant suddenly press closer. In Australia, the dependable machinery of parliamentary inquiry — the public submissions, the evidence, the careful checking of sources — is being quietly corroded by something synthetic. Artificial intelligence is now influencing the way policymakers receive information, and not in a good way. Guardian analysis has found dozens of policy submissions, from across the political spectrum, are riddled with misinformation and so-called hallucinations: real research mis-summarized, invented citations, and sources that simply do not exist. This is not a fringe glitch; it is infiltrating Australia’s parliament. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the region of Nepal where most of the 33 missing Australians were last heard from remains almost entirely cut off. Last week’s catastrophic landslide and flash flood in Nepal and Tibet covered the area around Gyirong Port in metres of silt and debris. The death toll has climbed past 930, and 4,400 people are missing on both sides of the border. Families are waiting with phones in hand and no signal. Add to that an Australian business community drowning in debt, the US and Iran trading fire again in the Gulf, and the unsettling spectacle of a Collingwood WAG boycotting the Brownlow, and you have a day that asks for more than headlines. It asks for attention.
Let’s sit with the AI issue for a moment. The image of a parliamentary inquiry — wooden tables, typed submissions, a quiet clerk — seems as far from Silicon Valley as one can get. But the investigation shows it is exactly where the algorithms have arrived. Policy submissions are supposed to be the repository of public knowledge; they exist to inform parliaments so that laws are grounded in evidence. The new submissions, though, are interwoven with strange citations: reports that were never published, studies that don’t exist, quotes that have been entirely invented. The AI does not intend to deceive; it simply does not know how to admit ignorance, and so it manufactures a confidence that is completely contagious. A committee member reviewing such a submission would be forgiven for nodding along — the structure is right, the tone is right, and only the facts are missing. The consequence is not a culture war; it is a governance malaise. Decisions about safety, about taxation, about environment policy could be made on the basis of false pretenses, and there is no easy fix because the problem is not malice but scale. Meanwhile, in Nepal, human time is moving in the opposite direction. The mudslide-hit area near Gyirong Port is covered in metres of silt and debris. Cait Kelly, reporting from Kathmandu, describes an area that is not just unreached but unrecognizable. The death toll has climbed past 930, with 4,400 people missing across the Nepal-Tibet border. The Australians’ last known location is in a place with no phone tower, no road, no clear route to rescue. The waiting families are doing the most human thing imaginable: refreshing news feeds, calling officials, setting up WhatsApp groups to share the fragments of information that emerge. There is a terrible asymmetry between the two stories — one caused by a machine’s inability to say “I don’t know,” the other caused by a mountain’s refusal to let go of its dead.
The political landscape at home is shifting in ways that old alignments no longer explain. One Nation’s victory in the Western Australian seat of Secret Harbour is a massive blow to a safe Labor stronghold. It is not simply a lost seat; it is a signal that Labor’s appeal has worn thin in places that once believed in it. Tom McIlroy and Reged Ahmad unpack the phenomenon on the Full Story podcast: how One Nation is rising, and how Labor is struggling to find a language that responds. The standard political response — “we will deliver for working families” — sounds like a recording in a society where working families are squeezed by rents, energy, and food. One Nation does not offer a solution so much as a culprit, and that is apparently enough. In Queensland, the state has introduced age limits and licensing requirements for e-vehicle riders — a reasonable regulatory move, but one that raises deeper questions about how quickly governments can respond to technologies that run ahead of laws. In New South Wales, the Icac hearings have exposed links between politics and developers, with the star witness Charles Perrotet now under sharp scrutiny. The words “old boys’ network” are no longer a metaphor; they are an evidentiary exhibit. In the football world, the Brownlow medal is supposed to be the game’s finest evening, but Dee Salmin’s boycott has made it a moment of reckoning. Her partner, Collingwood’s Darcy More, will attend the ceremony, but she will not. She has decided, in the wake of the sector’s response to the alleged sexual assault at the Sydney Swans’ team hotel, that she cannot celebrate. The symbolism of an empty seat at the Brownlow is profound: even in the glittering room, the silence will be audible.
The world outside Australia is in its own spiral. The US and Iran have exchanged fire again in the Gulf — missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iranian strikes on US bases in Jordan and the UAE. Each side describes itself as responding; each side is also escalating. And while the military deet is being played out, ordinary Iranians are dealing with runaway food inflation as new American sanctions bite. Geopolitics is usually discussed in terms of missiles and doctrine, but it is really about mothers deciding which groceries to skip. The disclosure about Pete Hegseth is similarly disquieting: the Pentagon’s top spokesman has admitted that Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway. The Pentagon’s spokesman tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war in Iran. But the admission itself grinds the confidence of anyone who believes in civilian oversight. In the United States, the Grand Canyon flash flood is another story of nature’s indifference. Two people are dead, fifteeen are missing or unaccounted for, visitors were evacuated, and the only water pipeline for tourists and residents was destroyed. The Canyon is a symbol of the timeless; the flood is a reminder of how suddenly the timeless can change. The AI legal front has a new case: Anthropic is being sued for alleged theft of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted songs to train Claude models. Musicians are waking up to discover that their labor may have been absorbed into a product — without their consent. In Kyiv, the air raid sirens have become a daily rhythm; Russia has fired 800 jet-powered drones into Ukraine in four days, using faster weapons to sustain prolonged waves of attack. The people of Kyiv are not just enduring; they are adapting to a horror they cannot fully name. And in Cape Town, a pre-game stunt with passenger jets flying dangerously low over a rugby stadium has ignited a debate about safety. What was meant to be spectacle was received by many as a threat. In a world of heightened anxiety, even planned risks feel unacceptable.
In Australia’s economy, the word “insolvency” is no longer an abstract ledger concept. A tidal wave of business failures has swept across the country, and the causes are as plain as a quarterly electricity bill. A “cost-of-doing-business crisis” is the term being used, but behind it is a broader sense of grief. Joe Rechichi, the owner of Andiamo Trattoria Del Popolo in Summer Hill, Sydney, tells a simple truth: “Since Covid the whole world has changed and it is not clear what it takes now to be a successful business.” This uncertainty is more damaging than any single tax or regulation. It eats into the confidence required to hire, to invest, to even open the doors each morning. Every failure is not just a balance sheet; it is a family dream, a first employee, a neighborhood institution gone. At the same time, the cultural and intellectual life of the country is attempting to push back against simplicity. The Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao and Chinese-American journalist Melissa Chan have published a graphic novel, You Must Take Part in Revolution, as a dystopian riposte to the sugarcoating of the “faraway, communist country” that online “Chinamaxers” romanticize. They are not lecturing, they insist; they are telling a story. But in an era of deep fakes and AI hallucinations, telling a story is itself an act of resistance. The papers carry more signs of a society trying to adapt: the Albanese government’s tripling of visa application fees for foreign students has turned visas into the budget’s fastest-growing source of tax revenue. It’s a neat fiscal outcome, but a troubling signal — the country is monetizing the dream of migration. In New South Wales, new rules will limit Year 12 students to one take-home assignment per subject counting to the HSC mark, in a direct response to AI misuse. The technology that is infiltrating parliament is now shaping how we test the young. And the health pages with their own warnings: a seal and a dolphin washed up near Geelong have fueled fears over bird flu; Queensland has recorded its highest ever number of unintentional overdose deaths. The connection between these stories isn’t obvious, but it is real: systems are overloaded, bodies are exhausted, and trust is thin.
Among the sports pages, the news is a mixture of endings and transitions. Lionel Messi has announced his retirement from international football, ending a career of 207 caps for Argentina, crowned by the World Cup in 2022. For a generation, Messi’s left foot was a language; now that language has signed its final sentence. But the game continues its relentless churn. Bradley Barcola has joined Liverpool from Paris Siint-Germain for an initial £106m, a fee that could rise to £123m, making him the latest symbol of football’s dizzying economy. In the Premier League, Aston Villa host Arsenal, a fixture that carries its own drama. The tennis world has seen its own exits: Venus Williams has joined Novak Djokovic in leaving the US Open in the first round. Her match with Sofia Kenin made history as the latest-ever start at the tournament — 12.13am — a strange hour for a champion to take her final bows. The image of Venus walking off in the small hours of the morning is a kind of metaphor for athletic twilight: glorious, but diming. In cricket, Pakistan have taken instant and dramatic action after back-to-back thrashings by England, ousting head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and sending seven squad members home. It is the kind of purge that signals desperation, not strategy. And beneath all this, the morning mail as always ends with a brain teaser and crosswords — a reminder that even in the midst of political breakdowns and natural disaters, we still need small pleasures to keep our minds sharp and our humors intact. If you enjoy the Morning Mail, there is the Afternoon Update for a three-minute snapshot of the day’s main news, and the Breaking News Australia email for those who want the next alert. But perhaps the most human thing is to simply pause: read the crosswords, walk outside, call someone you love. The news today is full of absences — missing Australians, retired champions, boycotted ceremonies. The day asks us to hold all of these lightly and seriously at once. Tomorrow will bring more headlines; today is the only one we can actually live. Until then, please take care of each other. Good morning.