A former senior National Gallery of Victoria employee is alleged to have funnelled $8m from the gallery over six years, AAP reports.
He allegedly bought $8m worth of mobile phones using an NGV account, which he then sold for personal financial gain.
The state’s corruption watchdog has charged the former employee with eight offences alleged to have taken place between September 2019 and September 2025.
“IBAC will allege that mobile phones were purchased under an NGV account to the value of approximately $8 million and then sold for personal financial benefit,” the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission said in a statement on Thursday.
The watchdog said it began investigating allegations of corrupt conduct in relation to theft and misuse of his position by the former senior employee earlier in September 2025.
The man has been charged with seven counts of theft and one count of misconduct in public office.
He is expected to appear before Melbourne magistrates’ court on 20 October.
Founded in 1861, the NGV is Australia’s oldest and most visited art museum.
NGV has been contacted for comment.
Hello, thanks for reading so far. I’ll take you through the rest of the day’s news.
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Violent, serious offences decrease as crime rate falls in Victoria
The crime rate in Victoria has fallen by almost 4% in the past year, with police praising controversial “adult crime, adult time” laws as being responsible for a major drop in youth offending.
AAP reports the state’s crime rate, which accounts for population growth, fell to 8,679.6 offences per 100,000 people, according to Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency figures released on Thursday.
Overall, the state recorded 624,624 criminal offences in the 12 months to June, a reduction of 13,360 offences compared with the previous financial year.
Youth offending decreased by 8.1% in that time, but police maintain child offenders aged 10-17 continue to be over-represented in major violent crimes such as home invasions, aggravated burglaries and robberies.
Police attributed some of the reductions to increased visible and proactive policing. But other areas of offending continued to rise.
Drug offenders apprehended increased 11.6%, while the number of offenders processed for drug trafficking and dealing rose 18.5%.
Police also recorded a 2.7% increase in retail theft, with 43,124 offences recorded.
Last-minute decision to protect endangered birds from SA space project
Conservation groups have welcomed an 11th-hour decision to protect “precious and important habitat” on South Australia’s Eyre peninsula from plans for a rocket launching facility.
The Whalers Way “orbital launch complex”, which could see as many as 42 rockets a year take off from conservation land, had already been approved under federal and state planning and environment laws.
But a recent decision by the state’s independent Native Vegetation Council could scuttle the space project, located about 32km from Port Lincoln.
The 23-hectare site is protected under a longstanding heritage agreement, a type of covenant on private land designed to protect native wildlife and habitat in perpetuity.
The chief executive of BirdLife Australia, Kate Millar, welcomed the council’s decision to protect “one of the most precious and important habitats in the state”, which was a stronghold for one of Australia’s tiniest birds, the endangered Eyre Peninsula southern emu-wren, and home to 80% of the endangered mallee whipbird population.
Read more here:
Wong pays tribute at UN to Australian aid worker killed in Gaza
Foreign minister Penny Wong has paid tribute to Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in Gaza in a 2024 drone strike, at the UN summit in New York.
Wong said:
Australia remembers the death of Zomi Frankcom and her six World Central Kitchen colleagues, killed by an IDF strike in 2024.
And we will not stop – I will not stop – pressing for transparency, accountability, and justice for the Frankcom family.
Friends, no humanitarian worker should ever be a target.
Nine’s managing director of streaming and broadcast, Amanda Laing, will depart the company after just two years following a “restructure”.
Nine’s chief executive officer, Matt Stanton, who will be overseeing the department in the interim, said her role would “not exist in its current form” amid a company restructure.
In a statement, Stanton said:
[The] industry is changing at pace and we are operating in an increasingly competitive market.
Amanda will sadly be departing the business.
Laing, who also worked at Nine from 2006 to 2017 before a stint as a senior executive at Foxtel, said:
I leave Nine with immense pride in the team I have had the privilege to lead and everything we have achieved together. I’ll forever be a champion of their work.
It comes after the departure of the Australian Financial Review’s editor-in-chief, James Chessell, to join independent media website Rampart.
What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is software designed to perform digital tasks on behalf of humans with a high degree of independence. They’re built on different models, depending on their specific purpose or the task assigned by a human.
They’re often used for tasks such as writing code, conducting online research, generating reports based on that research or even booking a restaurant reservation.
They’re not the same as commonly used chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, because they take actions and make decisions rather than just responding to prompts.
Developers can include guardrails, such as strict access controls, in the instructions to reduce privacy and security risks. However, as we’ve seen this morning, some agents can bypass those safeguards by finding loopholes in their instructions or the systems they interact with.
Aria nominations are out – Genesis Owusu and Tame Impala up for top album
Nominations for this year’s Aria awards were released this morning, just under a month before the body’s 40th anniversary ceremony.
Genesis Owusu and Tame Impala lead the nominations with eight each, followed by Ecco Vandal with seven.
Music legends including Kylie Minogue, Paul Kelly, Keith Urban and Vika & Linda will also be celebrated, as will newcomers Way Dynamic, Wilsn and aleksiah.
Take a look at the full rundown of nominees here.
NSW Greens call for audit of government website cybersecurity in wake of breach
The NSW Greens have called on the state government to immediately audit all government websites and datasets after an OpenAI agent was confirmed to have accessed state crime data agency.
Greens NSW industry spokesperson Abigail Boyd said the state is in need of an “urgent, forensic, and wide-ranging digital audit”.
Bocsar is not the only vulnerable source of potentially sensitive information, the NSW government hosts highly sensitive information through public-facing websites like the HealthStatsNSW website, as well as the Data.NSW website, which is an open data portal hosting 17,164 NSW public sector datasets.
The NSW government is extremely vulnerable to these attacks from malicious artificial intelligence products.
Boyd said the government could not rely on major technology companies to comply with Australian laws and safeguards.
We clearly cannot rely on these multinational big tech companies to comply with even the most minimal of social obligations such as notifying when, or even taking enough care to notice if, their products are hacking government systems.
We are told to believe that OpenAI only became aware of this egregious breach of Australian’s data in August, and then waited until well into September before sending a notification email to Services Australia in September. By all accounts, there has been no attempt by OpenAI to notify the NSW government of the potential breaches of our state systems and databases.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
