{"id":671830,"date":"2026-05-15T04:14:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T04:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/671830\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T04:14:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T04:14:10","slug":"the-federal-government-wants-to-use-ai-to-speed-up-drug-and-housing-approvals-can-we-trust-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/671830\/","title":{"rendered":"The federal government wants to use AI to speed up drug and housing approvals. Can we trust it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to building or making anything, there’s usually paperwork involved.<\/p>\n

Now, politicians have a new favourite weapon in their age-old fight against red tape: artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n

This year’s federal budget was filled to the brim with examples of ways the government hopes to use the new technology to save $10.2 billion in regulatory costs.<\/p>\n

Using AI to speed up medical and environmental approvals were two headline examples.<\/p>\n

Amid the promises of efficiencies, the budget contained only a birds-eye view of the exact role AI will play in these government processes and the safeguards around them.<\/p>\n

How will AI be used to cut red tape?<\/p>\n

The idea of handing over part of the process of approving medicines or housing plans to the machines might prompt fears about whether we can trust them with that responsibility.<\/p>\n

Based on what we know, the government isn’t delegating the decision-making to AI. Rather, it’s being used to help with the paperwork around those decisions.<\/p>\n

The medicine approval process by Australia’s medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), already considers other countries’ approvals of medicines as a shortcut to avoid drug makers repeating unnecessary trials.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Handing over medicines or housing plan approvals to the machines can prompt fears about whether we can trust them with that responsibility.\u00a0 (Yuri Samoilov<\/a> \/ Flickr CC BY 2.0)<\/p>\n

This all goes into the final decision by Australian regulators about whether a medicine will be safe for Australians.<\/p>\n

According to this year’s budget, the TGA is “using AI to evaluate the suitability of medicines already approved by another comparable overseas regulator”.<\/p>\n

In this case, AI will compare other countries’ regulations and, the government says, it will save manufacturers $340 million each year.<\/p>\n

Have any other countries done the same?<\/p>\n

The UK had some success using a similar approach.<\/p>\n

In October 2025, its Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said clinical trial approval times fell from 91 days to 41.<\/p>\n

The UK process involved clinical trial approval, not the marketed-medicines reliance pathway the TGA is automating, but the structure \u2014 AI assists, humans decide \u2014 is the same.<\/p>\n

What about AI and housing approvals?<\/p>\n

The other big item flagged in the budget was building an AI tool to help housing developers through the environmental approval processes, as part of a $105.9 million package to modernise data and systems belonging to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water and the National Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n

This will be specifically used to “assist and better inform proponents seeking environmental approvals”.<\/p>\n

$100m plan to use AI to speed up housing<\/a><\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence will be recruited to speed up assessments of housing and energy projects waiting for environmental approval.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said it had already begun testing a proof-of-concept AI tool.<\/p>\n

AI will be used to “enhance the user experience for people navigating complex laws and documentation” when they go through the approval process but leaving the decision-making to staff.<\/p>\n

“Decisions about whether to approve projects must, and will, always be made by assessment officers, not by AI.”<\/p>\n

The aim is to get “faster yeses and faster noes”, as described by minister Murray Watt last year when he spruiked using AI in the housing environmental approval process.<\/p>\n

What are some of the other ways AI was spruiked in the budget?<\/p>\n

A list of similar projects promised or promoted in the budget included:<\/p>\n

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs trialling an optional tool to pull information out of large claims documents to cut manual review timeIP Australia’s use of an AI-assisted trademark availability toolIP First Response, a chatbot for small businesses with infringement queriesThe National Library of Australia transcribing 58,000 hours of oral history using AIWhat do the experts say?<\/p>\n

Queensland University of Technology law professor Nic Suzor, who has spent 20 years researching government information access, said this is where current-generation AI is most useful.<\/p>\n

“This is both inevitable and mostly good \u2014 [it] always depends on the details,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"Queensland<\/p>\n

Queensland University of Technology law professor Nic Suzor, who has spent 20 years researching government information access. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

“But doing that integration work is exactly where you can get really big benefits from current-gen AI models.”<\/p>\n

Professor Suzor said the greatest benefit and least risk came from leaning on AI to open up and index data scattered across departments, a formidable issue for government and other big organisations.<\/p>\n

He said there were always ethical considerations like privacy when it came to doing this.<\/p>\n

Australian National University’s Responsible Innovation Lab’s senior lecturer Ehsan Nabavi wrote in the Conversation last year about his broader concerns about AI introducing biases into housing approvals, a process proposed and piloted by some of the states.<\/p>\n

“[AI] shapes what gets seen and what gets ignored in different stages of assessment, often in ways that aren’t obvious at all,” Nabavi wrote.<\/p>\n

He also warned that viewing AI as a quick fix to some of our thorniest problems was likely fool’s gold.<\/p>\n

“It risks distracting deeper systemic issues such as labour market bottlenecks, financial and tax incentives, and shrinking social and affordable housing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to building or making anything, there’s usually paperwork involved. Now, politicians have a new favourite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-671830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}