A New South Wales local council has refused to show a world-renowned artwork about children killed in Gaza after asking organisers to investigate hiring “armed guards” to counter the risk of “community conflict” over the mural.

The organisers, Shoalhaven Friends of Palestine, were aiming to show the Wall of Tears installation by American artist Phil Buehler at the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in Nowra on Tuesday, following the work being exhibited around Australia, including on the front lawns of Parliament House in Canberra in September. The massive artwork pays homage to the 18,457 children killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 19 July 2025 and was first shown in New York on 29 January to coincide with the second anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old left to bleed out among the bodies of six family members after their car was targeted by an Israeli tank.

Shoalhaven city council asked the group to “investigate” the use of “armed guards” in a risk assessment seen by Guardian Australia. The perceived risks included “protest, counter-protest, community conflict” and “verbal abuse, intimidation or disruption arising from politically sensitive subject matter”. The group was also asked to reduce the exhibition window from eight days to three days and restrict attendance to RSVPs only in the gallery with “locked doors”, and also to no longer advertise the event due to potential “reputational risk” for the gallery or council due to their decision to host the exhibition.

One of the organizers wrote to the council stating she was “deeply disappointed” by the decision and said the “very suggestion that armed guards might be necessary for an exhibition commemorating dead children is deeply disturbing”. The organizers have now arranged for the work to be installed at Berry Uniting Church on Thursday, while the council has not responded to media about what had triggered the safety concerns.

Australia’s education ministers have agreed that the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) will return to a pen and paper test for year 5 students from 2028 in response to a growing backlash against technology in the classroom.

The testing revealed Australian students were spending an average 2.6 hours per day using digital devices compared to the OECD average of 1.7 hours per day. NAPLAN tests have also consistently shown one third of Australian students aren’t meeting challenging but reasonable expectations in foundational literacy and numeracy which one expert called a “national tragedy”.

Ministers were also considering reforms to the primary school maths curriculum and new additions to the national curriculum to address anti-Semitism.

New South Wales Deputy Premier and Education Minister Prue Car said this is a response to the evidence suggesting that excessive screen time has been harmful for students and their outcomes. She is also pushing for tests in years 7 and 9 to also be pen and paper tests and the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which administers NAPLAN, will provide advice on this.

Prime minister Albanese is facing growing discontent within his own electorate as creatives push back against the federal government’s proposal to allow AI companies to scrape everything Australians create online.

Albanese’s seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner west is home to more than 3,000 cultural and creative businesses, and 10% of its workers are employed in cultural and creative fields – compared with 4.2% nationally. He has held it on a safe margin for three decades, and has spoken of its high representation of live music, theatre and artist spaces with pride.But now, as Labor considers giving AI companies access to Australian creatives’ works by default as it pursues a compromise with US tech giants, locals are reacting with dismay.

Labor is mulling over the copyright changes in a suite of reforms surrounding AI, including datacentres, energy and the economy. While Albanese has promised “the strongest possible protection”, warning it would be “theft” if creatives weren’t paid for their work, creative industries are alarmed that AI companies have requested a weakening of copyright law to train their models using Australian material. Some AI companies have said making licensing agreements under existing copyright law would be too difficult, while Anthropic has suggested an “opt-out” model which would allow it to scrape content unless a rights holder objected, prompting warnings from Coalition senators and the recording industry that this could amount to an acquisition of property by the government.

Labor’s proposals were leaked in September as senior personnel from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, met Labor ministers and warned that Australia’s copyright laws were preventing the company from training models locally.

The federal government’s draft laws are expected by the end of the year, with consideration in parliament due in 2027. Artists from the area are saying that AI could be “good for humanity” but is now an “extraction industry mining for profit for the few”. Some also state that AI has been useful in their practice, but having to opt out is “outrageous”, and no one would post anything if free content can just be churned out by an AI machine.