David Pocock (ACT, Independent) | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Industry and Innovation (Senator Ayres) to a question without notice I asked today relating to artificial intelligence.

Minister Ayres accused me of reckless speculation but, rather curiously, couldn't just rule out the speculation and gave us three answers. It's hard to say exactly what we learnt from those three answers, but he could have simply ruled it out.

The minister also thinks that 'selling out our future' is simply asking that we have guardrails in place for AI and simply asking that we have policies in place where the Australian people benefit from data centre investment—policies that actually recognise the difference between Australian owned sovereign data centres, where our data stays here in Australia, and investment from big multinational hyperscalers who want to come here and use our resources—our land, our water and our electricity—to train AI models the endpoint of which, it seems, is simply to replace human labour at scale. The government doesn't want to hear about that. When you ask Minister Ayres about job losses, he asks you: 'What are you talking about? Where did you get 600,000-person figure?' Jobs and Skills Australia. You'd expect the minister to be across that. I don't see how it is selling out our future to actually ask these questions. I think they're very reasonable questions to ask, and Australians expect the government to have a plan. We're selling out Australian artists, we're selling out Australian authors and we're selling out journalists—any creative who relies on copyright—if the government is going to do a deal with data centres and AI companies to undermine copyright in this country. It must not happen.

Question agreed to.