The federal government has demonstrated a willingness to regulate the downside of social media and artificial intelligence in a way that other governments around the world have not.
You only have to look at the work of the eSafety Commissioner and the social media age ban, the recent digital duty of care legislation, and more recently the Prime Minister’s pledge on mandatory AI standards.
Victorian senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah is a medical doctor and comes from a career background in biomedical research. She has maintained an deep interest in technology and innovation.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Senator Ananda-Rajah discusses AI regulation, the digital duty of care, data centre investment, sovereign AI models and the long decline in business R&D.
The regulatory issue is important, especially in the intent of the digital duty of care regime, which she says will be hugely positive for Australians.
Senator Ananda-Rajah was elected to the senate at the 2025 election from the third spot on the Labor ticket. She had already been a member of the House of Representatives, elected as the member for Higgins in 2022, only to have the seat abolished through an electoral redistribution.
She says the argument that regulation of technology will stifle innovation is false. Australia should move forward with confidence that it can set the terms for Big Tech to minimise the downside risk of social media and AI.
“There’s a misconception that regulation is somehow going to destroy innovation, and in fact, nothing could be further from the truth,” she said.
“If you just look at all the life-saving drugs that we use, they have all been developed within a very heavily regulated environment, and it has to be for safety and efficacy. So we could absolutely take a similar approach with AI, and I think we should.”
Senator Ananda-Rajah has long argued for a digital duty of care. The government’s bill will be narrower than the model she favours, focused on psychosocial harms to young people on social media.
The problem with the current model is that big tech gets to mark its own homework, she says, and the industry’s self-regulatory DIGI code is woeful. “It’s a self-regulatory model, and it just doesn’t work,” Senator Ananda-Rajah said. “Instead, what we need to do is empower our regulators and empower civic society to mark the homework of big tech,” she said.
At the same time, the government is courting tens of billions of dollars in data centre investment from many of the same companies. Senator Ananda-Rajah sees no contradiction.
“We can do both, and we should do both. The AI race will be won by those countries that can offer compute,” she said.
“We have abundant space. We have abundant renewable energy resources. We have enormous talent in this country… and we are a stable democracy. We are saying we’re open for business, but according to our terms.”
What is still missing, she says, is a sovereign Australian model, trained on Australian data. She wants the Australian Research Council and the National Reconstruction Fund to back local companies that want to build one.
“I really reject this notion that we can’t [build competitive AI], that we’ve somehow missed the boat. I completely reject that. That’s defeatism,” she said.
But Senator Ananda-Rajah reserved her harshest criticism for corporate Australia. Business investment in R&D had fallen from 1.37 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 0.88 per cent in 2022, she said, while companies spent profits on share buybacks, dividends and executive bonuses.
“And then they come to us crying about productivity and how woeful our productivity is. Well, they are part of the solution,” she said. “It’s lazy, and I think unfortunately Australia has fallen prey to complacency.”
“We have been slapped on the bum by the resources curse, and it’s just made us too complacent,” she said.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.