After three years of war in Europe, Ukrainian Ambassador to Australia Vasyl Myroshnychenko says his country has become a real-time battlefield laboratory, producing vast troves of invaluable data. Successfully defending against the Russian invasion has produced an amazing ecosystem of innovators from all over the world. The Ambassador says there are lessons and opportunities for Australia.  

In this episode of The Commercial Disco, GBG’s head of data innovation Michael Harmer explains why the case for a national ID in Australia is “dead in the water,” arguing that the country’s existing identity infrastructure, anchored by government-verified documents and services like the DVS, already delivers world-class assurance. Harmer discusses how AI is both a threat and an opportunity for digital identity, the importance of behavioural context in fraud detection, and why mobile credentials will shape the future of secure and privacy-preserving identity verification.

Can Australia play an outsized role in the global regulation of Big Tech? Do we have the middle-power muscle to bring together a coalition of countries that would have the combined heft to push back on tech overreach? Tech Policy Design Institute co-founder and CEO Johanna Weaver digs deep into the global political and technological forces shaping the world right now.

The Productivity Commission sets out in detail the massive upside for Australia in introducing AI tools across the economy. But it also warns that the government financial support for building Australian large language models (LLMs) or the AI factories that train them is a terrible idea. In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Productivity Commissioner Stephen King says simply that government is “a terrible entrepreneur”.

Catherine Livingstone has one of the best business brains in the country, and ahead of the economic roundtable in Canberra next week she has called for a bold, system-level approach to the economic policy discussion. She joins James Riley on the Commercial Disco.