Former Industry Minister Ed Husic on Tuesday blamed Treasury “hard heads” for limiting Australia’s technology development, and revealed he wants artificial intelligence governed by an AI Act to instill public confidence.
But Mr Husic, who led a two year consultation on Australia’s AI regulation that is yet to deliver anything enforceable, said the Albanese government could take years longer to deliver the legislation.
“I reckon we should have at least our own AI Act. I don’t know necessarily if that will happen in this term. I think it should,” Mr Husic said on a panel at the Australian Financial Review’s AI Summit.
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Actions speak louder than words. MVP Grant disappeared and will reappear with a radically reduced rate of a maybe $50k investors. Boosting female founders is nowhere to be sern, axed. The one person who led AI Ethics and developed AI frameworks, former Chief Data Scientist Dr Ian Oppermann, moved out of his position by said government. Let’s cut the BS and look at the actions rather than fluffy words. Yes, we do need guidelines and regulations in the technology sector regarding AI as we have in finance with the licensing requirements (ACL, AFSL for example) but let’s hear from actual experts in Data Science and Ethics and not the shiny “techbros”. We have the world’s best scientific research communities and most of them either leave or can’t commercialise because of the lack of support and funding for innovation.
Treasury has a clear culture of anti-Industry policy, that is in their view government should never, or at least very reluctantly, invest/intervene in supporting domestic capabilities. They see a sector as being efficient or inefficient. If its efficient, then it doesn’t need intervention, if its inefficient, then intervention won’t change that but will drain resources from other investments.
In short, they were against FMA or similar policy for cultural reasons (a department of economist are never going to support Industry policy unless forced and then in a manner which will kill the policy if possible).
It’s up to DFAT to advocate economic security (through supply chain diversification) and Department of Industry to advocate for domestic capability uplift. Treasury is just a blocker and is incapable with the current entrenched culture to be anything more.