Richard Flanagan on AI policy: Albanese isn’t just betraying authors like me. He’s selling out Australia to AI colonists

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At the age of 13 I was taken to an election rally at the Hobart City Hall where Gough Whitlam was to speak. It was 1974, the hall was packed and when Gough came on the emotion grew electric.

Australia in 1974 still felt like a country shaking off being a colony. We had just stopped standing up in the cinema when God Save the Queen played, portraits of the English monarch had just been taken down from government offices, and Australia had finally begun exploring a foreign policy separate of the US, having withdrawn Australian troops from the bloody and pointless quagmire of Vietnam. To wave after wave of applause, Whitlam talked of buying back the farm. It was an idea of Australia as nation independent and sovereign, proudly charting its own course. Its bedrock was the beginning of a cultural renaissance that would see a flowering of Australian film, music and literature.

Author Richard Flanagan says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government is “pondering a terrible betrayal”.Photos: Peter Mathew, Alex Ellinghausen. Graphic image: Monique WestermannJump-cut half a century and we have as our prime minister a Benny Hill impersonator who rarely met a corporation for which he wouldn’t roll over – more Toto than Toto. In the noble tradition of online scammers, US artificial intelligence corporations have persuaded the Albanese government that their offer of investment in Australia, replete with highly dubious conditions, is only for a short time, after which it will be withdrawn.

The Albanese government – with falling poll numbers, collapsing living standards, a renascent One Nation, reduced immigration and the consequent hit on GDP numbers – seems to see in AI, or at least data centre construction and “training” centres, a sugar hit for the economy that might perk up the national accounts enough to save its political skin at the next federal election.

For, after it promised to steer a careful path and protect creators’ rights with AI, we discover that the Albanese government is now pondering a terrible betrayal: selling out Australian artists and, more than that, the Australian people.

Days after AI companies told us their product might destroy all humanity, we discover that in the manner of standover goons doing a shakedown they have now threatened our government that unless it sacrifices our nation’s culture for what they call “training” (translation: theft), they will not invest here. The government’s leaked proposals add up to this: making Australia to AI regulation what the Cayman Islands is to tax evasion.

No artist I know is happy to see destroyed a system that has developed over centuries to enable them to work. Copyright law is not a block or a problem – it is the foundation of all the creative industries. It’s what makes AC/DC and Anna Funder, Tim Winton and Cate Blanchett possible. Protecting creators’ rights means protecting copyright, the foundation of Australian literature, music, art and film.

The proposed idea of an artist choosing to “opt out” – choosing not to have their work used for AI “training” (translation: theft) – is as hopeless as waving to a swimmer being attacked by a white pointer after you made it to shore. Would we accept the idea that because the Gypsy Jokers insisted on making home invasions legal a few of us may be allowed to “opt out” of home invasions?

Not one other country in the world has signed up to such brazen theft being made law. It’s hard to imagine that any will. Other countries are closed or are closing to the idea of strip-mining the soul of their cultures for AI. Which makes the bluff and bluster of the AI lobby’s threats – that they will move on if Australia doesn’t agree post-haste – only ring more hollow.

It is intimidation founded in nonsense to say Australia will miss out on AI unless it sacrifices its culture to Anthropic and Grok. Are they seriously saying they won’t build their data centres everywhere they can? Are they saying we will be denied access to their products? Given their insatiable greed, it’s very unlikely, but if they’d use such a threat now, imagine what they will demand once embedded into our society.

Worse, our own government, too easily dazzled by power, seems to believe the best way of protecting ourselves from attacks from foreign powers’ AI is to embed into the very heart of our own nation the same AI controlled by the biggest and most erratic foreign power of them all, the US, an increasingly anti-democratic, dangerous and disloyal regime.

The government’s secret proposals on AI copyright effectively amount to handing over our culture to a handful of anti-democratic oligarchs and raising the spectre of Australia becoming a vassal state. If these words sound overstated they merely repeat much of what Arthur Mensch, CEO of Paris-based AI company Mistral, told the French National Assembly in May. But what is driving the Europeans to protect their sovereignty by building their own AI that respects their culture, copyright and their citizens’ privacy isn’t even on the table in Australia.

Instead, we are being bullied into becoming fully integrated into the American system but without the critical American legal protection of statutory damages that is leading to a proliferation of litigation against AI companies in the US.

This is an Australian government which beneath its babble about respecting artists has done next to nothing for them over its four years in office. It is a government so feckless with our national sovereignty that we must regularly witness the wretched spectacle of the sebaceous Richard Marles haunting Pentagon corridors with yet another several-hundred-million-dollar cheque for AUKUS, the only concrete achievement of which has been to make Perth, with its prospective US base at Fremantle, a nuclear target.

And despite Albanese’s blandishments on the environment, will his promise of renewables to power data centres prove any more a durable guard rail than the protection he offered artists? If you think those promises won’t be broken also, ask Toto not to wag his tail and see what happens.

At a moment when there is such widespread rage at AI in the US that both Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon can appear at the same event denouncing it, when community after community is saying no to data centres, when AI executives fear assassination, the AI oligarchs, close to being run out of their own country, are looking for another nation to pillage for their water, their power, and their “training” (translation: theft). With the Albanese government they may have found the ideal country ripe to be colonised by their rapacious greed, as Mughal India was colonised by the East India Company.

It may be that most Australians don’t care one jot that our writers, artists and musicians may now have to submit to the yoke of the very thieves whose wealth was made from the greatest copyright robbery in history. But every Australian should care because now the same AI corporations really are coming for you – for your water, your power, your nation’s sovereignty, and your very lives to harvest – your Insta photos, your TikTok videos and Facebook community pages, your dating site information and your search records.

And to what end? To make Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg even richer? More powerful? To be able to exert more control over us and our lives? Were Prime Minister Albanese to front an election rally today and explain why, 52 years after Whitlam, he is planning to sell off the farm, would anyone other than his $10,000 donor dinner partners cheer?

But what can we expect? A government that doesn’t understand its nation’s culture is a government incapable of leading the nation.

Richard Flanagan is a Booker Prize-winning author. His latest book is Heresies.

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