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Acknowledgements

I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. I extend that acknowledgment to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People here today.

I’d also like to acknowledge:

• Shri. Manish Tewari, Indian MP and Chair of India’s Parliamentary Friends of Australia
• Hon. Tim Watts MP, Special Envoy for the Indian Ocean Region
• Hon. Anoulack Chanthivong, NSW Minister for Industry and Trade
• H.E. Nagesh Singh, Indian High Commissioner to Australia
• H.E. Philip Green, Australian High Commissioner to India
• Aparna Ray, Joint Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs
• Paul Grimes, CEO of Austrade
• David Borger, Business Western Sydney, Executive Director
• Anthony Bubalo, CEO, Asia Society Australia
• Indrani Bagchi, CEO, Ananta Aspen Centre

Thank you to the Asia Society and the Ananta Aspen Centre for bringing us together.

A Personal Starting Point

I want to start somewhere personal.

A short drive from where we sit today is a suburb called Harris Park, in the heart of my electorate. It’s named after John Harris, an Irish-born navy surgeon who arrived in Sydney in 1791 after a posting to India. When Harris built his Parramatta farmstead, he didn’t model it on the houses of his County Londonderry youth. He modelled it on the colonial bungalows he’d lived in along the Bay of Bengal — wide verandahs, high ceilings, the architecture of a hot and humid place.

Two centuries later, more than half the residents of Harris Park were born in India. The old timber cottages are now sari shops, jewellery stores, and some of the best dosa restaurants in Sydney. The locals call it Little India.

I tell this story because it captures something true about the Australia-India relationship: the connections between our countries are older, deeper, and more woven into the fabric of daily Australian life than people often recognise. And the diaspora I represent in Western Sydney is the living proof of it.

The India That Exists Now

Earlier this year I led the Australian delegation to the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. More than 100 countries, 15 heads of state, and a palpable sense that consequential decisions were being made in real time.

What India laid out at that Summit was a vision of AI for good — technology in service of human development, deployed at scale, anchored in democratic values. And India spoke on that subject with a credibility that few other nations can match.

Because India is the living proof of what its leaders were arguing. Over the past decade, India has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty using digital tools that the rest of the world is still trying to understand. The Unified Payments Interface put modern banking in the hands of street vendors and subsistence farmers. Aadhaar gave a billion people a verifiable identity, and with it, access to services and entitlements that had been out of reach for generations. The Open Network for Digital Commerce is now doing the same for small business. No country in history has used technology to expand human opportunity on the scale that India has — and is.

That credibility matters. It means that when India talks about AI being safe, trustworthy, and broadly beneficial, it isn’t speaking in the abstract. It’s speaking from experience.

And it’s a vision Australia shares. Our two countries have more in common on the values that should shape technology than is often appreciated. We are both democracies that believe sovereignty rests with citizens, not with platforms or with states that hide behind them. We both believe that workers should have a voice in how technology is deployed around them, not just a notification that it has been. We both believe the benefits of AI must be broadly shared, not concentrated in a handful of firms or geographies. And we both believe that the rules governing this technology should be written by open societies, in the open, with the people they affect in the room.

The task ahead is to transpose those shared values into the technologies of the future. The architecture of AI — its data, its models, its standards, its governance — is being built right now. If democracies don’t shape it, others will. Australia and India, working together, are well placed to ensure that the AI systems of the next decade reflect the values of open societies, not the convenience of closed ones.

That convergence is the product of decades of growing trust and deepening cooperation — and a recognition that Australia and India need each other in ways that go well beyond the transactional.

Calibrating to the India of Today

It also means that the Australia-India relationship needs to be calibrated to the India that exists now, not the India of a decade ago.

When I was writing my book on Australia’s relationship with India, I traced a long story of missed connections. For most of the post-war period, Australia and India were locked in what one observer called “an unbridgeable gulf of time, distance and culture.” Between 1947 and 1980, India fell from Australia’s third-largest trading partner to its nineteenth. We spoke of common bonds — Cricket, Curry and Commonwealth — but the economic fundamentals weren’t there.

That India no longer exists. Today India is the world’s fifth largest economy, on track to be the third by the end of the decade. Bengaluru’s metro GDP is around US$300 billion, and it has become Asia’s biggest market for venture capital. The foundations for partnership are the strongest they have ever been.

The Tech Relationship We Already Have (and Rarely Talk About)

When people talk about the Australia-India economic relationship, they usually reach for the familiar headlines: ECTA, two-way trade hitting $50 billion for the first time in 2024–25, Australian exports excluding coal up nearly 70 per cent since the agreement took effect.

Those numbers matter. But I think the most extraordinary part of our economic relationship with India is one of the least discussed: the deep technology partnership that Australian businesses have quietly been building with India for 35 years.

It started in 1989, when ANZ established a hub in Bangalore with 400 software programmers. Coles followed in 1999, offshoring its credit card processing. Hutchison moved 200 customer support roles to Mumbai in 2003. Telstra moved 450 IT jobs the following year, and Optus did the same with its call centre operations. In 2011, Macquarie set up its global services centre in Gurugram, handling technology, operations and business support for one of Australia’s most sophisticated financial institutions.

That was just the beginning. Today, every major bank, telco, insurer and retailer on the ASX has substantial operations in India — directly, or through giants like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant and Capgemini. Tata Consulting Services alone employs more than half a million people in India. Some estimates suggest large Australian companies employ more than 300,000 people in India directly or through contractors. One Australian bank, on its own, has nearly 30,000 people working for it in India.

Think about what that means. Hundreds of thousands of Indian engineers, accountants, analysts and developers wake up each morning and do work that powers the Australian economy. They process our payments, run our customer service, manage our IT systems, do our payroll. Most Australians have no idea — but if you’ve called your bank, lodged an insurance claim, or used any major Australian app this year, there’s a good chance an Indian colleague helped make it work.

And this isn’t a one-way story. Inside Australia, Indian-born Australians are six times more likely to be in an ICT profession than the Australian average. STEM professionals of Indian heritage build Australian companies, run Australian research institutions, and underpin our digital ecosystem. ICT is now the single largest occupation among Indian-born Australians.

If you map that out, you get a picture that looks something like this: a digital workforce that spans the Indian Ocean, mostly invisible, running on optic fibre and trust. It is, in my view, the single most important and underappreciated dimension of the modern Australia-India relationship.

The question for this dialogue is how we move from a relationship of cost arbitrage to one of genuine partnership — where Australia and India build the next generation of technology together, not just where one country builds and the other consumes.

The Bilateral Architecture

The good news is the architecture is already taking shape.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund, which has supported more than 90 collaborative projects with over $100 million in joint investment. In February, our government announced five new joint research projects worth $3.76 million spanning clean energy and biotech. We’re partners in the Quad’s technology security work, and we’ve recently entered a trilateral Technology and Innovation Partnership with Canada and India.

Underneath all of it is the relationship that, for me, matters most. Indian-born Australians are now the largest overseas-born group in Australia for the first time on record. I see, every weekend in my electorate, the way Indian-Australians have enriched not just our economy but our culture, our politics, and our sense of who we are as a nation.

Why Technology is the Unlock

When Peter Varghese delivered his 2018 India Economic Strategy, he argued that “no market over the next 20 years offers more opportunity to Australia.” He was right — and the lever doing most of the work to open that market is technology.

The New Roadmap identifies Clean Energy, Agribusiness and Technology, Education and Skills, and Tourism as priority sectors. My stronger claim is this: technology — particularly AI and digital infrastructure — is increasingly the key driver of trade competitiveness, supply chain resilience, and economic growth across every one of those sectors.

Take supply chains. The disruptions of recent years have shown the cost of concentration. Australia and India, as democracies with complementary industrial profiles, are natural partners — but resilient supply chains will increasingly run on logistics platforms, data-sharing frameworks and interoperable payments. Technology isn’t incidental to resilience. It’s the medium through which resilience is built.

Take clean energy. Australia has the renewable resources; India has extraordinary engineering capability and a vast deployment market. Optimising grids, managing demand response, and integrating storage are fundamentally technical problems — exactly the kinds of problems our AISRF projects and accelerators like RISE are already working on together.

Take talent. The story I told earlier — of hundreds of thousands of Indian workers powering Australian companies, combined with a diaspora that already runs much of our domestic tech sector — gives us a foundation almost no other country has. The opportunity is to build on it deliberately.

Practical Outcomes

So I think we should be ambitious about what we are trying to achieve today.

On AI governance, our alignment is strong. The principles in Australia’s National AI Plan, released late last year, sit comfortably alongside India’s approach. The task now is to turn alignment into cooperation: on critical and emerging technologies, AI research collaboration, secure supply chains, and regional Indo-Pacific engagement.

On digital infrastructure, the combination of India’s scale and Australia’s regulatory sophistication is a powerful one. India’s digital public infrastructure is one of the great policy achievements of the 21st century. This dialogue is the right forum to explore how we put that combination to work.

On trade and investment, implementing ECTA and negotiating the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement needs to be matched by the business-to-business and research-to-research connections that turn agreements into real outcomes.

Closing

I’ll close where I began — with Harris Park.

That little Sydney suburb, with its Indian shops set in colonial cottages on land that produced Australia’s first successful crop, reminds me that the relationship between Australia and India was never destined to be distant. It was, for too long, neglected.

That neglect is over. The nations that build the technologies of the future will capture their value. Those that merely use them risk becoming their vassals. If Australia and India are to be genuine partners in the technologies that will define the coming decades, we need to build them together — across the Indian Ocean, and across our two diasporas, grounded in the democratic values we share.

The relationship between Australia and India has never been healthier. That’s just as well — because the stakes have never been higher.

I look forward to a frank and productive conversation. Thank you.