Launch of the UTS AI Industrial Report

I too would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet today.

I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters, and culture.

I really want to thank Roy and colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) for asking me to come and help launch the Turning AI into Productivity report. 

I intend to spend a bit of time on artificial intelligence part of that, not so much the productivity part because we’ll be here all night. 

This is, I think, a really important contribution for the way that Australia thinks about these questions.

I do want to congratulate the UTS, the Google Foundation and project leaders, Emeritus Professor Roy Green – an old friend of mine, an old collaborator of mine – and Dr John Howard, for this outstanding piece of work.

Roy Green is a prolific writer and researcher, and an experienced policy authority on industrial technological and innovation policy and why it matters.

But he can’t – nobody can – turn out a book as regularly as Dr John Howard.

John is to industrial, tech and innovation writing what Danielle Steel is to romantic novels.

It’s extraordinary.

I have a series of John Howard books in my CPO office.

It is a truism to say that artificial intelligence is changing the global economy but it is a little bit more to set out what that means.

Fundamental to strategic competition and therefore Australia’s future security and our economic resilience.

The question facing Australia is not whether AI will impact our economy, but it is how we position Australia to shape this critical technology in economic and strategic terms.

Prosperity, equity, good economic outcomes will not be delivered by the technology alone.

The countries that benefit most from this general purpose technology will not be those that just use AI the most.

They will be the countries that build the skills, institutions, infrastructure, and industrial capability needed to put AI to work.

That look beyond just generative AI.

That understand what capabilities that it makes sense, in resilience terms, to access from overseas.

What capabilities that we have a competitive advantage in and can and should build here at home. 

And leverage them to secure access to capabilities that are built elsewhere. 

As Roy and John put it: the technology is available everywhere, but the complementary factors that generate value are not.

That has clear implications for future economic and industrial growth, for productivity and for equity.

And it has clear national security and broader resilience implications too.

In an increasingly complex and uncertain global environment – a world that as a child of the 70s that we didn’t have – building economic resilience is key to determining future national strength.

Countries are racing to secure the same building blocks for that strength: compute, data, energy, critical minerals, scientific and engineering talent.

The outcome of the AI race will help determine who captures the economic and strategic benefits that flow from the diffusion of AI throughout economies.

The Albanese Government’s approach to this challenge is reasonably well articulated in the Future Made in Australia plan and its National Interest Framework.

Deploying and coordinating the levers of government with private sector partners to develop our future competitive advantage in renewable energy terms, and build the domestic capability required to create Australia’s long-term economic prosperity, our resilience, and our national security.

Identical national interest imperatives in the Future Made in Australia Act drive my consideration of the urgency of industrial policy effectiveness in critical technologies – AI and quantum – and in critical metals, in iron and steel, in copper, in fertiliser, in defence industry, in these food security areas.

The rationale is exactly the same. 

Australia has, and I think this is the core point that policymakers must pay attention to that is outlined in Roy and John’s report, Australia has a substantial current competitive advantage in industrial AI.

It brings together multiple areas where Australia has considerable strengths: physical AI, compute capability, and rich datasets.

Much of the global conversation about AI – witness what’s happening in the United States at the moment as global leaders converge on the UN General Assembly – focuses on frontier models, hyperscalers, and the race to build ever more powerful technologies.

But this report asks an equally relevant question for Australia: how can we apply these technologies to real industries and real production processes to realise real economic and capability opportunities?

The value is not generated by AI technologies themselves, but it’s about what people do and their application of AI to the real economy.

I saw industrial artificial intelligence in action last Friday during a visit to a new Australian business – Hysata in Port Kembla.

Hysata makes world-leading hydrogen electrolysers that take clean electricity from the grid and use it in the most efficient way possible in the world today, to turn that into hydrogen for industrial applications every day.

Supported, I have to say, by significant equity and grant support from the Commonwealth Government, but also more than $200 million worth of Australian support in the private sector.

Every day, their manufacturing process generates 100 million different bits of new engineering data points.

That is more information than even their most experienced engineers and current systems could examine in months.

Industrial AI helps turn that data into actionable information.

Those insights are then fed directly back into Hysata’s anode production line, increasing the capacity of that line by 15 per cent, ultimately reducing the cost of green hydrogen in a material and measurable way.

That is industrial AI in practice.

Technology applied to make Australian industry more productive and more competitive.

Firms like Hysata show us that Australia does not need to compete in every part of the AI stack to build a competitive economy.

We already have world-class capability in sectors such as advanced manufacturing, agriculture, mining, medical research, and defence.

We already have deep, specialised expertise and we have highly specialised, well-developed datasets.

The benefits of AI will not only be captured by those who build the biggest or the most capable foundational models.

They will also be captured by those who can apply and turn these models to specialised problems where pre-existing expertise, data, and industrial capability matter.

That is an Australian opportunity – that we are in a really good position to make sure that we realise.

In medical research, AI is critical to finding new drugs and diagnosing new disease faster.

Brisbane-based Gelomics is pioneering “physical-plus-digital” biomedicine, combining human tissue engineering with AI that makes the research and experimentation dramatically faster.

Their unique technology solution sees human cells embedded in proprietary hydrogels to replicate tissue, improving testing speed and reducing costs.

Our agricultural sector operates at a larger scale and in harsher conditions than those of most other countries.

That means we have developed unique agricultural knowledge and enormous datasets too that reflect our climate, soils, and farming practices. 

These cannot be replicated elsewhere and create opportunities to apply industrial AI to uniquely Australian challenges.

That logic extends to the infrastructure and technologies that underpin the development of AI.

Because artificial intelligence depends on more than models and algorithms.

It depends on critical minerals.

It depends on energy.

It depends on the data we supply it, and the rules and norms we shape it with.

And it depends on scientific breakthroughs in areas like quantum technologies.

In all these areas, Australia starts from a position of strength and in fact when you think about quantum technology, Sydney starts from a pretty good position too if I can be a little bit parochial about our quantum capability here in New South Wales.

We already produce many of the critical minerals needed to build the technologies of the future.

We have boundless space for new energy generation.

We are a global leader in quantum research and innovation.

Our datasets are rich and unique.

And due to, in no small part, our fantastic university system, and the work of the CSIRO.

I should have acknowledged Ming Long, the Chair of the CSIRO, who’s here.

The work of our science institutions has meant that we’ve had some stewardship of those datasets in coordination with our friends in the private sector.

That means we have a uniquely Australian asset, and they are not separate opportunities.

They are complementary strengths that reinforce one another and underpin Australia’s future industrial AI advantage.

But these capabilities do not create value in isolation.

Value is created when the research community, workers, firms, trade unions, and public science institutions are brought together with infrastructure particularly in strong place-based innovation ecosystems.

My view is that there is a tendency in Canberra, I’ve learnt over the last few years I’ve been hanging around Canberra, it’s very fashionable to talk down our capability.

The report that Roy and John have written demonstrates we have a really strong foundation to be optimistic and to fight for a stronger industrial future and have confidence that engaging industrial AI is absolutely central to that work.

The most successful economies are those that connect scientific and industrial capability.

I am impatient and focused on how we can bring that impact faster and in the right places.

Focusing on regions like the Hunter and Central Queensland which have real industrial opportunity.

I’ll be in Gladstone tomorrow – if you haven’t spent time in Gladstone, you should get up there. It’s a fantastic place – the beating industrial heart of regional Queensland.

I am also very focused on setting clear investment signals to capture the benefits of AI here in Australia.

Not just here in the CBD of our largest city, but in the outer suburbs and in our regions, so that we generate the strongest possible economic and social and democratic impact.

Last Friday, the Albanese Government released a consultation paper on the development of Australia’s AI Standards.

The Standards will ensure that Australia builds AI infrastructure and develops training in a way that works for Australia and Australians.

It will require an all-of-nation effort to capture the economic and resilience benefits and spread them across the whole economy.

The Parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence – there are colleagues in this room who’ve worked with me on Parliamentary Committees before and I apologise to them for the hard work they do, I’m not necessarily always enthusiastic about a new Parliamentary Committee.

This is a good opportunity, the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

It is part of our plan to elevate these questions and engage in good faith with colleagues across the Parliament and to encourage a quality, uniquely Australian, but quality national interest public discussion.

To work together, across the Parliament, on the opportunities and challenges.

Because these questions here for Australia and Australians are too important to ignore and too important to get wrong, or to leave for facile social media grabs or opportunistic political slogans.

That means building trust and building public confidence.

This report makes a deeply important contribution to this effort – it locates the artificial intelligence technology questions in a blue-collar and industrial context.

I think, in policy terms, for the first time a substantial way.

It takes the deep experience of its authors, the intellectual and technological expertise and it delivers on uniquely Australian evaluation of the industrial and sectoral implications for government, for the industry for our suburbs and our regional communities.

Thanks Roy, thanks John, for this work.

It’s now up to all of us to get cracking and put it to work.

Thank you very much.