Australia’s (conflicting) national AI interests: water, data centres and creativity

[Georgia Jenkins]

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Australia’s (conflicting) national AI interests: water, data centres and creativity

 Georgia Jenkins Thursday, July 16, 2026 - AI, AI creative fund, Artificial Intelligence, Australia, copyright policy, cultural heritage, Georgia Jenkins, TDM, theft

A Kat with a diificult choice ahead Photo by Sandro Moser on Unsplash

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave other countries some critical feedback on their copyright policy in his speech, ‘AI in Australia’s Interests’, last Wednesday, and reflected that: ‘No country has gotten it right’. Only last year, Australia set AI copyright debates aflame by making the supposedly controversial claim that it would not consider introducing a text and data mining (TDM) exception. While only one part of a broader AI ‘social licence’, those outside Australia watch with bated breath as its government strives to put creators first.


The speech

Albanese began his speech by reminiscing on the 1980s in Australia. Aside from INXS, Paul Hogan’s ‘Shrimp on the barbie’ tourism campaigns, and the rise of Kylie Minogue on Neighbours, Albanese reflected on Australia, again, doing it differently. Notably, under another labour government, Medicare, Australia’s universal health insurance policy, was created and introduced by a man known for, amongst other things, wearing a blazer emblazoned with the words ‘Australia’. Much of Albanese’s speech was based on this foundation: The idea that a government can combine both economic reform with social justice policies.

Narrating a national story of collectiveness from workers’ rights, women’s voting rights, superannuation, and stretching to the social media ban last year, Albanese’s speech characterized Australian legislative reform as somewhat of a global underdog – taking on issues that others declare insurmountable and setting an international standard. This was then quickly applied in the context of AI in which the opportunities presented by AI are set against the risks, described by Albanese as a ‘choice’ that Australia can still make.

It seems that the Australian Federal Government contends that there is a space to set the terms of this choice through what they term ‘AI’s social licence’. Much of this choice is dependent on balancing innovation against wider societal harms. For those not following the discussion surrounding the Australian AI copyright policy, the statement made by Albanese that Australian artists and Australian media require the ‘strongest possible protection’, is incredibly powerful. Only a few weeks ago, Australian artists travelled to Canberra, the seat of Australia’s Federal Parliament, because a rumour had spread that the Government was considering an AI industry proposal that would effectively allow TDM.

And then comes the balance. The social licence hinges on Australia possessing requirements for the expansion of AI: space and resources. These are attractive features for AI companies that purportedly allow Australia to set terms that are in ‘Australia’s National Interests’. Naturally these are conflicting interests. However, it would seem that a non-negotiable is that ‘Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work’. This is explained as having control over the use of ‘Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI’. As Albanese remarks, ‘not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs’.

Among other horizontal issues related to AI, AI copyright policy will be overseen by the Office of AI, sitting within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet who intend to publish new ‘Australian standards’ to shape this societal licence.

 

The revival of the copyright-theft argument

Again, this debate is being framed through the lens of property. In the context of artists controlling the price and value of the work, Albanese remarks that ‘Anything less [than that] is theft’. Many will remember the use of a similar rhetoric in the anti-piracy campaigns in the early 2000s (e.g. “You wouldn’t steal a car’). Imagery is important. The transformation of an infringing copyright act into theft ‘implies that property has been stolen’. Many have written extensively on the dangers of a Lockean approach to copyright law that has the potential to expand copyright’s boundaries far beyond its initial, limited monopoly. But ‘theft’ does galvanise public sentiment…

The point is not to deny that using copyright works used to train AI models or allowing their outputs to displace creative labour causes harm. It is to suggest that harm also occurs at a broader societal level. This is not a problem akin to theft. Instead, it forms part of a wider systemic issue that extends far beyond TDM related activities. It requires us to ask harder questions about the effectiveness of the copyright system, particularly given that it already struggles to meet its own objectives, namely paying authors.

 

Additional remarks

It is a ‘choice’ to characterise a nation’s legislative record as akin to a global underdog with fair and democratic moral standards. It shouldn’t be forgotten that there is a broader context of data centre investment. In a country that is already ‘drought-prone and water scarce’, the idea to set the terms of an AI social license by dangling space and resources is concerning. One such space is apparently Sydney where it has been reported that ‘If all 41 in the pipeline or under assessment are built, they would directly use 15–20% of Sydney’s water supply within a decade’.

It was also proposed that data centres should be located in regions where ‘water is more abundant and cheaper’; implicitly shifting the burden elsewhere. As a West Australian, this new ‘mining boom’ feels very familiar. It hides the uneven distribution of environmental costs and expects communities with greater natural resources to absorb the disproportionate ecological impact.

The same can be said of Australian creators. Indeed, the rumoured TDM exception was allegedly in exchange for a $350m AI creative fund to compensate artists and a $50bn datacentre investment proposal from the AI industry. Only a few weeks prior, The Atlantic’s ‘AI Watchdog tool’ revealed that ‘millions’ of Australian and New Zealand songs formed part of ‘giant datasets of songs that are being shared within the AI-development community’. In response, Dame Hinewehi Mohi, the Director of Māori Membership APRA AMCOS, reflected on the depth of this extraction, commenting that:

The theft of our music strikes at the very heart of our identity and cultural heritage. Once taken, its integrity cannot truly be restored. Through the indiscriminate scraping of AI systems, our music is stripped of its context, distilled, diluted, and disconnected from its origins. This erasure cuts deeply into the essence of who I am, not only as a creator and advocate for local music, but as an Indigenous person whose culture, stories, and identity are woven into every note.

As many have observed before, without human creativity there would be no generative AI. This is particularly true from a collective lens as it is the totality of individual acts of creativity that generates value far exceeding an individual licence. One whose aggregate socio-cultural value makes such data indispensable within AI data infrastructures. Its use, in this Kat’s view, is more aptly described as societal appropriation. It suggests that the risk presented to human creativity is not individual, but relational. When AI models are trained on copyright works and generate outputs with a substitutionary effect, it displaces communication between creators, users and the public. It displaces the very meaning of human creativity.

So when legal responses to these kinds of wider societal harms are discussed, the starting point should be its collective nature. We need more of that fiery collective spirit to propose interventions that combine economic reform with social justice policies. Let’s just hope that Australia still has the chance to make that decision.

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