Australia can be a leading AI nation, if we want to be. We just need to invest in the right places and ramp up the pace.
This week the Australian government announced its National AI Plan. As someone building an AI company here in Australia, I have to say it: this plan isn’t ambitious enough.
Here’s why.
We aren’t meeting the moment
AI won’t just transform tech, it will transform every industry. The AI revolution will likely reshape our economy more rapidly and profoundly than the Industrial Revolution.
Yet, the plan focuses on incremental gains instead of big, long-term bets. This moment requires urgency and bold investment, not cautious pilots and commitments.
We risk building a “sovereign AI” echo chamber
The plan invests in domestic AI infrastructure and local capabilities. That’s good in principle.
However, if the focus becomes inward – favouring locally built systems without strong international collaboration – we risk hampering competitiveness and operating in isolation.
We ignore the bottleneck: energy
AI data centres require energy. Their value, capacity and competitiveness are determined by the availability of power.
We simply cannot become an AI leader where energy infrastructure is insufficient and cannot export AI if our compute is expensive and constrained. We have always had a resource-led economy.
Let’s free these resources up to use onshore for AI.
We are positioning ourselves as consumers, not producers
Those who don’t produce become AI consumers – and must accept prices subject to the monopolistic positions of others.
That is not sovereignty and not something we should be aiming for. While we may not be able to compete with the US or China on foundational model research and development, we need to invest in becoming an AI producing nation:
- global AI infrastructure hub;
- world-class incubator for AI business;
- prime population to test for measuring AIs impact on national productivity and progress, especially in healthcare;
- substantive leadership from federal and state governments that incentivises action and rapid roll out of AI solutions and the infrastructure that supports it.
We focus on ‘everyone benefiting’, missing the right adoption levers
Encouraging AI adoption is fine – but like the internet, mass benefit didn’t come from subsidies and it started asymmetrically at first. That’s expected.
It came from robust infrastructure and making technology readily available.
Related
If we want to unlock national productivity and harness AI to truly have an impact on how we live, we need: cheaper energy, abundant compute and leading data infrastructure.
We are vague on governance
“Keeping Australia safe” is, of course, the right aspiration, but the plan relies on existing regulatory frameworks.
We need clear, modern governance, transparency, independent oversight, and real accountability.
Instead of slowing progress across the board to guard against bad actors, we should allow innovation to move quickly by default and impose targeted, proportionate consequences for those who act in bad faith.
Australia can be a leading AI nation, if we want to be.
The plan acknowledges AI’s impact in healthcare. At Heidi, we’ve seen it firsthand: our recent rollout across New Zealand shows how responsible, large-scale deployment of AI can transform healthcare systems quickly and safely. This benefits clinicians, patients and society at large.
Australia can do the same and more. We just need to invest in the right places and ramp up the pace.
Dr Thomas Kelly is the cofounder of Heidi Health.
This article was originally published on Dr Kelly’s LinkedIn feed. Read the original here.