Australian culture, resources and democracy for $4,300 a year? Thanks for the offer, tech bros, but no thanks; The Guardian, December 15, 2025

 Peter Lewis , The Guardian; Australian culture, resources and democracy for $4,300 a year? Thanks for the offer, tech bros, but no thanks

"According to the Tech Council, AI will deliver $115bn in annual productivity (or about $4,300 per person), rubbery figures generated by industry-commissioned research based on estimates on hours saved with no regard for jobs lost, the distribution of the promised dividend benefit or how the profits will flow.

In return for this ill-defined bounty, Farquhar says our government will need to allow the tech industry to do three things: build a data and text mining exemption to copyright law, rapidly scale data centre infrastructure and allow foreign companies to use these centres without regard for local laws. This is a proposition that demands closer scrutiny.

The use of copyrighted content to train AI has been a burning issue since 2023 when a massive data dredge saw more than 190,000 authors (including me) have our works plundered without our consent to train AI. Musicians and artists too have had their work scraped and repurposed.

This theft has been critical in training the large language models to portray something approaching empathy. It has also allowed paid users to take this stolen content and ape creators, devaluing and diminishing their work in the process. Nick Cave has described this as “replication as travesty”, noting “songs arise out of suffering … data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing.”

The sense of grievance among creators over the erasure of culture is wide and deep. A wave of creators from Peter Garrett to Tina Arena, Anna Funderand Trent Dalton have determined this is the moment to take a stand.

It is not just the performers; journalists, academics, voiceover and visual artists are all being replaced by shittier but cheaper automated products built on the theft of their labour, undermining the integrity of their work and will ultimately take their jobs.

Like fossil fuels, what is being extracted and consumed is the sum of our accumulated history. It goes from metaphor to literal when it comes to the second plank of Farquhar’s pitch: massive spending on industrial infrastructure to accommodate AI.

This imperative to power AI is the justification used by Donald Trump to recharge the mining of fossil fuels, while the industry is beating the “modular nuclear” drum for a cleaner AI revolution. Meanwhile, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, is reassuring us that we don’t need to stress because AI will solve climate change anyway!

The third and final element of Farquhar’s pitch is probably its most revealing. If Australia wants to build this AI nirvana, foreign nations should be given diplomatic immunity for the data centres built and operated here. This quaint notion of the “data embassy” overriding national sovereignty reinforces a growing sense that the tech sector is moving beyond the idea of the nation state governing corporations to that of a modern imperial power.

That’s the premise of Karen Hao’s book The Empire of AI, which chronicles the rise of OpenAI and the choices it made to trade off safety and the public good in pursuit of scale and profit."

Proposal to allow use of Australian copyrighted material to train AI abandoned after backlash; The Guardian, December 19, 2025

Patrick Commins , The Guardian; Proposal to allow use of Australian copyrighted material to train AI abandoned after backlash

"The Productivity Commission has abandoned a proposal to allow tech companies to mine copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models, after a fierce backlash from the creative industries.

Instead, the government’s top economic advisory body recommended the government wait three years before deciding whether to establish an independent review of Australian copyright settings and the impact of the disruptive new technology...

In its interim report on the digital economy, the commission floated the idea of granting a “fair dealing” exemption to copyright rules that would allow AI companies to mine data and text to develop their large language models...

The furious response from creative industries to the commission’s idea included music industry bodies saying it would “legitimise digital piracy under guise of productivity”."

'It's insulting they think we can't handle it': The Australian teens banned from social media; BBC, December 10, 2025

Katy Watson , BBC; 'It's insulting they think we can't handle it': The Australian teens banned from social media

"With nearly all her friends living at least 100km away, social media is a lifeline. But not anymore, now that Australia's social media ban for children has taken effect.

"Taking away our socials is just taking away how we talk to each other," Breanna says. 

While she can still text her friends, it's not the same as a quick "snap" or a "like" on a photo that allows her to play a part in their lives even when she is far away."

'This is the end': Australian teens mourn loss of social media as ban begins; Reuters, December 10, 2025

Christine Chen, Reuters ; 'This is the end': Australian teens mourn loss of social media as ban begins

"Australian teenagers have taken to social media for the last time to farewell their followers and mourn the loss of the platforms that shaped much of their lives before a world-first ban took effect on Wednesday.

In the hours leading up to the ban's midnight start (1300 GMT on Tuesday), a flurry of goodbye messages came from teenagers - as well as adults - on platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Reddit.

Australia has ordered 10 major platforms including TikTok, Alphabet's YouTube and Meta's nstagram and Facebook to block around one million users under the age of 16 or face massive fines.

Some 200,000 accounts have already been deactivated on TikTok alone, the government said, with "hundreds of thousands" to be blocked in the coming days.

Young Australians, who have grown up using social media, faced the prospect of losing access to their favourite apps with a mix of sadness, humour and disbelief."

ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons; The Guardian, September 17, 2025

 Amanda Meade , The Guardian; ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons

"The ABC has been barred from attending Donald Trump’s press conference near London this week after a clash between the broadcaster’s Americas editor, John Lyons, and the president in Washington DC over his business dealings.

The Australian broadcaster said its London bureau was informed by Downing Street that its accreditation to attend the press conference had been withdrawn for “logistical reasons”...

Lyons, who is reporting for Four Corners, drew the ire of the president on Tuesday when he asked Trump how much wealthier he had become since returning to the Oval Office for his second term in January.

Trump accused the reporter of “hurting Australia” with the line of questioning.

“In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now,” Trump said. “And they want to get along with me.

“You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone. You can set a nicer tone.”

Trump subsequently told Lyons: “Quiet.”"

Watering down Australia’s AI copyright laws would sacrifice writers’ livelihoods to ‘brogrammers’; The Guardian, August 11, 2025

 Tracey Spicer, The Guardian; Watering down Australia’s AI copyright laws would sacrifice writers’ livelihoods to ‘brogrammers’

"My latest book, which is about artificial intelligence discriminating against people from marginalised communities, was composed on an Apple Mac.

Whatever the form of recording the first rough draft of history, one thing remains the same: they are very human stories – stories that change the way we think about the world.

A society is the sum of the stories it tells. When stories, poems or books are “scraped”, what does this really mean?

The definition of scraping is to “drag or pull a hard or sharp implement across (a surface or object) so as to remove dirt or other matter”.

A long way from Brisbane or Bangladesh, in the rarefied climes of Silicon Valley, scrapers are removing our stories as if they are dirt.

These stories are fed into the machines of the great god: generative AI. But the outputs – their creations – are flatter, less human, more homogenised. ChatGPT tells tales set in metropolitan areas in the global north; of young, cishet men and people living without disability.

We lose the stories of lesser-known characters in remote parts of the world, eroding our understanding of the messy experience of being human.

Where will we find the stories of 64-year-old John from Traralgon, who died from asbestosis? Or seven-year-old Raha from Jaipur, whose future is a “choice” between marriage at the age of 12 and sexual exploitation?

OpenAI’s creations are not the “machines of loving grace” envisioned in the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, where he dreams of a “cybernetic meadow”.

Scraping is a venal money grab by oligarchs who are – incidentally – scrambling to protect their own intellectual property during an AI arms race.

The code behind ChatGPT is protected by copyright, which is considered to be a literary work. (I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.)

Meta has already stolen the work of thousands of Australian writers.

Now, our own Productivity Commission is considering weakening our Copyright Act to include an exemption for text and data mining, which may well put us out of business.

In its response, The Australia Institute uses the analogy of a car: “Imagine grabbing the keys for a rental car and just driving around for a while without paying to hire it or filling in any paperwork. Then imagine that instead of being prosecuted for breaking the law, the government changed the law to make driving around in a rental car legal.”

It’s more like taking a piece out of someone’s soul, chucking it into a machine and making it into something entirely different. Ugly. Inhuman.

The commission’s report seems to be an absurdist text. The argument for watering down copyright is that it will lead to more innovation. But the explicit purpose of the Copyright Act is to protect innovation, in the form of creative endeavour.

Our work is being devalued, dismissed and destroyed; our livelihoods demolished.

In this age of techno-capitalism, it appears the only worthwhile innovation is being built by the “brogrammers”.

US companies are pinching Australian content, using it to train their models, then selling it back to us. It’s an extractive industry: neocolonialism, writ large."

Australia passes landmark social media ban for children under 16; NBC News, November 28, 2024

Peter Guo, Jennifer Jett and Brian Cheng , NBC News; Australia passes landmark social media ban for children under 16

"Australian lawmakers on Thursday approved a landmark ban on social media for children under 16, in some of the world’s toughest such controls. 

The ban, which aims to address the impact of excessive social media use on children’s physical and mental health, affects social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit, but not YouTube.

The platforms, which bear sole responsibility for enforcement, have one year to figure out how to implement the age limit, which is the highest set by any country. If there are systemic failures to keep children from having accounts, the platforms are liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million).

Senators debated the legislation late into the night on the last day of their parliamentary session, which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor government had targeted as the deadline for it to pass. The bill, which is also largely supported by the opposition Liberal party, passed the Australian House of Representatives on Wednesday by a vote of 102 to 13.

Supporters of the ban have cited the effect of harmful depictions of body image on girls and the effect of misogynistic content on boys. Its passage comes after a series of Australian teenagers died by suicide over what their families said was online bullying."

Intellectual property waiver for COVID vaccines should be expanded to include treatments and tests; The Conversation, November 21, 2022

 Deborah Gleeson, Associate Professor in Public Health, La Trobe University, Dianne Nicol

Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Tasmania, James Scheibner
Lecturer in Law, Flinders University, The Conversation;

 Intellectual property waiver for COVID vaccines should be expanded to include treatments and tests

"Low and middle-income countries have been impacted disproportionately by the pandemic so far, suffering 85% of the estimated 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021. 

Globally, progress in reducing extreme poverty was set back three to four years during 2020–21. But low-income countries lost eight to nine years of progress.

Expanding the WTO decision on COVID vaccines to include treatments and tests could be vital to reduce the health burden on poorer countries from COVID and enable them to recover from the pandemic. The Australian government should get behind this initiative and encourage other countries to do the same."

Aboriginal flag copyright transferred to Commonwealth, as artist agrees to make flag freely available to all; ABC News, January 24, 2022

Jake Evans, ABC News; Aboriginal flag copyright transferred to Commonwealth, as artist agrees to make flag freely available to all

"The iconic flag that has become a symbol of Aboriginal Australia is now freely available for public use, after its designer agreed to transfer copyright to the Commonwealth following long negotiations.

Luritja artist Harold Thomas created the flag in 1970 to represent Aboriginal people and their connection to the land, and it has been an official national flag since the end of the last century — but its copyright remained with Mr Thomas.

Anyone who wanted to use the flag legally had to ask permission or pay a fee.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt said following negotiations with Mr Thomas, the flag now belonged to all Australians...

Copyright issues with the flag had repeatedly drawn conflict, such as when Mr Thomas handed the rights to use the flag on clothing to a non-Indigenous company, which later threatened legal action against the NRL and AFL for using the flag on player uniforms.

That led to Mr Wyatt encouraging football fans to drape themselves in the Aboriginal flag in protest.

Mr Thomas will retain moral rights over the flag, but has agreed to give up copyright in return for all future royalties the Commonwealth receives from flag sales to be put towards the ongoing work of NAIDOC.

The government has also agreed to establish an annual scholarship in Mr Thomas's honour worth $100,000 for Indigenous students to develop skills in leadership, and to create an online history and education portal for the flag."

Pig heart transplants: ethics, regulations and why we shouldn't expect to see them in Australia soon; ABC Science News, January 21, 2022

Belinda Smith, ABC Science News; Pig heart transplants: ethics, regulations and why we shouldn't expect to see them in Australia soon

"So what are some of these ethical quandaries around the practice of transplanting organs and tissues between species — a technique called xenotransplantation — and can we expect to see pig hearts in chests in Australia soon?"

The Selfishness of Novak Djokovic; The Atlantic, January 15, 2022

Jemele Hill, The Atlantic; The Selfishness of Novak Djokovic

"Sacrificing is what caring communities do—and it’s something Djokovic knows nothing about. As the top player in men’s tennis, Djokovic has a responsibility to be a good ambassador for his sport. But that, like Australia’s COVID rules, is just another requirement that he’s failed to meet."

The self-belief that made Novak Djokovic a champion has put him in limbo in Australia; The Washington Post, January 6, 2022

Liz Clarke, The Washington Post; The self-belief that made Novak Djokovic a champion has put him in limbo in Australia

"Two qualities in particular set the 6-2, 170-pound Djokovic apart:

A fanatical adherence to a strict gluten-free diet and a program of stretching and exercise that has transformed his otherwise unremarkable physique (much like Tom Brady) into a purpose-built, pliable winning machine.

And profound self-belief and self-determination that have pulled him from the brink of defeat in countless high-stakes matches. Djokovic’s inner belief is arguably his greatest asset, but it doesn’t necessarily mesh with decision-making for the greater good — such as complying with vaccine mandates amid a global pandemic."

Rahaf al-Qunun has been granted asylum in Australia, Thai official says; CNN, January 11, 2019

Kocha Olarn and Helen Regan, CNN; Rahaf al-Qunun has been granted asylum in Australia, Thai official says

"Her online campaign was so successful that Saudi charge d'affaires Abdalelah Mohammed A. al-Shuaibi told Thai officials through a translator: "We wish they had confiscated her phone instead of her passport."

Qunun later tweeted the video of that meeting and wrote that her "Twitter account has changed the game against what he wished for me.""

Watching America lose its moral authority in real time; Washington Post, July 14, 2017

Dana Milbank, Washington Post; Watching America lose its moral authority in real time

"I traveled with my family in Australia for three weeks as a guest of the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, invited to explain what’s happening in President Trump’s America.

As if there were an explanation.

Of more interest was what I learned from the Australians. To visit this stalwart ally and talk with its people was to see how the United States, in the space of just a few months, has utterly lost its moral authority."

Judge compares offensive Facebook posts to football in sentencing Sydney man; Guardian, 7/28/16

Elle Hunt, Guardian; Judge compares offensive Facebook posts to football in sentencing Sydney man:

"Research from Our Watch and Plan International Australia found 70% of young Australian women aged between 15 and 19 believed online harassment and bullying to be endemic.

Siobhan McCann, the policy manager for Plan International Australia, said the majority of girls and young women received some sort of online abuse every day, but only one in three said they would report it.

“We wonder if this is because young women don’t feel supported by the legal system.

“We hope today’s small victory sends a message that abusing women in the digital space is just as legitimate a crime as abuse on the street or at home. And we hope trolls will take note that they can be charged and tried for it.”"

From Julia Gillard to Hillary Clinton: online abuse of politicians around the world; Guardian, 6/26/16

Elle Hunt, Nick Evershed and Ri Liu, Guardian; From Julia Gillard to Hillary Clinton: online abuse of politicians around the world:

"Hillary Clinton received almost twice as much abuse as Bernie Sanders on Twitter this year, according to a wide-ranging analysis provided to the Guardian that compared the treatment of politicians in the US, UK and Australia.

The abuse of politicians online, particularly women, is perceived by some to come with the territory. But as high-profile cases flag the urgent need to clean up the web, the scope of the problem is now revealed in greater detail in work by a Brisbane-based social data company, Max Kelsen.

The analysis looked at leadership contests involving both male and female politicians, with the aim of examining if abuse differed between politicians at similar levels in their parties...

As recently as in the past six months, there has been a growing intolerance of online abuse of public figures, spurred on by high-profile cases across the world, reflected in the Guardian’s The web we want series."