ADJOURNMENT

Ms CLUTTERHAM (Sturt) (19:35): Artificial intelligence and efficient and effective regulation can coexist. Government and industry can collaborate with respect to AI for the benefit of the Australian people. The private sector and public sector can realise a shared vision and goals when it comes to artificial intelligence.

But all of this takes leadership underpinned by three critical things: decisiveness, targeted stakeholder consultation and expertise. That is the approach this government is taking with respect to AI. By bringing government and industry together to develop policy solutions, it's possible to harness the opportunities, reduce the known risks and plan for future ones.

Partnerships of this nature mean there's no need to choose between letting innovation grow and flourish without controls or regulating to paralyse development. Regulation or innovation is a false choice. Both are important, with regulation needing to safely facilitate innovation, creativity, competition and entrepreneurship, not paralyse them.

Another false choice is deciding now whether AI will be an existential threat to the human race and then regulating on the basis of that choice. This is lazy, populist, apocalyptic thinking that helps no-one, creates unnecessary fear and discourages populations from embracing opportunity. It also paints industry as the bad guys when, in actual fact, it is industry that has the technology we want and that the Australian people expect we will have.

Most reasonable Australians will also accept that accessing and using artificial intelligence does require a level of regulation. It does not mean more government or bigger government for the sake of it. It means targeted government action informed by public sector and private sector industrial expertise, so that relevant issues like urban and regional planning, energy and water use, economic development, workforce planning, education, service delivery, organisational accountability and community confidence can be confidently and expertly managed.

This is to make sure that once a particular aspect of artificial intelligence really gets going, we have the understanding and means to intervene—not to paralyse it but to manage it in the event that unintended consequences begin to play out. First and foremost, regulation with respect to artificial intelligence must have two key objectives. Regulation must both reduce harm and promote timely access to evidence based technological resources that benefit people.

Achieving these two objectives requires consideration of different criteria. Firstly, regulation must be proportionately incremental, integrating lessons learned from measurable data at each step along the technology's development. It must also recognise and reflect that there are different regulatory layers and address them in a tailored way.

Regulating the AI infrastructure layer, the AI frontier layer and then the AI application layer will require different approaches, and some layers may require less regulation than others. Regulation must also reflect and speak to existing public policy frameworks such as competition, industrial relations and energy. And, in this sense, it must be developed in a way which does not impose disproportionate or new and excessive compliance and reporting burdens on industry.

It must be developed in a way that is proportionate to the actual risk and the actual evidence based opportunity. It should be designed in the way that the technology should be—with gateways, so a single regulatory action does not lead to an irreversible outcome or cause unnecessary paralysis. Finally, regulation must encourage trust and confidence between government and industry because it's only through effective and efficient partnerships between government and industry that we will be able to build the foundations upon which the benefits can be safely harnessed and the risks minimised.

We are already seeing a divergence of regulatory approaches across the globe. The EU is proceeding by prioritising rights based safeguards, the US is prioritising innovation and China is prioritising strategic control. But global collaboration is crucial.

International interoperability is crucial to ensure that regulation is not only compatible but fair, allowing all nations the opportunity to harness the benefits of artificial intelligence. That is the challenge before us and that is what the Prime Minister was calling for in Australia's national statement at the UN last month. That call was urgent and that call was right.