Canberra Builds an AI Regulator While Bosses Axe Jobs

Qantas, NAB and Officeworks have announced that hundreds of local jobs are being axed and shifted overseas, with the bosses citing the AI boom and tech skills shortages as their reasons. The people holding those jobs weren't asked. The people who made the call will be fine.

That's the backdrop to this week's announcement from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who unveiled a new AI regulator with the power to enforce significant penalties. Canberra is calling the package "world-leading." Companies will have to maintain security controls, manage the risks from their models, notify governments rapidly of incidents, submit to independent evaluation, publish their safety and security frameworks, and keep pace as standards change.

Who Has the Power

Read that list again. Every obligation runs between AI companies and the government. Companies tell the state when something goes wrong. Companies submit to evaluation. Companies publish frameworks. The workers whose jobs are being shipped overseas and the communities living with these systems appear nowhere in it.

The announcement came during what the base reporting describes as a couple of days at home for the prime minister after returning from the Caribbean last week. In that same stretch, Albanese attended a Nepal Festival in Sydney and reversed his decision to sell off four historic defence sites. Governing, in other words, looks like a fast-moving schedule of photo opportunities, with a regulatory announcement slotted in between.

What They're Calling a Guide

The government has also released a draft of Australia's first best-practice guide on AI in the workplace. It came after months of talks with unions, employer groups and major companies, including Microsoft, Commonwealth Bank, Telstra and Kmart. Note the guest list. Four giant corporations sat at the table while the people who'll be managed by these systems were represented through institutional proxies.

The guide's stated aim is to balance AI regulation with its productivity potential. Whose productivity, the draft doesn't say. What it does recommend is soft: companies should give human workers a say in any AI decisions, provide training for new skills or tasks if workers' roles change because of AI, and share the technology's benefits through higher pay or shorter work hours.

Should. Urges. Best-practice. This is guidance, not a guarantee. Nothing in it stops a company from doing what Qantas, NAB and Officeworks have already done, which is cut hundreds of local jobs and point at the machines.

The Reform Trap

Here's the pattern. Companies cut jobs, citing AI. The government responds with a regulator and a voluntary guide, both negotiated with the same corporations doing the cutting. The regulator's strongest tools are aimed at safety and security incidents, not at the question of who owns the technology or who decides how it reorganizes work. The "human say" in the guide stops at AI decisions, and the right to share in the gains depends on the goodwill of employers.

Workers who watch their roles move offshore don't need a draft guide. They need control over the conditions of their own labour, something no regulator in Canberra is offering and no corporate roundtable will concede. Organizing in workplaces, building solidarity across industries, and demanding a direct say in how technology is deployed remain the only levers that have ever moved employers. Regulators arrive after the decisions are made.

The prime minister called it a major step forward. For the people whose jobs just left the country, the step landed somewhere else.