Tin-Foil Kangaroos
Australia Leads the Global AI Freak-Out - What Is It Really Costing Us?
We’re officially the jumpiest mob on Earth
An Ipsos Global Advisor survey of 31 countries found 69 percent of Australians feel nervous about AI products and services - the highest “anxiety score” on the planet and nearly 20 points above the global average.
While neighbours in Thailand and Indonesia are busy wiring chat-bots to book dinner reservations, we’re busy checking the pantry for extra Cling Wrap.
How did we get so twitchy?
Australia’s AI phobia is a four-way car-pile-up:
- Robodebt flashbacks. One doomed algorithm, a royal commission and a $1.8 billion mea-culpa left a psychic scar big enough to fit Uluru.
- Deepfake dread. Weekly TV spots warn of scam voice-clones that can ransom your Nan before tea.
- Layoff headlines. Big Tech has axed tens of thousands since 2022 and every click-chaser blames “the AI revolution.” Funny thing is, most of those cuts were the industry exhaling after the COVID hiring binge we all knew had to deflate sooner or later.
- Low trust, low literacy. Aussies routinely rank government and corporates among the least-trusted AI custodians, so every glitch lands like a meteor.
Media mayhem: chaos pays the bills
Mainstream newsrooms - looking at you, Murdoch Media - thrive on chaos.
Headline editors (the folks who decide whether your story reads “New Tool Saves Hours” or “ROBOTS CRUSH JOBS”) understand a simple equation:
Chaos = Clicks → Clicks = Ad Dollars.
A measured report on incremental productivity wins won’t juice CPMs like “AI to Kill 300,000 Aussie Jobs!”
So the volume knob stays cranked to 11, nuance gets binned, and the national anxiety graph keeps climbing - conveniently in step with ad revenue.
Fear sells, and a cottage industry of “responsible-AI” consultants, lobbyists and doom-scroll editors are making bank reminding us the sky is about to fall.
Government wallet-check: a milk-money budget in a billion-dollar race
Canberra’s direct AI spend since 2018 comes in at just under half-a-billion dollars - respectable pocket change until you compare it with the UK’s £1.5 billion for national AI compute in 2024 or Singapore’s S$1 billion pledge for AI Strategy 2.0 in 2023.
On a per-capita basis we’re bringing a kumquat to a mango fight.
The result? Aussie research facilities chase GPUs offshore, start-ups scour Silicon Valley for cheques, and our productivity scoreboard stays stuck on the opening credits.
Is the panic actually justified?
Some caution is healthy. Bias, privacy leaks and disinformation are real risks, and we do need guard-rails. But blanket paranoia? That’s self-sabotage. Freezing adoption hands the reins to offshore hyperscalers that already own the stack. Worse, it scares local capital away from backing the next Atlassian-sized success story.
A saner path forward
- Educate instead of hyperventilating. Put AI literacy into primary schools and TAFEs before we draft yet another 200-page “ethics framework.”
- Regulate for outcomes, not optics. Focus on transparency, audit trails and a clear right of appeal; resist the knee-jerk ban-hammer.
- Spend like we mean it. Sovereign GPU farms cost millions, yes - but so did the NBN and we still thought having broadband was worth it. The UAE just announced free, government-backed ChatGPT access for every resident; probably not in Albo’s budget but let’s start somewhere.
- Tell the good stories. Bushfire-spread modelling, tele-health triage in the outback, ag-tech drones counting crops - wins beat boogeymen every day of the week.
Mic-drop (with an extra dig for the six-o’clock news)
Fear is cheap to tweet and even cheaper to read out over dramatic stock footage.
Progress, on the other hand, takes engineers, GPUs and a willingness to admit that “everything’s doomed” makes for lousy policy.
So maybe it's time we swapped the tin-foil hat for a hard hat, got off the breakfast-TV doom carousel and started building - because the rest of the world isn't waiting for Australia to feel comfy. History rarely rewards spectators, and it never pays royalties to click-bait.
I for one would like to see Australia get in the AI game. We have some serious talent and capabities here, let’s not see it all go to waste.
Cheers
