Nationals senator Ross Cadell has warned Australia’s rapid embrace of artificial intelligence could cost thousands of jobs, overwhelm the nation’s electricity grid and devastate regional communities.
The NSW senator accused the Albanese government of pursuing AI advancement without adequately considering its economic and environmental consequences, warning regional Australia would bear the brunt of the fallout.
In a statement on Wednesday, Senator Cadell described Labor’s rapid AI rollout as having “potentially catastrophic economic and environmental impacts”.
“Regional Australia would be the biggest loser in this ill-considered AI quest,” he said.
“Labor talk like they want the flying cars of The Jetsons, yet under the leadership of Anthony Albanese we are lucky to be keeping the lights on.
“Right now, there are way too many unknowns to be putting all our eggs into the basket of AI advancement.
“We need to embrace the opportunities presented by AI, though why race ahead of the pack when we are already attracting foreign investment.”
Senator Cadell warned the economic risks of expanding AI infrastructure could outweigh its benefits if governments failed to establish appropriate safeguards.
“If allowed to run before it can walk, the deployment of AI in Australia could put thousands of Australians out of a job, push our power grid to the brink of failure, and destroy our creative sector,” he said.
He questioned how Australia would generate enough electricity to support energy-intensive AI data centres, citing a proposed Anthropic project in regional Queensland that he claimed could require 2.16 gigawatts of power at peak demand.
Senator Cadell claimed the facility could consume up to 18.9 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than double the load of Australia’s largest aluminium smelter at Tomago.
“We’re talking about the need to cover more than 28,000 rugby league fields with solar panels just to power this one centre or more than 1500 new wind turbines at a plate capacity of 33 per cent,” he said.
Senator Cadell also accused Labor of threatening Australia’s creative industries through potential changes to copyright protections for material used by AI companies.
“By trading away existing copyright protections, we’re dashing the hopes of our next generation of talented performers,” he said.
“Poorly considered changes to copyright laws will draw the final curtain on a growing market of voluntary licensing agreements and overall weaken Australia’s creative sector.”
Senator Cadell said the parliamentary inquiry should focus on establishing safeguards to protect Australians rather than endorsing the government’s approach to AI development.
“The role of the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence must be to identify the appropriate guard rails that protect everyday Australians while embracing the opportunities, rather than to rubber stamp a government agenda,” he said.
His comments follow alarming evidence from Australia’s online safety watchdog about the risks of artificial intelligence, including the widespread use of apps capable of generating sexualised deepfake images.
AI-powered apps capable of generating sexualised deepfake images are being downloaded about 200,000 times a month by Australians, the nation’s online safety watchdog has told a parliamentary inquiry.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant revealed the figure on Tuesday as she warned artificial intelligence was being weaponised to produce child sexual abuse material and target Australian schoolchildren.
Appearing before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Sydney, Ms Inman Grant said her office had taken enforcement action against eight AI-powered nudify services.
“These services represent about 200,000 downloads by Australians per month,” she said.
The commissioner warned the rapidly developing technology was creating increasingly sophisticated opportunities for criminals to exploit vulnerable Australians.
“We are already seeing AI weaponised to create child sexual exploitation and abuse material with increasing reports of deepfake image-based sexual abuse across Australian schools,” she said.
New research from eSafety also found one in five Australian children had experienced potentially inappropriate or harmful interactions with AI chatbots or companions.
One in three children had shared personal or potentially sensitive information with the technology.
Ms Inman Grant said organised criminals were using voice cloning and face-swapping technology in sextortion schemes targeting young Australian boys and men.
She also raised concerns about AI-powered companions designed to encourage dependency among children, alongside the technology’s potential to facilitate coercive control and domestic abuse.
The commissioner pointed to a recent investigation in Canada involving an artificial intelligence model allegedly created by pedophiles to generate graphic synthetic child sexual abuse material using childhood images of a survivor.
“These are real harms affecting real people right now. They’re not just existential threats,” she said.
Ms Inman Grant warned governments risked repeating the mistakes made during the rise of social media, when regulation struggled to keep pace with emerging online harms.
“For years, regulation played catch-up with social media harms, after the damage was visible in children’s mental health, in election integrity, and trust in our information ecosystem,” she said.
“And AI is moving faster, and its harms could be much more catastrophic.”
During questioning, Ms Inman Grant warned Australia risked entering an “age of unreality”, where increasingly sophisticated AI-generated images and videos made it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
“We would be living, I think, in a very confusing and polluted information environment where we don’t know what is real and what is not real,” she said.
Ms Inman Grant also highlighted gaps in existing laws covering non-sexual deepfakes, pointing to an incident in which two teachers were falsely depicted kissing despite not being in a relationship.
She said the manipulated video would not meet the threshold for serious adult cyber abuse under eSafety’s existing framework despite its potential to cause harm.
Ms Inman Grant warned similar concerns extended to election integrity, with AI tools increasingly capable of producing realistic footage showing people saying or doing things that never happened.
She said there was a regulatory gap surrounding deepfakes, particularly when it came to protecting the integrity of elections.
Ms Inman Grant argued stronger regulation was necessary to ensure technology companies prioritised user safety before releasing new products.
“AI companies should not be left to mark their own homework when their risks are this significant,” she said.
“Public trust requires accountability, transparency, and independent oversight.”
She rejected suggestions stronger safeguards would necessarily undermine technological innovation, arguing consumer confidence could instead encourage wider adoption.
“Strong safeguards build trust. Trust drives adoption, and adoption drives innovation and productivity,” she said.
The watchdog is already undertaking compliance and enforcement activity against certain AI services under Australia’s existing online safety framework.
However, Ms Inman Grant said regulators needed stronger information-gathering powers to examine algorithms, access platform data and independently test claims made by technology companies.
She also revealed her office was not empowered to test whether generative AI systems could produce certain categories of illegal material, including child sexual abuse content.
During questioning, Ms Inman Grant said proposed digital duty of care reforms could allow regulators to test whether AI companies had adequate safeguards by issuing prompts designed to expose weaknesses in their systems.
She said such testing would be conducted for the specific purpose of determining whether a service had appropriate protections in place to prevent the generation of illegal content.
Ms Inman Grant warned regulators were struggling to match the resources and technological capabilities of major AI companies.
“This is more than an arms race, they’re way out ahead,” she said, warning governments would need greater technical expertise and international co-operation to keep pace.
She also backed a co-ordinated approach across government to avoid overlapping regulatory responsibilities.
Ms Inman Grant said proposed digital duty of care reforms would help shift responsibility towards technology companies identifying and reducing foreseeable risks before harm occurred.
“Trust, however, cannot be an afterthought. It must be earned and designed into the products and services Australians use every day,” she said.