- by Andrew Harrison
- The Guardian
- Issue #2192
Graphic: aqua-cloud.io (CC BY 4.0)
The latest federal budget has a clear message for Australian workers: your labour is disposable, but tech billionaires are essential. While the Treasurer found nothing for JobSeeker, Youth Allowance, or the pension, he scraped together millions to hand to the industry designed to make you redundant.
Here is what our tax dollars are building: $70 million in AI Accelerator/grants for private research. Over $500 million to put artificial intelligence in charge of environmental approvals, automating the rubber-stamp for mining and property developers. Handshake deals with US giants Anthropic and Microsoft to push AI “adoption across the economy.” There’s also $1.5 billion for research institutions, funnelling public science into private profit.
They call it “productivity.” We should call it what it is, a machine for eliminating jobs.
When the government and the tech lobby talk about “unlocking productivity” with AI, they are not promising shorter hours or easier days. Under capitalism, productivity means one thing: more surplus value squeezed from fewer workers. When AI is deployed to “accelerate” project approvals or “modernise” building codes, it is not helping the public. It is removing the human friction that once slowed down capital’s appetite for extraction and development.
The industry blueprint is explicit. AI means workers “automate tasks” and move to “higher-value activities.” Translation: one worker will now do the labour of three, supervised by algorithms, while the profits flow to shareholders. If you are made redundant in the process, the budget offers no retraining, no income security, and no protection. You are abandoned to an economy of stagnant wages and insecure employment, while the tech firms that replaced you pocket public grants.
BUILT BY BILLIONAIRES
It is worth remembering who invented this technology. AI was not developed in a public workshop to solve human needs. It was built in Silicon Valley by tech elites and the venture capital class specifically to cut labour costs and centralise wealth. These are the same people who fantasise about replacing nurses, drivers, teachers, and clerks with software. Their business model is simple: eliminate wages, harvest data, and concentrate power. The budget’s partnership with Anthropic and Microsoft is not a national strategy. It is a surrender of public infrastructure to US tech monopolies that see Australian workers as an expense to be automated away.
HUMAN COST
The budget finds $70 million for AI business coaching and over half a billion to speed up environmental approvals with algorithms. It finds $53 billion for military spending. It finds zero dollars to protect the millions of Australians who will be displaced.
The Good Things Foundation already reports that one in five Australians are digitally excluded, with the highest rates among low-income households, single parents, older workers, people with disability, and First Nations communities.
The budget’s AI agenda will deepen this chasm. Those without digital literacy will be locked out of ‘AI augmented’ workplaces. Those forced into them will face deskilling and algorithmic management. Meanwhile, the NDIS is being cut by $37 billion. The reckoning is brutal. Investment in automation, divestment from people.
FIGHTING BACK
This is not going unchallenged. Around the world, students and workers are drawing a line. In the United States, graduation ceremonies have turned into sites of protest. Students have booed and walked out on commencement speakers who preach AI as the “next industrial revolution,” refusing to applaud their own obsolescence.
Here in Australia, the resistance is already taking shape. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is running a national Stop AI Theft campaign after survey data showed more than 80 per cent of creative workers fear AI-related job losses. The union has called out News Corporation for forcing journalists to train on AI tools designed to replace human subeditors, while performers and writers watch their work scraped without consent to train machines that will replace them.
The Finance Sector Union has also taken the Commonwealth Bank to the Fair Work Commission after the bank tried to axe 45 customer service roles, blaming a new AI “voice-bot.” Call volumes actually spiked after the bot was introduced, proving the cuts were never about efficiency.
