THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
 FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS, AFTERNOON BRIEFING

Monday 13 July 2026

Topics:  Polling, One Nation, Iran war, Indo-pacific, Artificial intelligence, Sam Neill

E&OE……………………………………

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Industry and Sovereign Capability Minister Andrew Hastie, welcome to the program.

ANDREW HASTIE: Good afternoon, PK.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Let's just go to this polling. It's a poll that demonstrates that One Nation's support has gone down. What do you attribute that to? Why is that happening?

ANDREW HASTIE: I'm not sure, PK. I'm not privy to the questions of the poll, but I think people are starting to ask hard questions, particularly given that One Nation is talking about forming government at the next election, and I think it's right that they get the same level of scrutiny as the Coalition, as Labor, as the Greens Party, and anyone else who wants to be a government in this country. So, I think it's good that people are asking hard questions, and I think some of the answers they're getting aren't satisfactory.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: At the end of last week, your leader gave a speech where he went hard against One Nation on economics, is that now the strategy of the Liberal Party to try and make a firm case against One Nation? Were you pleased to see this pivoting in his approach?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, Angus Taylor has made it very clear that we are going to protect Australians' way of life and we're going to restore their standard of living. The economy is critical to restoring Australian standard of living, which has gone backwards over the last four years. Energy costs are through the roof, immigration's out of control, and of course, people have lost hope in owning a home. So, our vision is an economic one first and foremost, and that's the battleground on which we want to fight. 

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Ok. So, on that issue, though, he said in his speech that basically, and I'm paraphrasing here, but that One Nation is worse at adding up, so to speak, than Labor. Do you agree with that?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, I think One Nation has to submit itself to the Parliamentary Budget Office for costings, and if they can't do that, well, they can't be credible. Every policy that we're going to take to the next election will be modelled and costed and worked through, so that people take us seriously. If One Nation wants to move beyond cartoons, they've got to do the hard work, and that's the thing that Angus Taylor is leading the Coalition through right now. Very intensive policy development, and that's really important because that's how we generate the solutions for the Australian people that they need.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: I want to go through a couple of other issues with you, if I can. The war in Iran seems to be escalating again. You've previously said the war in Iran was a huge miscalculation. What would you call this resumption in hostilities, and is the Strait of Hormuz now sort of permanently going to be weaponised this way, in your view?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think the Iranians have discovered that they have the equivalent of an economic nuclear bomb. They can do immense damage to the global economy by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, and they can also attack America's alliance network, whether it's in the Gulf or indeed across the world with countries who depend upon the importation of commodities and oil from the Middle East. So, they've discovered this, and they're using it to get leverage at the negotiating table. And I think this was always going to be the strategy in the lead-up to the midterm elections. They want to damage President Trump at the midterm elections as much as they can. It's going to be hard to hold the House in any midterm election. The President always struggles to hold the House, but also, I think they're aiming to do damage at the Senate as well. And if that's the case, then it could be a very, very untidy final two years for President Trump. So, I think there's a political strategy at the heart of this, and that's why they're keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed. That's why they've restarted hostilities with America, and they've also, I think, demonstrated that as a regime, they're quite resilient. So, none of this is good for the world, by the way. I want to see Iran comprehensively defeated. I want to see them stripped of nuclear capability. I think it's a good thing that their military has been destroyed in the way it has, but nonetheless, here we are.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Well, it also means that US forces will be in this theatre for a lot longer, presumably. What does that mean for our own region? How vulnerable does it leave us here in the Pacific?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think it just really emphasises that the US is spread out over three main theatres. We've got the Middle East—and Iran is doing its best to keep President Trump and his team occupied with that problem. You've got Europe with the war in Ukraine, and then of course you've got the Indo-Pacific, our region, with a China that is growing more and more assertive and aggressive. The missile test last week was, I think, a flex. It was a demonstration of their growing power. Unlike America—who also tests ballistic missiles—they didn't give lead notice to a lot of nations. In fact, they gave less than the bare minimum required, which is normally 24 hours. So, we've got a lot of problems, and the US is overstretched, and I don't think that's good for the free world.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: I want to talk about artificial intelligence. You gave a speech recently where you articulated your ideas around artificial intelligence. The Prime Minister is poised to give a very significant speech on Wednesday on AI. He will outline a more interventionist approach to artificial intelligence this week. Do you welcome that approach to potentially install more guardrails?

ANDREW HASTIE: My view starts with the premise that the artificial revolution is coming. It's already here, in fact, and we're either going to miss out and become weaker as a consequence, or we've got to seize the opportunity and make it work in our national interest. And so, my personal view is that we should be incentivising investment into our country. We should be putting democratic guardrails around that. We should be making it work in our national interest, and we should be honest and realistic as well about the trade-offs involved in adopting artificial intelligence. Not just for jobs and people's livelihoods, but also what it means for our way of life, our communities, and how that impacts us as people. So, there are a lot of questions. I'll be watching very closely to see what the Prime Minister says about this because this is an issue. This is a huge issue. I don't think we're doing enough thinking about it as a Parliament.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: No, it's huge, and it's about to change everyone's lives. You mentioned democratic guardrails. What does that look like? Do you support legislating those guardrails?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, we're not going to have our own frontier model. Anthropic and Google and Meta and OpenAI and XAI, the big AI companies in the US are already developing frontier models. Australia uses those models, and at the moment we're literally tethered to the United States through submarine cables that give us our AI capacity right now. My belief is that we should have a sovereign compute down here, which means that we invest in the infrastructure, we invest in the people, we invest in the data centres, and we attract investment from those companies into Australia, so that they are subject to our laws. At the moment, they have kill switches in the United States. We saw this with Anthropic Mythos 5, the model that was cut recently. They can cut us off if they want, and that's why I think it's a risk to Australia not to have our own sovereign compute capability here on our soil.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Sovereign compute capability is huge, though, isn't it? I mean, the cost of that would be enormous to go in. That's essentially going in to provide ourselves insurance, right?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, that's right. It is very expensive, but this is not a task solely for the government. We can provide the settings and the incentives for investment. Energy is a key part of that. Caring for the environment is critical to that as well, because data centres—like solar and wind farms—not only impose a cost on our grid, but they are also a disruption to communities as well. So, these are the sorts of issues that we need to work through. The government has a role in saying yes, we want more investment in this country. Yes, we want it to be accountable to our laws, and yes, we want it to work for the Australian people. We don't want to be subject to people like Elon Musk, frankly, in the United States who can switch us off like that.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: So, right now, how vulnerable are we, in your view?

ANDREW HASTIE: Well, it's not so much vulnerability. It's just that we don't have any agency over our AI future at the moment. We're reliant on the good grace of the United States and these AI companies to keep providing the services that we have. In the event of a crisis or a war, if we're only connected by submarine cables, our capability can easily be taken away from us, and that's why I think we have an amazing country down here. We have a stable landmass. We have an abundance of energy. We have talented Australians, good people. We can make the case to invest here. The other thing I want to say really quickly, PK, is that we need to be focused on education. At the moment, we're unleashing social media and AI on our kids. We need to prepare them for the future. We need to be investing in their education so that we get the NAPLAN scores and the PISA scores trending upwards, not downwards, which is what's happening at the moment. And they have the intellectual capacity to use AI as a tool; we don't want them to become slaves to AI or to be offloading their cognitive thinking to AI machines.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: In terms of social licence, though, that's the sort of language the Prime Minister will use and has been using. Data centres in people's backyards—is that the sort of thing that you think there should be bigger guardrails around?

ANDREW HASTIE: I think it just requires governments, whether it be federal, state, or local governments, to be working together to come up with a national plan so that we can incorporate AI in such a way that it doesn't disrupt our communities, our institutions, the things that we really care about. We're talking about a whole new political and economic settlement with AI. It's going to change a lot of things, and that means when you hammer out a settlement, everyone's at the table, and everyone has to negotiate and reach a compromise that benefits and works for everyone. I don't think we're even talking about AI yet on a national scale, and that's why we need to start seeing leadership from the Prime Minister.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Your colleague James Paterson also has warned that foreign authoritarian states may try to slow the AI rollout in Australia because they want to find some support for the technology. Do you see it that way?

ANDREW HASTIE: I do. I think there's an AI arms race at the moment underway between China and the United States. If you look at the White House's AI document, which was released a few months ago, it explicitly says the US is seeking AI global dominance. That's why it's supercharging its AI companies and businesses in the United States. China is also seeking to have the AI edge, and so it makes sense that allies of the United States who use American artificial intelligence would be targeted by authoritarian states who want to maintain the edge. So absolutely, this is more than just economics; it's geopolitics, and that's why it's so important that we get ahead of this and we start talking about how we make AI work for Australia.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Just finally, Andrew Hastie, some sad news this afternoon. He's a legendary actor, Sam Neill. He's died, seventy-eight. Of course, he was born in New Zealand, was living in New Zealand, but very much we regard him as an Australian actor. Just your thoughts on this? The Prime Minister has, of course, shared thoughts on this, and we'll be remembering Sam Neill this afternoon.

ANDREW HASTIE: Yeah, a wonderful actor. Someone that people of my generation remember, saw him in a lot of films. My favourite film with Sam Neill, I saw as a youngster. Attack Force Z, it was filmed in 1982. It's about Australian commandos. Mel Gibson stars in it. He's been one of those enduring presences on our screens, and he'll be missed. 

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Yeah, that's right. We just watched Hunt for Red October the other day, and with my daughters. So yeah, he's been in so many big films. 

ANDREW HASTIE: Thanks, PK.