THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

SPEECH
INTERSEKT, MELBOURNE

THURSDAY 3 SEPTEMBER 2026

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Good afternoon.

Thank you to Fintech Australia for the opportunity to address Intersekt today.

Last month, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games.

You might have seen the footage of robots competing across a range of disciplines from athletics, boxing, soccer, weightlifting, and table tennis.

The race that caught everyone’s attention was the 100m sprint, where the winning robot — Tiangong Ultra — smashed Usain Bolt’s world record by almost one second, completing the race in 8.64 seconds.

These humanoid robots moved so fast that they needed crash pads on the finish line to stop them, as they were incapable of washing off their speed or braking like human sprinters.

My kids laughed as these robots collapsed into a heap on the race track after bouncing off the crash pads.

It all seemed rather amusing, even as it dawned on me that there are now robots that can outrun the fastest humans on the planet—with immediate applications for the modern battlefield.

For those who have seen Terminator 1 and 2, you know what I mean.

But there is a much bigger race underway right now, and Australia isn’t even on the starting blocks.

The harsh reality is that there are no crash pads in place at the finish line.

I’m talking about the Artificial Intelligence race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

It has geopolitical, strategic, economic, and moral implications for Australia, and—right now—we are unprepared to deal with them.

A.I. is going to reorder the global economy, and it will force choices upon us whether we like it or not.

Questions of sovereignty, security, productivity, and competitiveness are central to the challenge posed by AI.

We had a warning back in June when the U.S. Department of Commerce suspended access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 model over export control compliance—not because Australia did anything wrong, but because we had no say in an American decision that reached directly into our system. 

I use Claude, and my access to Fable 5 was cut.

I imagine many of you use Claude, too, and had the same experience of helplessness—it was a reminder that geopolitics can impact our work directly.

That feeling has not gone away—even if we pretend that it’s business as usual—because the reality is that we don’t have a sovereign frontier or foundational A.I. model here in Australia.

We are physically tethered to U.S. and Chinese frontier labs by submarine cables with no control over data, algorithms, or strategic direction.

Even the machine admits that a Claude request here in Melbourne hits Anthropic’s core infrastructure in the U.S via submarine cables in the Pacific Ocean.

Most of you already know this; but it’s worth restating the facts: we don’t have a sovereign frontier or foundational model in Australia.

That reality has implications for government, defence, businesses, healthcare, education, and our financial services.

We have some hard calls to make.

The first is that we have to pick a side in this AI race.

The second is that we have to build our own sovereign AI capability.

And the choices that we make have consequences, and we must do everything with a view to Australia’s sovereignty, security, and prosperity.

We must have crash pads in place for the Australian people—especially in the financial services sector.

We cannot be held ransom to a hostile state actor with a kill switch.

Ten years ago, we all thought that the decision to remove Huawei from procurement decisions relating to our 5G telecommunications infrastructure was the hardest decision in a generation.

But we didn’t see the AI revolution coming around the bend.

Looking back, the Huawei call was a crucial decision. But national security decisions that need to be made today around AI make the Huawei decision of 2018 look quite simple.

Because a decade ago, there was only one customer whose procurement choices would be affected: the federal government.

Today there are maybe 27 million customers that are all making multiple procurement decisions in AI.

Or if we narrow it down to the most significant operators of critical infrastructure, there are a hundred companies that need to make decisions around AI procurement that are each critically important to our resilience as a nation.

Or if we narrow this down a little further, to the most significant operators—we are left with many of the people in this room, beginning with the banks.

To the bankers in the room, the procurement decisions that you make today will determine the security of our financial system, and the level of confidence that the Australian people have in it.

For example, if our financial services are outsourced internationally, who will control the switch on the infrastructure Australians use to transact and verify identity? Do we want that risk in our system?

We need to be thinking about the resilience, control and sovereignty of our banking system. We need to be thinking about the speed of the system, but also the crash pads when things go bad.

And that brings us to some fork-in-the-road questions around the integrity of U.S. and Chinese models. These are questions that I am not going to be able to answer today, but I think they are questions that need to be the focus of the best minds not only in your cyber teams but in your boards and executive committees. They need to be informed by the best possible advice.

The good news is that we’ve worked with the Albanese government to establish the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, which will build a national framework for AI.

The Committee will grapple with the big moral, geopolitical, strategic, and economic questions posed by AI. We need as much input from the FINTECH sector as you can muster. We are reporting at the end of November, so time is of the essence.

Finally, while we have tough choices to make about AI partners and models, we also have agency over Australia’s competitiveness. Right now, we are falling behind other nations—largely because of decisions made by the Albanese government.

The private sector is being choked by a burdensome taxation regime, high energy prices, stifling red/green & woke tape, to name a few drivers of declining productivity. Inflation is also raising the cost of capital, making it difficult to attract investment for our start-ups in fintech, medtech, and biotech.

We are watching homegrown talent and intellectual property head offshore, as the Albanese kills off the incentives for Australian talent and tech to stay here. And Labor’s changes to the Capital Gains Tax and Research Development Tax Incentive will only make it more difficult for Australian startups to stay and scale up here.

In closing, the Liberal-National Coalition’s mission is simple: to rebuild Australia into a modern, prosperous, secure, productive, and competitive country. The Coalition will deliver lower taxes and repeal Labor’s changes — and deliver cheaper power by unashamedly pursuing energy abundance instead of ideological climate targets.

We will invest in nation-building infrastructure, including ports, oil refineries, power plants, and roads.

But in my role as the Shadow Minister for Industry and Sovereign Capability, I am exploring ways that we can build a sovereign AI lab with Aussie talent and tech—here—on our red earth.

Without it, we aren’t in the race, and there are no crash pads for Australia.

Thank you for your time.

[ENDS]