Australian Labor MP warns colleagues: let AI companies write their own rules and you will fail
Ed Husic is pushing his own party to get tougher on big tech, as the country's creative workers union demands that AI firms stop using artists' work without permission.
Key points
- Labor MP Ed Husic publicly warned colleagues in 2025 that allowing AI companies to self-regulate is "doomed to failure".
- Husic said weakening copyright law to benefit AI firms would go "against the ethos" of the Labor party.
- The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union representing journalists, artists and musicians, called on the Australian government to introduce stricter copyright rules for AI.
- The push came ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's major speech on artificial intelligence policy.
Australian Labor MP Ed Husic has broken cover on one of the trickiest questions in tech policy: who controls artificial intelligence, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT, and who protects the people whose work feeds it?
His answer, delivered bluntly ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's scheduled speech on AI, is that big tech companies cannot be trusted to police themselves. Self-regulation, Husic said, is "doomed to failure."
He also fired a warning at his own colleagues. Any move to water down copyright law, the rules that give creators ownership of their work, in order to hand AI companies a cheaper path to training data would be "going against the ethos" of the Labor party.
The timing matters. Right now, AI companies train their systems by feeding them enormous amounts of text, images and audio scraped from the internet. Much of that material belongs to writers, musicians, photographers and other creators who never agreed to it and received nothing for it.
The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union that represents journalists, artists and people who work in film and television, made the same argument directly to the government. It wants new laws that would require AI firms to seek permission before using creative work as training material.
As reported by The Guardian, the union's call landed at a pointed moment, with the government signalling it is actively reviewing how Australia handles AI regulation.
For ordinary Australians who write, draw, photograph or perform for a living, the stakes are concrete. If copyright rules are loosened, an AI company could legally use your published work to build a system that then competes with you, without paying you a cent. Tighter rules would mean companies must negotiate, license or simply ask first.
Husic's position is significant because it reveals a split forming inside government before any law is written. Labor built its identity on workers' rights. Letting a technology company take a journalist's archive or an illustrator's catalogue without consent is a hard thing to square with that history.
What should creative workers do right now?
The honest answer is: watch, and make your voice heard. No law has changed yet. But the window for shaping one is open. If you earn money from creative work, contacting your local MP or supporting organisations like the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance puts your position on the record while the policy debate is live.
The government has not yet said which way it will move. What Husic's intervention does is make it harder to slip a quiet copyright carve-out through without a fight.
