Faced with a choice between saving the planet from climate change and saving some jobs in the gas and coal industries, successive governments have told us that jobs must come first. And then along comes so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI).
Wed 14 Oct 2026 13.11 AEDT
Photo: AAP Image/Susie Dodds
Last week, the Australian Parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence held public hearings with some of the world’s largest AI companies. But what followed felt less like parliamentary scrutiny and more like a corporate sales pitch with parliamentary stationery.
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Australians have been told for decades that we shouldn’t ‘rush’ into renewable energy because a rapid switch to wind and solar might cost jobs in the fossil fuel industry, place pressure on the electricity grid and risk higher electricity prices. Faced with a choice between saving the planet from climate change and saving some jobs in the gas and coal industries, successive governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal have told us that jobs must come first.
And then along comes so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI).
Even AI’s biggest boosters freely admit to the incredible dangers of the new ‘AI’ software they are working on. Senior employees have warned of a 10% chance of the technology destroying humanity itself, and there are daily examples of this unregulated technology rummaging through everything from Medicare to financial system databases. But fear not, this is just ‘training’ and everyone knows mistakes happen during training.
But leaving aside the risks to humanity, democracy and the health and financial systems, the one thing that everyone agrees on is that AI is designed to cause mass unemployment. To be clear, job destruction is the product that the AI industry is selling.
The Commonwealth Bank (CBA) is investing $2.4 billion a year in technology and capability, and has rolled out AI tools and AI training to more than 30,000 employees. Telstra has entered a seven-year joint venture with Accenture to accelerate its AI strategy, and WiseTech, which spent $175 million on R&D in just the first half of 2025-26, says it is transforming itself into an “AI-led organisation”. And all of these companies are explicit in linking their expenditure on AI with their plans to shed jobs.
CBA’s CEO Matt Comyn says “some roles will reduce in number” and that “some work will be done by smaller teams”. Telstra CEO Vicki Brady said her company believes its workforce “will likely be smaller in 2030 than it is today”. And WiseTech management announced that as part of its shift to AI it was pursuing a phased reduction of up to 50 per cent of its product development and customer-service roles.
While business and political leaders have for decades told us we shouldn’t rush to save the world from fossil fuel pollution (for fear it might cost some jobs), we are now being told we have to rush headlong into AI, despite the enormous risks (for fear of missing out).
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Generating mass unemployment is not an unintended consequence of the ‘AI revolution’, it’s a key part of the plan. To be clear, the ‘business plan’ behind the trillion-dollar valuations of the AI companies is for millions of companies to pay trillions of dollars for AI subscriptions instead of trillions in wages.
The inconvenient truth is that unless a large share of the world’s companies are willing to convert a large share of their current wage bill into their future AI bill then the value of the share price of the AI companies will collapse faster than a polar ice sheet in a heatwave.
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The current boom in the value of AI companies is, literally, the world’s biggest ever bet on mass unemployment. OpenAI’s valuation rose from around US$30 billion in 2023 to US$852 billion in its latest 2026 funding round, a near 30-fold increase in just three years. Similarly, Anthropic, founded only in 2021, was valued at around US$61.5 billion in March 2025 and US$380 billion by February 2026. The only way that these incredible valuations can remain sky-high is if companies around the world begin to rapidly shed workers, and spend up big on AI instead.
Despite decades of pretending potential job loss was what prevented them from tacking the fossil fuel industry, Australian governments are currently barracking for the job-shedding potential of AI even though all those new data centres will also drive up electricity costs, greenhouse gas emissions and the costs of construction for all other industries.
So, what’s going on? Why did so many Prime Ministers, premiers and CEOs pretend to be worried about the impact of climate policy on jobs, only to now barrack for the enormous job destruction that will accompany the rapid rollout of AI?
The answer, is, sadly, the deference of Australian governments to foreign companies promising trinkets.
While the public arguments about the impact of climate policy and AI on jobs reek of hypocrisy, the private logic is entirely consistent.
The boosters of big business like the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), and their patsies in parliament, always side with of the most powerful people in the room. And while for decades sucking up to power meant siding with the gas and coal industry, today their obsequience requires tugging their forelock for big tech.
The profits made from extracting gas and coal have always dwarfed the profits made from selling renewable energy. Likewise, global AI companies that sell software to replace workers will make much bigger profits than local companies that use humans to provide goods and services
While countless gas and coal mines have been approved in the name of ‘creating jobs’, now countless data centres are to be approved in the name of destroying jobs. Likewise, the corporate shills who warned (without evidence) that renewable energy would push up electricity prices are now barracking for every energy-hungry data centre proposal that comes along. They know these data centres will drive up electricity prices and, like the impact on jobs, they just don’t care. They never did.
It’s not too late for Australia to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, and it’s not too late for us to rein in and regulate the growth and use of AI in Australia. Indeed, now that the big business voices that led the charge against renewables under the guise of protecting workers have outed themselves as contemptuous of the wellbeing of workers, now is precisely the time to rethink what we regulate, what we subsidise and what we say no to. Transitioning away from fossil fuels instead of towards AI would create far more jobs and cost far less money. Plus, according to climate scientists and the AI industry itself, it would significantly reduce the risk of destroying civilisation as we know it.
Dr Richard Denniss is the co-CEO of the Australia Institute.
