Andrew McKellar interview on Sky News about response to government announcement on AI
Transcript: 15 July, 2026
Ashleigh Gillon:
Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Andrew McKellar. Andrew, thanks a lot for your time. Is more regulation in the AI space broadly a good thing for the business community, do you think?
Andrew McKellar:
Hi, Ash. Look, it's an important speech that the Prime Minister's just given. Obviously we're looking through the detail of that. I think one of the most significant things we've seen in it is the Prime Minister's suggestion that we will have Australian standards for AI and also that he'll establish an office of AI in his department as a central coordination point within government. On the issue of Australian standards, look, I think it's something we have Australian standards in many areas, so that's I think entirely possible. The important point of detail here is are those standards intended to cover technical issues, content, intellectual property, or is it that those standards are going to be applied to the infrastructure? So for example, the construction or the investment that is coming in terms of data centres, which is a huge growth area, it's the enabling infrastructure. So I think clarifying that detail is going to be very important.
Obviously we want to work that through those issues with government because either way it is going to be important. If we're going to have the social licence on artificial intelligence and data centres, then obviously some level of standards needs to come with that.
Ashleigh Gillon:
You mentioned data centres. There's a lot of debate about these big data centres. I've just seen a release from Greenpeace calling them energy vampires. We know that they do require a lot of infrastructure as you alluded to there. Are they an opportunity or more of a risk to Australia's economy, do you think?
Andrew McKellar:
No, they're a huge opportunity. So if we want to be front and centre, if we want to be on the leading edge in terms of AI capability and really have access to that in all of the scale that we need to, then we do need that sort of investment to come here. Obviously the risk is that if it's not managed in an appropriate way, then we face a challenge in terms of social license. So the way I interpret the Prime Minister's speech on what I've seen so far is that this is an attempt to try to put some structure around that. That's very important. So I think having a degree of certainty, we don't want to discourage that investment. We want to make sure that Australia's an attractive destination. We don't want to lose community support. So obviously yeah, they're very energy intensive. How they are managed in terms of the energy supply that we're able to create, what they commit to it and the form of energy that they use, that will also be very important.
Ashleigh Gillon:
So Andrew, what are Australian business leaders telling you about the uptake of AI locally? There's a lot of commentary suggesting that many businesses here are perhaps being too slow in adopting AI compared with global competitors. Is that a fair critique, do you think?
Andrew McKellar:
Look, I think it's a very mixed picture. It's fair to say overall Australia's not at the forefront in terms of the take up of AI. There are many, many businesses and that's small, medium and large who are actively developing the use cases to developing that functionality. And obviously there is significant data centre investment already occurring. We're not at the absolute cutting edge. We're playing a bit of catch up. So I think here we've got to create a very attractive environment. We've got to build trust in the community. Importantly, one of the things that we've seen to date is that on the evidence that the government has looked at itself, its own research, which was published last week, the impact in terms of the labour market so far has not been significant. So we're not seeing huge job losses coming with this. I think from businesses point of view, business has got to have a best practise aproach to the implementation.
We've got to ensure that we manage any of those impacts and we do it very responsibly if we want to retain the support and the trust of the community.
Ashleigh Gillon:
Andrew, McKellar, I appreciate your insights. So thank you.
Andrew McKellar:
Thank you.