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 and creative workers, 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 can't be trusted to police themselves. Self-regulation, Husic said, is "doomed to failure."
He also fired a warning at his own party. Any move to water down copyright law, the rules that give creators ownership of their work, to hand AI companies cheaper access to training data would be "going against the ethos" of Labor.
AI companies train their systems by feeding them enormous amounts of text and audio scraped from the internet. Much of that material belongs to writers and visual artists who never agreed to it and received nothing for it.
Australia's copyright fight has been building for weeks. Our earlier story on 13 July, "Australia's creatives versus AI companies: the copyright fight heading to Canberra", set out how artists were already demanding their work stop being used without permission or pay.
As reported by The Guardian, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which represents journalists and people working in film and television, made the same argument directly to government. It wants new laws requiring AI firms to seek permission before using creative work as training material.
For Australians who write or perform for a living, the practical consequences are real. 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 a cent. Tighter rules would mean companies must negotiate or simply ask first.
Husic's position matters 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?
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 record while the debate is live.
The government hasn't said which way it'll move. What Husic's intervention does is make it harder to slip a quiet copyright carve-out through without a fight. That's the real news here.
