Three years after Liberal MP Aaron Violi became the first Australian politician to publicly declare he had used AI to write a speech, the nation now leads Canada and the United Kingdom in AI adoption on the parliamentary floor. The Economist analysis found Australian MPs used AI at more than triple the rate of British politicians, with Canada a close second.
The analysis comes as the Albanese government pursues billions of dollars in data centre investment, OpenAI apologises for a recent incident in which its agents accessed a Medicare portal, and tech leaders including insiders at Anthropic warn AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Violi, now the opposition spokesman for the digital economy and cybersecurity, said AI was a useful tool but cautioned that MPs must be careful. "If an MP is putting a prompt into AI and then using the speech verbatim without checking the source documents, well, I think at some point they're going to get themselves in trouble," he said.
The Canadian parliament provided a cautionary example in July, when MP Bill Oliver went viral after accidentally reading AI editing prompts aloud during a speech, saying: "Here's a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislator speech rather than a series of short points."