Today in Parliament, Abigail contributed to a debate on artificial intelligence and workers' rights. While the tech industry builds its profits on stolen creativity, exploited labour and environmental destruction, she called for collective ownership of AI systems, democratic governance of automation and mandatory worker consultation before AI is deployed in any workplace.

Abigail said:

The memorandum of understanding between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Microsoft is significant for being the first of its kind, but what a low bar. A company signs a recognition of the existing legal right to join a union, promises to sometimes listen to workers and offers a tacit acknowledgment of copyright, and it is lauded as groundbreaking. What a damning indictment on the inhumanity of those sprawling, tax-dodging, crypto-fascist, corporate bottom feeders. At the core of artificial intelligence [AI] companies is a profound antagonism towards workers, their rights and their dignities. In defence of the enormous resource use of AI models, Sam Altman recently said, "It takes a lot of energy to train a human." The purpose, in their minds, is to replace us. But that replacement is a mirage. AI depends on human labour—data labelling, content moderation and reinforcement learning—outsourced to workers in Kenya, the Philippines and India, sometimes at wages as low as 90¢ an hour and often involving exposure to deeply disturbing content.

One hundred AI workers in Kenya published an open letter saying their conditions amount to modern-day slavery. Hidden supply chains keep costs low while the resulting products generate enormous profits. AI is built on theft and exploitation. To date, there is no conclusive evidence that AI has boosted productivity at a national level. If anything, the most apparent impact is that workers are being pulled deeper into an ever-faster, never‑ending current of capitalism. The particular cruelty of generative AI is that it targets creative and knowledge workers—the people who were told they were safe. For decades, the advice was "learn to code", "get a degree" and "do creative work that machines cannot do". Now, the same class of tech investors who gave that advice are funding tools to replace exactly those workers. Freelance illustrators are watching their livelihoods evaporate as clients switch to image generators trained on their own portfolios. Their labour trains the machine that replaces them. It is a closed loop of dispossession.

There is a mad race to build data centres, fuelled by United States investment chasing the AI craze. We are entering bubble territory, characterised by a near daily drumbeat of "bragawatt" announcements for massive, gigawatt‑scale, environmentally disastrous AI infrastructure or data centre projects. J.P. Morgan estimates $5 trillion to $7 trillion in capital expenditure over five years. To achieve a 10 per cent return, the industry needs $650 billion in annual AI revenue, in perpetuity. Where does that come from? It comes from workers on the chopping block and degraded services.

Companies are now threatening to not invest in Australia unless we grant them sweeping company tax exemptions. The correct response is collective ownership of AI systems, democratic governance of automation decisions, forensically and vigorously enforced supply chain safeguards, strong labour protections that give workers veto power over their own displacement, and a fundamental challenge to the idea that technology built on collective human knowledge should be privately owned and deployed for private profit. I call on the Labor Government to put its money where its mouth is. I move:

That the question be amended by inserting after paragraph (4):

(5)That this House calls on the Government to model the same best practices and insert mandatory consultation clauses into all relevant New South Wales Government contracts of employment and industrial instruments, in relation to planned adoption of workplace AI at any level.

(6)That this House calls on the Government to advocate to the Federal Government to legislate mandatory workforce consultation prior to the adoption of any workplace AI.

Read the full debate in Hansard here.

25 March 2026