The kids are in the back seat. They can read the sign. Nobody in the front is looking.
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently booed by graduating students at the University of Arizona while talking about AI. The kids are protesting a future being narrated to them by people who will not pay the cost of getting it wrong.
Tim Duggan made the Australian version of this point in the Nine newspapers the week before. Citing a Writer and Workplace Intelligence survey, Duggan reported that 44 per cent of Gen Z workers admit to actively sabotaging their employer’s AI rollout. The numbers are American, but the sentiment is here too.
Gallup polling published earlier this year across 107 countries found young people unusually anxious about their personal economic circumstances. Australia was one of three standout developed economies.
On Tuesday, Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn made the same case. AI will have workforce consequences throughout the economy, he wrote, and they should be faced directly. Pretending otherwise does not protect workers. It only ensures they are surprised later. The CEO of the country’s largest bank interviewed OpenAI founder Sam Altman later that day.
Young Australians are not only worried about buying a house. They are also worried about whether the careers they have been preparing for will still exist.
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Doing it for the kids?
The government’s budget a couple of weeks ago barely touched any of this. Instead, a predictable fight. The budget’s centrepiece rewrites capital gains tax settings and restricts negative gearing to new builds. It is framed as intergenerational fairness. It raises almost no meaningful revenue until 2028. It reopens capital tax settings explicitly excluded from the last election. It was announced without prior public consultation.
Phil Coorey wrote on budget night that, meritorious or otherwise, this was the day integrity left the building. The line has aged better than the policy.
The contradiction sits one layer down. A growing cohort of younger Australians, locked out of property, have been building wealth through shares and ETFs. They are not landlords. They are trying to compound their way around a broken housing market.
The budget tells young Australians it is helping them buy a house in 2035 while making the alternative materially harder today.
The Hawke moment
There was another fight available. Labor won the 2025 election with a decisive mandate. The Coalition is fractured. The Reserve Bank has repeatedly flagged supply-side constraints as the binding issue for monetary policy. Multifactor productivity actually fell in 2024-25.
In 1983, Hawke and Keating faced harder economic conditions but recognised what the moment required, and were prepared to manage the expectations of their traditional base.
This is the part where only Labor can run the argument. A Coalition government attempting AI-enabled reform in the NDIS, aged care or the federal public service would face union resistance from day one.
Only Labor has the relationship with unions, the credibility on fairness, and the historical licence to do hard structural change without triggering industrial war.
The 1983 Accord was a sustained partnership with the union movement that delivered real wage restraint in exchange for a credible social wage.
This government’s closest equivalent is a three-day Economic Reform Roundtable in August 2025 with no binding outcomes. One is what you do when you want to look like you are addressing a problem. The other is what you do when you actually are.
Applied Australia
So what would the missed Hawke move have looked like? Applied Australia.
Australia is not going to win the race to build frontier AI models. That race belongs to the companies preparing to list in New York at trillion-dollar valuations. There is a more achievable position available.
Even if AI research stopped today, the models and capabilities that already exist would deliver years of productivity gains. We do not need a frontier breakthrough. The technology in front of us is already capable of transforming government services, healthcare delivery, aged care administration, education and a large share of the private sector. Estonia rebuilt government around digital citizen services.
Singapore treats applied AI as a national survival project. Imagine NDIS administration with AI-augmented case management. ABS data products written for citizens rather than statisticians. Health records that talk to each other.
None of it needs a model breakthrough. It needs the kind of political will that picks up an unglamorous tool and uses it where it matters.
Young people do not need to love AI. They do need to see a future in which the technology works for them, not against them. That requires leadership willing to disappoint a base that wants traditional redistribution and make the case for something larger.
Jim Chalmers wrote his doctoral thesis on Paul Keating. Two decades on, he has handed down a budget Keating himself might not recognise.
Keating’s 1985 reforms, the ones that introduced CGT with full indexation in the first place, were designed to do what the moment required: open a protected economy, modernise the tax base, equip Australia for a global capital market being remade in real time.
The genius of Hawke and Keating was not that they did hard things. It was that they did the hard things required by the economic moment. The PhD on Keating was the easy part. The hard part is being him.
One more thing
Honda launched the Accord into Australia in 1977. By the mid-1980s it had become one of the most popular family sedans in mortgage-belt suburbs, reliable and well-built, if a little short on rear legroom.
The late prime minister Bob Hawke, who both cut an Accord in the 80s and drove one.
- This post originally appeared on Matt Vitale’s Open Dialogue blog. Read the original here.
