Fifteen Garden Hoses Between Australia and the Dark

Week of 17 July: Albo claims the AI future, the 15 seabed lifelines it hangs on, and One Nation hits the rocks while Pauline summers in Sicily with Gina

There are 15 cables lying on the seabed between Australia and the rest of the world, each about the width of a garden hose, their glass fibres carrying almost all our international data. Everything you were promised this week arrives through them.

So too, this nonsense.

On Wednesday the Prime Minister promised to make Australia an AI power. An Office of AI, a world-first framework, Australia setting the terms for the most powerful technology on Earth.

That promise depends on cables most Australians never see, and on whether anyone can fix them when they break.

This week runs from Albo’s grand AI plan and a warning about theft, to the deep dive, the 15 garden hoses the country runs on, and the new Chief of the Defence Force calling their loss an existential threat.

Then, while the One Nation orange wave breaks on the rocks, Pauline makes a cameo beside her most generous benefactor at a Sicilian pool.

One thread runs through the lot. Announcing the future is easy. Delivering it is hard.

The gap between the two is where a country’s trust collapses.

An Office, a Rulebook and a Warning About Theft

Albo’s AI speech did three concrete things.

It stood up an Office of AI inside the PM’s own department, effective immediately.

It promised Australian Standards for AI, heading to National Cabinet next month and to parliament early next year.

It killed the copyright carve-out the AI giants wanted, the text and data mining exemption, stone dead. Creators keep ownership, control and price, and using their work without permission is, in the PM’s framing, theft.

He sold it well, too, opening on his first job at a Commonwealth Bank branch, coaxing passbook holders to trust a strange new hole in the wall called an ATM. The point being Australians have met unnerving machines before and come out in front.

Remember, though, only in December the government’s National AI Plan, launched by Tim Ayres and Andrew Charlton, said Australia didn’t need standalone AI laws at all.

Charlton has spent months telling anyone who’d listen that Australia must be a maker of AI, not just a taker. Seven months later the PM has taken the file off both of them and walked it into his own department, which tells you who Labor wants to own the politics of this.

Copyright in Australia protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself, and it arises automatically under the Copyright Act 1968. This essay was protected from the moment I typed it. No registration, no fee, no little C in a circle, and the rights run for 70 years after my death.

What the industry wanted was a free pass to mine all of that for training without asking.

Why do they care so much? Anthropic just paid $1.5 billion USD to settle with American authors, roughly $3,000 USD a book across close to half a million titles, and Treasury’s own briefing notes count 81 AI copyright lawsuits live in US courts.

These companies will pay handsomely for legal certainty. Albo is betting Australia can charge for it.

The stakes are not hypothetical. A Treasury briefing note released under freedom of information shows Anthropic told the Treasurer its proposed $21.6 billion Australian investment hinges on copyright certainty, and that it’s shopping for 1.4 gigawatts of data centre capacity, which Data Centres Australia says is close to the size of the entire existing industry.

Microsoft has committed $25 billion through 2029 and Amazon has pledged $20 billion, while OpenAI and NEXTDC have proposed a $7 billion build.

Meanwhile, the boom is flattering the books. On the latest ABS capex figures, business investment without data centres would be flat or negative, meaning they’re driving essentially all the growth.

The boom leaks, too. ANZ estimates 80% of a data centre’s cost is imported kit, servers and cooling shipped in from overseas.

Large new facilities will be required to underwrite new power generation, pay their full grid connection costs, and put at least as much energy into the grid as they take out. Net generators, not net users.

There’s logic to it, and precedent. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei had already pledged his company would absorb any rise in power prices its data centres cause, so Albo is partly legislating what the industry’s most vocally safety-conscious operator volunteered.

In America, community pushback over power and water blocked or delayed $130 billion USD of data centre projects in the first three months of this year alone.

Albo’s pitch to investors is that unlike our rivals in the Gulf, nobody is putting a drone through the roof of an Australian data centre. True.

Though as we’re about to see, the threat doesn’t come through the roof. It comes along the seabed.

Credit where due, one national rulebook beats eight states and territories writing their own, and grabbing the wheel personally is the right call.

But an office is not a policy. It has no statutory powers. The standards are proposals until parliament passes them, and Ed Husic, who used to own this portfolio, is sniping from inside the tent that the approach is doomed and that some of the data centre demand is investor froth rather than real AI need.

Even the world-first label needs an asterisk. Brussels legislated an AI Act two years ago and runs an AI Office of its own. The genuinely new bit is putting data centres and copyright in one national rulebook.

There’s context Canberra’s coverage missed. In the five weeks before Wednesday’s speech, the three men running the global frontier each published a governance blueprint.

Sam Altman wants a US-led international forum that writes the standards and rations the technology to countries that follow the rules. Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, who reckons artificial general intelligence is only a few short years away, wants an American standards body modelled on FINRA, the outfit Wall Street uses to police its own brokers, vetting frontier models before release. Amodei goes furthest, arguing the top models should be regulated like aircraft, tested by an authority with the power to ground one that fails.

When the leaders selling the technology beg for a rulebook, take the risk seriously. Then apply the oldest test in regulation and ask who the rules would keep out, because incumbents adore a moat.

Do they walk the talk? Washington has intervened at the frontier twice in as many months. An export control order forced Anthropic to switch off its much-vaunted Mythos and Fable models overnight, with the curbs lifted only once safeguards were built in. Weeks later OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 launch was held back at the government’s request, cleared for the public only after extra testing.

Fair’s fair, both labs wore it, and Anthropic went further, closing the loopholes that gave Chinese users access to its models and publicly asking for a tougher referee still. The gap between talk and walk sits elsewhere.

The same industry preaching safety on the op-ed pages runs a super PAC, backed by OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman, that has raised more than $100 million USD to fight the American state politicians writing AI laws.

The contrast matters here, because these are the companies queuing to anchor Albo’s investment pipeline, and one of them spent April lobbying our Treasurer on copyright.

The smartest thing in the speech is that it calls their bluff. If the labs mean what they publish, Australian Standards for AI should cost them nothing to sign up to. Let’s see who haggles.

Here’s the quiet admission buried in Wednesday’s speech. If the grid that Chris Bowen keeps insisting is travelling beautifully could actually carry the load, you wouldn’t need a law forcing your biggest new customers to bring their own power station.

The Fifteen Garden Hoses

Power, though, is only half the infrastructure story.

Start with the man who took command of the entire Australian Defence Force last week. Before Admiral Mark Hammond got the top job, he spent four years running the Navy, and he told a maritime conference exactly what keeps him up at night. Seabed cables are “our lifelines,” and their loss would be “an existential threat to our island and to our people.” His blunter point was that you do not need to invade Australia to defeat Australia.

Existential. Not from a think tank, not from a columnist. From the man who now commands every ship, soldier and squadron we have.

Here’s what he’s talking about. The communications regulator ACMA counts just 15 of these cables, carrying 99% of Australia’s international data traffic, some lying 8,000 metres deep.

Through them runs everything, from banks to hospitals, commerce to the share market, search to socials and the traffic behind every gigawatt of Albo’s AI dream, all as pulses of light. Most come ashore around Sydney and Perth, newer ones on the Sunshine Coast, and several share the same corridors.

The redundancy is thinner than the map suggests.

We have lived at the end of a thin wire for 154 years, and we’ve forgotten how hard the first one was won.

In 1870, news from London took months by ship. Charles Todd, a Greenwich astronomer turned South Australian postmaster, drove a single telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin across 3,200 km of country colonists had barely crossed. Strung on 36,000 poles and finished in under two years, it met the undersea cable coming up from Java. South Australia outbid Queensland for the privilege.

When the wires joined in 1872, months became hours overnight, and the town that grew along the line took the name of Todd’s wife, Alice.

The Java cable itself had already snapped once that very year. The wire is everything, and the wire is fragile.

It’s a problem we didn’t leave behind in the 19th century.

Finnish investigators charged the crew of a tanker with dragging its anchor nearly 100 km across the floor of the Gulf of Finland in 2024, tearing out a power link and four data cables. A Helsinki court later tossed the charges on jurisdiction grounds. Taiwan logged five cable incidents last year alone. A ship sunk by Houthi missiles is believed to have sliced through Red Sea cables on its way down, and the repairs took months while lawyers argued over who could safely enter the water.

Defence Minister Richard Marles told the Shangri-La Dialogue the seabed is becoming a battlefield, with attacks over the past 18 months at a scale without precedent.

In May, Iranian state media reportedly floated charging tolls on the cables running through the Strait of Hormuz, the same chokepoint that menaces the world’s oil.

When one of these cables breaks, a specialist ship must sail out, grapple the severed cable off the ocean floor, haul it up, splice glass fibres in a clean room on deck, and lay the whole lot back down.

The industry’s own numbers run to 200 cable faults a year worldwide, and its surveys reckon two-thirds of the repair fleet will reach the end of its working life by 2040.

A replacement ship costs over $100 million USD and takes years to build, and the economics reward laying new cables over fixing old ones, so almost nobody builds the ships. A British parliamentary committee wants a national repair ship. France went further and took its cable maker back into majority state control.

The Lowy Institute points out that in Australia, no Commonwealth agency has the mandate, or even a mechanism, to task a repair ship if a cable is cut in a crisis.

An existential threat, on the Defence chief’s own assessment, and nobody in Canberra answers the phone that rings when it happens.

The good news is Australian, and it’s another private enterprise success story rather than a government one.

Bevan Slattery, the Queenslander behind Pipe Networks, NEXTDC, Superloop and Megaport, has laid more than 20,000 km of cable through his company Subco, including a direct line from Perth to Oman. When Tasmania needed its first new cable in 20 years and neither Canberra nor Hobart would fund it, an AI company underwrote that build too.

Slattery’s next act is APX East, a $747 million cable connecting Sydney straight to California by 2028, which he bills as the longest continuous subsea path ever attempted and the first across the Pacific with no stopovers. By his account, traffic between America and the Indian Ocean is already being rerouted through Australia, and his warning to Canberra deserves framing.

The longest-lead item for AI in this country won’t be power, land or chips. It will be international connectivity at AI scale.

Below the waterline, the Navy is buying dozens of Ghost Shark autonomous submarines from Anduril’s Sydney factory under a $1.7 billion program to watch the seabed. Not to be confused with Boeing’s Ghost Bat, the flying one, engineered by more than a few of my former employees from Dick Johnson Racing.

So the pieces exist. Admiral Hammond gets it. One of our great entrepreneurs is building. The Navy is buying. What’s missing is the government function that joins them, and Wednesday’s speech didn’t create one.

You cannot be the region’s data warehouse without the keys to the loading dock.

The Splinter, Not the Wave

The same gap between announcing and delivering has opened on the populist right. One Nation has found the anger. It hasn’t yet built the machine.

Three polls this week say the Pauline surge is receding, and the direction of the flow is the story.

Resolve has One Nation down three points to 26%, the Coalition up three to 23% and Labor flat on 28%.

YouGov lands on the same 26%, down four in a fortnight, and finds the sharpest fall among voters who call themselves working class, where One Nation shed six points and Labor now leads the two-party preferred count 53% to 47%, a swing twice the size of the national shift.

DemosAU has the Coalition up three as conservatives drift home. Hanson’s own numbers tell the tale. Her preferred PM rating is down eight points in a month and her net likeability down 11 to +3.

The detail explains it. DemosAU found 61% of Australians want immigration substantially reduced, so the grievance is real.

One Nation’s policies are another matter. The same poll has voters rejecting the monoculture pitch 51% to 25%, abolishing SBS 58% to 12%, and turning the ABC into a metro subscription service 54% to 21%. Flinders University’s Josh Sunman reckons the vote has hit its ceiling, stuck short of the 30% mark.

Grievance sells. The solutions, so far, do not.

Perspective, though. Morgan is the outlier, with One Nation bouncing 5.5 points this week to 28% and back ahead of Labor on primaries, and the polling average still sits near 27%.

Senate modelling by DPG Advisory says even at current support the party would hold the balance of power with as many as 15 senators. Redbridge’s research keeps finding the fuel underneath it all. Two-thirds of voters are convinced the country is on the wrong track, and almost as many reckon the next generation will do it tougher.

Barnaby Joyce, One Nation’s highest-profile defector, shrugged the wobble off as the price of scrutiny, and it’s a sensible read of the tea leaves.

Victoria is where the trend next meets a statewide ballot.

A “leaked” Redbridge seat model commissioned by Trades Hall, sampling 6,500 voters, puts Labor’s median outcome at 35 seats in the 88-seat chamber, the Coalition at 39 and One Nation at 12, with Labor’s worst case a rump of 25 and its best case being minority government.

The model has the Premier, Jacinta Allan, losing her own seat of Bendigo East.

One Nation is doing this on 27% of the Victorian primary, a point clear of Labor and the Coalition on 26% apiece. It has no state leader and not one confirmed candidate, four months from the election. Pauline’s in the Senate, of course, and while the movement itself bears her name, she’s not on a Victorian state ballot paper.

If the Libs finish third in any seat behind Labor and One Nation, their preferences scatter, and a serious slice of them leak to Labor rather than One Nation.

You can see it in Redbridge’s own numbers. Head-to-head, the Coalition beats Labor 54% to 46%. Swap in One Nation as the challenger and Labor wins 52% to 48%.

Queensland ran this experiment in 1998. One Nation’s surge didn’t build a conservative majority. It made Labor’s Peter Beattie premier.

One Nation doesn’t have to win seats to decide this election. It only has to push the Liberals into third to re-elect Labor.

Redbridge’s fieldwork here predates the slip that’s been measured in these other national polls, which is frankly about the only comfort Labor and the Coalition can take.

Which brings us to Sicily. In the very week her polling slid, Pauline, midway through a British tour that included embracing far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, was photographed poolside with Gina Rinehart at the Grand Hotel San Pietro in Taormina, where a room will set you back at least two grand a night.

Rinehart is no mere travelling companion either. She is the party’s chief patron. A company she owns handed One Nation a Cirrus aircraft this year, and her associates tipped in another $2 million in cash.

One Nation proudly skewers the elites and proclaims itself the voice of the people.

But if the richest person in Australia isn’t an elite, then who the hell is?

That’s ultimately for the punters to reconcile. They usually do.

Weekly Wrap

Telstra’s executives fronted the Senate today, and the outage we pulled apart last week now has a name. A Symmetricom SSU-2000 Synchronisation Supply Unit, a 15-year-old GPS timing box that could have been replaced for $30,000.

The manufacturer flagged a firmware update in 2022 and again in January. Telstra never applied it. When a maintenance crew chasing a backup power fault switched the box off and on, it instead reset the clock and dragged the network back to 2006.

Telstra’s chief executive has conceded the fault was known and left unfixed. The fine could reach $30 million, 1,000 times the cost of the unit. The company that lost track of time is about to spend plenty of it explaining itself.

The maritime union has named its price for automation on the docks. A 28-hour week on full pay.

The first strike in a generation has hit Port Hedland’s iron ore operations, with union leaders vowing they can outlast BHP, days before Labor’s national conference debates handing unions a bigger say over AI in every workplace.

The docks and the mines this week, the conference floor next.

The Libs spent the week in a strategy session asking what Menzies would do. It’s the first time in a long while they’ve asked themselves that one. Perhaps next week I’ll throw in my two cents.

Albo has an office. Slattery is laying cable. The Navy is buying underwater drones. Telstra had a backup that didn’t work. One Nation has the grievance, but not yet the means to govern. The whole dream, meanwhile, rides on 15 threads of glass that no one in Canberra is charged with fixing when they snap.

Every story this week sets the same test. Who can turn an announcement into something that survives contact with reality?

Two-thirds say the country is on the wrong track. Almost as many are convinced their kids will inherit something worse. That anger is flowing to One Nation, but not because the punters have bought what Pauline is selling. Her own numbers show they haven’t.

The gap between saying and doing has never been starker, and the electorate has stopped believing anyone delivers.

There’s no better example than One Nation leading the Victorian polls without a single candidate on the ballot, risking the re-election of the Allan government, one of the worst state governments we’ve ever seen.

Until someone, anyone, delivers, we have to watch the gap.