Andrew Charlton explains why Australia must make AI, not just take it

In a two-hour conversation, economist Joseph Noel Walker interviews Andrew Charlton, Australia's Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, about how his government is thinking about artificial intelligence. Charlton argues that AI is a general purpose technology on the scale of electricity or railways, that the investment boom is already visible in national accounts, and that Australia must be a maker of the technology rather than only a taker that rents it from abroad. The discussion works through the economics of data centers and compute, including where a dollar of tokens actually goes, why time to power and predictable approvals decide where hyperscalers build, and how a national framework covering energy, water, copyright, and location is meant to protect community support for the build-out. The conversation then turns to sovereignty: the risk that access to frontier models could be cut off, the case for sovereign AI across the whole stack from energy to applications, and the industrial policy of trading Australia's natural advantages in energy, land, and stability for research capability, startup growth, and domestic models. The exchange matters because it lays out, in unusually concrete terms, how a middle power intends to convert a global compute boom into national prosperity and leverage.