Australia’s “lucky country” status has expired according to former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who has cautioned against the nation’s growing complacency amid the most complex array of global challenges since WWII.
The former Labor leader and most recently US ambassador used his National Press Club address on Thursday to call for a major shift in national urgency and “radical change” in collective mindset.
Mr Rudd said Australia risks fading into “a second-rate country” if it didn’t shift from accepting terms set by others to carving out its own terms of engagement in the world.
He said Australia needed to become a creator of high‑value industries and technologies, and a rule‑maker in trade, finance, and security.
“We are more than capable of rising to this challenge,” he said.
“We have the talent, we have the resources.
“The only question is, do we have the national imagination?
“Over the decades, we have drifted to become what I call ‘the complacent country’.”
He said journalist and writer Donald Horne’s assessment six decades ago that Australia was “the lucky country” had been a “myth” and our free pass in ignoring global threats was over.
“Donald Horne said we were the lucky country. That was a myth. Unfortunately, the myth is now past its use-by-date,” he said.
“The deep systemic forces now being unleashed across the world and now washing across our shores no longer afford us that luxury.
“We are now on borrowed time.
“I still hear Australians consoling themselves with the view that we punch above our weight.
“The truth is, it’s a long, long time since we did, and in fact, I doubt that that was ever really the case.
Mr Rudd said Australia needed to build resilience and listed several areas where the country could boost sovereign capability.
It included becoming a critical minerals leader, using its $4 trillion superannuation pool as a superpower and prioritising the reindustrialisation of defence manufacturing.
He said that Australia’s superannuation had attracted interest from the White House during his ambassadorship, with US officials struck by how a small nation built such massive investment power.
“President Trump was kind of blown away by how we’d managed to accumulate $4 trillion worth of savings of a bunch of 27 million people,” Mr Rudd said.
Mr Rudd also pushed for the nation to act now to seize opportunities on AI, insisting the technology was already a “mega disrupter” and Australia needed its own sovereign artificial intelligence.
Mr Rudd welcomed Anthony Albanese’s recently announced approach to AI growth Down Under and data centre expansion, which the PM has pledged to raise at the UN General Assembly in New York later this month.
“We need to move with urgency to maximise the upsides and to develop our own Australian AI built on our own data, rather than making ourselves dependent on others,” he said.
“We need Australia’s own AI industry across the stack, from compute through to frontier models, through to adoption, and all points in between.
“Otherwise, we will not have the indigenous capability here to build the cyber defences we need against that which will be thrown against us. And so, one follows from the other.
“So, to be capable of defending the interests and well-being of the Australian community in the period ahead, we must build this industry and get on with it.
“And that’s why I’m pleased to see the Prime Minister’s statement just a month or so ago.”
It comes as six separate cases where autonomous AI agents breached their testing environments and a growing exodus of tech workers leaving major AI firms while warnings about the risks the advanced systems pose to humanity.
Mr Rudd said he hoped that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping would make progress on a more responsibility world approach to AI at a summit which is expected to be held in America on September 24.
He expressed optimism following the world leaders’ met in Beijing in May when Vice Premier Li Fong and Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant agreed to develop guardrails against dangerous AI.
“That was a significant breakthrough. In the period since then, the number of breakouts by AI models both the United States and in China have been significant,” he said.
“Having just come back from Beijing and having been in Washington recently… these negotiations on such guardrails are ongoing in the lead-up to the summit proposed.
“Nothing’s guaranteed. But the events of the last several months… have seized both capitals by the throat.”
He said AI was security threat which could be wielded by foreign actors but also by tech billionaires or developers or even through AI itself via rogue AI agents.
Mr Rudd said AI agents would be able to tap into anything from bank accounts to telecommunication, infrastructure, power and water systems.
“We’re in an increasingly binary world, in terms of its geopolitics and its geo-economics,” he said.
“And frankly, the way it’s trending in terms of geotechnology, there will be interference. There is interference.”
He urged Australian intelligence authorities to provide the Australian community with a “sober, contemporaneous presentations” of the threat in a “manner which doesn’t compromise intelligence sources”.
In Parliament on Thursday, Anthony Albanese said that while Australia wanted to capitalise on the technology, caution was needed.
In what has become a familiar reference for the Prime Minister, he highlighted Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural papal encyclical released in May, which warned AI posed a major threat to humanity.
“He spoke about it being a threat essentially to humanity unless we get this right. And I think that the Holy Father was certainly correct,” Mr Albanese said.
“It is already having an impact on how we work, how we engage with each other.
“It is hard to just press the stop button on new technology
“What we need to do is to be aware of the opportunity that it presents for economic growth, for job creation, but also aware very much of the risks which are there for humanity being able to be controlled.
“People aren’t just economic entities and data points.
“We need to make sure that we shape the roll out of artificial intelligence.”
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