Australia is watching the largest economic reorganisation since industrialisation, and so far it is watching from the beach. AI already writes most of the software at the leading labs, is beginning to run its own research, and is redefining cybersecurity. Before long it will reorganise labour markets, warfare and the balance of power. Australia's position in that reorganisation, as of July 2026, is to host the sheds, sell the inputs and subscribe to the output.
Nothing forces us to do more, and that is the problem this project exists to name. Europe's failure will be loud. Ours would be comfortable, and comfort is a far better anaesthetic than denial. You cannot scare a country with a forecast while the surf is good, so we have not tried to. We have tried to show the country two versions of itself and let it decide which one it recognises.
Australia 2032 tells the decade twice. One prologue, drawn entirely from the public record, runs from the release of DeepSeek's R1 in January 2025 to the launch of the Office of Artificial Intelligence in Sydney on 15 July 2026. The story forks at that podium. One telling follows the comfortable slide into a prosperity we no longer own. The other follows the country that makes its own luck. Both close in 2034, looking back.
Neither telling is a prediction. We have tried to make both internally consistent, technically grounded and traceable to dynamics already visible, and the exact dates and events matter far less than the plausibility of the destinations. We have written it as a story, through two fictional Australians, because it is one thing to read about transformative AI in the abstract and another to feel it arrive in your brother's job applications. We do not hide behind the fiction. We have certainly got things wrong, and we welcome substantive argument about what and where.
Because we care deeply about what Australia could be in this transition, and we think the pessimists and the complacent are making the same mistake from opposite directions. Australia has a genuine opportunity to carve out a niche for responsible AI built on abundance: the cheapest firmed renewable potential in the developed world, the minerals the entire supply chain runs on, stable institutions, and a depth of talent that keeps being exported because nothing here asks enough of it. Paired with something rarer, an instinctively egalitarian disposition, the fair go as a design principle rather than a slogan, that abundance is the foundation for a distinctive national position: the middle power that makes advanced AI safe, fair and worth trusting.
We have led from that position before. When Australia decided the harms of social media to young people warranted acting first, it acted first, and the world followed within the year. We are good at being first on the thing we decide to be first on. This project argues that responsible AI, governance, assurance and the architecture of trust, is the thing worth deciding to be first on now, and that a country of our size can meaningfully shape the global governance architecture if it moves while its leverage still exists.
Australia 2032 was written by practitioners working at the intersection of AI ethics, governance and organisational design. All contributed in a personal capacity, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of clients or affiliated organisations.
The scenario format is adapted, with admiration, from Europe 2031, written by Daan Juijn, Stan van Baarsen, Judith Dada, Maximilian Negele, Lily Stelling, Philip Fox, Alex Petropoulos and Michiel Bakker, with copywriting and editing by Tom Chivers. Australia 2032 is not affiliated with Europe 2031; we simply think they built something worth answering. The epigraph belongs to Donald Horne, who tried to warn us in 1964.
If you have spotted something we missed, want to argue with a chapter, or are working on Australia's AI position and want collaborators, write to us at hello@thebaibes.com. Restoring a country's agency is not a job for three people, and we would rather hear from you before 2031 than after.