Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation - Keynote speech - FinTech Australia's Intersekt 2025 Conference

I’m pleased to address the Intersekt Conference as the Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation.

Fintech is one of Australia’s great innovation success stories.

Indeed, some economists have argued that the wealth of modern nations of the past 200 years was not primarily about resources or state investment, but about unleashing ideas, ingenuity, and entrepreneurial energy.

This insight can be seen in the innovation success story that is fintech in Australia.

Australia has a long history in what we now call fintech.

If you allow me a little historical indulgence –

In the 19th Century, the colonies pioneered banking and payments infrastructure, with banks, building societies, gold-based sovereigns, and telegraphic transfers being developed and adapted to the needs of a resource-rich, far-flung economy.

In 1817, the colony of New South Wales - a penal colony no less - saw the establishment of its very first formal banking institution, the Bank of NSW(now Westpac) at the initiative of Governor Lachlan Macquarie and Judge-Advocate John Wylde.

The bank replaced the fraught barter-based economy to one based on standardised financial instruments.

Surprisingly, even convicts often arrived in the colony with small amounts of money. Officials initially encouraged them, and later required them, to deposit these savings into Australia’s early banks. These systems introduced secure deposit mechanisms and reflected early efforts to integrate marginalised individuals into formal finance.

This was uniquely Australian innovation at work– born of necessity and sovereignty, encouraging inclusivity.

Then in the 20th Century, Australia was one of the first countries to roll out ATMs in the 1960s and 70s.

In the 80s, we pioneered the EPTPOS network, which remains one of the most efficient in the world.

Then through the Global Financial Crisis, a new wave of innovators emerged - neobanks, digital wallets, regtech, insurtech that shaped the modern fintech industry we recognise today.

I’ll leave it to those here to fill in the gaps on what is coming next.

Australia has over 800 fintech firms and is estimated to generate over $4 billion annually in direct economic value.

For consumers, fintech has meant greater choice and control; and greater accessibility to finance.

These innovations are to the great credit of the fintech industry - and all of you, its leaders.

But fintech is not just about consumer products. I want you all to keep in mind that you are also strengthening our sovereign digital capability by reducing reliance on foreign payment rails and platforms.

Your industry is also a magnet for high-skilled jobs, keeping Australian graduates and entrepreneurs here, rather than losing them to Silicon Valley or Singapore.

Our financial services sector has always punched above its weight.

The challenge now is in ensuring our fintech ecosystem will continue to lead in the AI era.

AI is reshaping how work how work is produced, distributed, and paid for.

My starting point is values-based: individuals should be fairly rewarded, society protected from AI’s worst excesses and Australians made more free, not less, to create and build.

We’re already seeing commercial frameworks emerge. News Corp’s deal with OpenAI and Reddit’s data licensing show markets can value data. Content verification tools are also emerging.

These are positive developments but government must do more than watch corporate deals.

Governments must support bedroom musicians, startup, and victims of AI-enabled crime, who unfortunately will mostly be women and children.

With these challenges in mind, seizing this AI moment requires careful and unified work across government.

This was well understood by the former Coalition Government.

Under our leadership, we set down the national AI ethics principles, stood up the National AI Centre, and kicked off the end-to-end payments modernisation agenda.

By contrast, Labor has been all at sea.

Endless consultations and shifting rhetoric about AI from one Minister to the next.

And now a rush to concentrate powers in the hands of regulators without adequate checks, as we saw with the recent Payments Systems Bill pushed through Parliament earlier this month.

And of course Minister Tim Ayres said this month that he wants unions at the “top table” when it comes to designing AI regulation – a declaration which should send a shiver down the spine of everyone here.

Let’s be clear: allowing unions to write our AI laws is not a plan which takes seriously the enormous productivity benefits that AI stands to deliver.

It’s a political choice about who gets to decide the rules of the future economy, not a strategy for innovation.

I’m sure you’ve all been following their recent Payment Systems Bill which gave sweeping powers to the RBA. The Coalition forced safeguards – thanks to my colleague Pat Conaghan’s amendment – so key decisions are disallowable by Parliament.

A practical example of this would be on interchange fee caps, which I know the RBA recently ran a consultation process on.

While lower costs can help merchants, if caps are set too low they will no doubt become prohibitive for smaller fintechs, and entrench incumbents.

This is precisely why our disallowance safeguard matters, so excessive calibrations can be checked by the Parliament, not rubber-stamped by bureaucrats.

Instead of making laws that unfairly stifle innovation, Labor should finish the job and deliver a comprehensive payments licensing regime like our 2021 Review of the Payments System had envisaged to provide greater regulatory clarity for fintech, rather than regulation by ASIC’s litigation which I know the crypto industry in particular is enduring at the moment.

Let me make a further point here about blockchain, a revolutionary technology that I know many of you here are intimately familiar with. It is programmable money, powering stablecoins, tokenised assets, and smart contracts that can settle transactions instantly and securely.

Other jurisdictions have understood this. The United States and Europe are moving quickly, while Labor has stalled. Industry is crying out for certainty, yet Australia risks being left behind.

A key example is Block, the fintech formerly known as Square. In January 2022, it acquired Afterpay for $39 billion, integrating “buy now, pay later” into its global ecosystem. This shows the scale of opportunity if we back innovation instead of government and regulators dragging our feet.

As my friend Simon Kennedy recently wrote in the Australian Financial Review, global innovation doesn’t wait for government backlogs. If Labor continues to delay, capital, companies and jobs will migrate offshore.

Labor’s instinct on the other hand is to delay first then over-regulate second and third.

As Leader of the Opposition Sussan Ley has said, there ought to be robust protections in place for Australians artists, musicians and news organisations, among others.

Whether this can be achieved by adapting existing regulations is, as the Productivity Commission has said, still a work in progress … albeit one that should have been finished by now.

But fair work demands fair compensation.

A “let it rip” approach that legalises taking others’ work without permission or pay is not supported by the Coalition.

Our bottom lines are simple:

1. No legalising theft. Copyrighted and proprietary data must not be treated as free training fodder. Creative Australia, our national arts body, hasput it well, warning that generative AI built “off existing creative work without compensation” threatens the viability of creative careers. Put simply, we agree: licence it or leave it. 2. We reject a regulatory wild west. As I have said, clearly AI requires a response from government. I do not believe in the rule of the jungle, where AI is unleashed on Australians on a no-holds-bar basis. A failure to effectively regulate risks

privileging the biggest offshore players at Australia’s expense – that is not the Australian way.

3. Contracts must rule. Markets only work if contracts work. Australia must ensure gaps in applying contract law to AI are addressed so rights can be protected and traded.

So, what’s next for AI regulation? What should government, and the private sector, be focused on?

First, we need to stop the policy zig-zags. Multiple ministers delivering consultation processes on AI with little certainty or coherence about what comes next and no clear end point.

Second, bring forward the National AI Capability Plan with milestones this year – and I pause here to note that our friends at the Tech Council of Australia has warned that waiting to the end of 2025 is too slow.

Third, set guardrails for high-risk AI settings while ensuring lower-risk, high productivity uses are still in play;

And fourth, supercharge business adoption where it is responsible to do so: for example, allowing start-ups to trial tools supported by the National AI Centre, which the Coalition established.

Let me end on this note: fintech is not just a sector, it is the outcome of a mindset.

It is the mindset that says Australians should not be content to be passive users of overseas platforms, but should lead in building them.

Your story Australian innovation at its best.

And as Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation, let me be clear: we don’t need more over-regulation.

We need regulatory certainty that protects creators, promotes competition and lets Australians build - that’s how we balance guardrails with innovation.

ENDS