Is My Job Really Threatened by AI?

About This Analysis

These projections incorporate current and anticipated government policy, but are tempered with a forward-looking understanding of AI capability trajectories that official reports frequently understate. Government assessments tend to be rear-view facing — calibrated to what AI has already done rather than what it is on track to do. Industry forecasts, meanwhile, are shaped by profit incentives and confined to individual business cases, systematically overlooking the cumulative workforce displacement their collective adoption will produce.

This structural blind spot is compounded by political incentives. Elected representatives’ reliance on corporate donations creates a bias toward industry-friendly narratives that downplay labour market disruption. The result is a policy environment that is reactive rather than pre-emptive — intervening only after damage has materialised.

This is precisely why policies such as a compute tax and a floor-and-trade mechanism for human employment are both necessary and urgent. Without deliberate structural intervention, the gains of automation will concentrate while the costs disperse across the workforce and the broader commonwealth.