The annual Midwinter Ball at Parliament House reliably draws many of the biggest names from Australia’s political, media and business elite. There are always surprising faces in the crowd, though, and at this year’s event on Wednesday night one of them was singer-songwriter Paul Dempsey.
The frontman of ’90s alt-rock band Something for Kate, perhaps better known these days for his covers, was in Canberra as part of a delegation of creatives lobbying the government to hold firm on Australia’s copyright laws amid a push from the tech sector to weaken them in order to attract more AI investment.
I didn’t get a chance to speak to Dempsey myself, but it is not unfair to say he looked a little bewildered by the occasion.
While many topics were discussed on stage and on the floor of the Great Hall during the off-the-record event — the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Jim Chalmers’ difficult budget and Angus Taylor’s predicament leading the Liberals among them — the artificial intelligence revolution and Australia’s role in it was not one of them. At least not in the conversations I was privy to.
