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On Thursday, October 23, University of Adelaide academics, staff, and students travelled to the University's Bonython Hall for the annual Julia Gillard Public Lecture. The lecture series, named after The Hon. Julia Gillard, a University of Adelaide Visiting Honorary Professor as well as Australia’s 27th and only woman prime minister, has become an opportunity to discuss many of Australia's most pressing concerns.

After a wonderful Welcome to Country from Cliffy Wilson, Professor Peter Høj, Vice Chancellor and President of the University of Adelaide, introduced Professor Gillard and shared with attendees the focus of this year’s lecture.

“Last year's [Gillard] lecture, focused on artificial intelligence and featured a discussion that touched on how governments, particularly Australia, can capitalise on the AI revolution,” said Professor Høj. “This year, Professor Gillard will facilitate a panel discussion on how the rapidly changing geopolitical environment and rise of disinformation is impacting Australia, our foreign policy, development assistance, our universities, and how these factors might be leveraged for better outcomes.”

Professor Gillard then took the podium to share some initial thoughts on the topic and to introduce her esteemed panel, comprised of AIML Chief Scientist, Professor Anton van den Hengel; , Professor of International Security in the School of Social Sciences; and , Professor of International Security in the Department of Politics and International Relations.

“There is no way of lifting our eyes and looking at the planet we share without being confronted by truly alarming images of conflict, violence, political polarisation, and the effects of climate change,” said Professor Gillard. “We seem to be increasingly stuck in a doom loop of reduced resources and global architecture smashing.”

Professor Gillard spoke of AI's role "at every level from the highest echelons of government and multinational corporations" down to the "mundane everyday tasks we each do" while acknowledging its monumental impact on the very structure of education. 

“How do we safeguard academic integrity when sophisticated essays can be written by machines in seconds?” she asked.  “This isn't about simple plagiarism anymore. It's about rethinking assessment entirely and finding new ways to demand critical thinking, creativity, ethical reasoning, and the unique capacity for synthesis and original insight.”

“Our role must be to bridge gaps, not inadvertently create new ones,” she continued. “This means nurturing a new kind of AI literacy [and establishing] the ability to discern, evaluate, and question the information AI provides, understanding its limitations and inherent biases.”

Turning to the panel, Professor Gillard asked the panelists to share their own thoughts on the current global landscape.

Panelists discuss the importance of media literacy

“There's an incredible concentration [of news] that's happening today that has never happened before in terms of our focus on events on news on ideas and that's certainly unprecedented,” said Legrand. “Traditional news is expensive… and it doesn't get the eyeballs that free, immediate, non-traditional new outlets [get] that don't pay journalists [and] perhaps use AI to generate new stories.”

“So, there's an imbalance already in our access to information and increasingly people are becoming exposed to ideologies which challenge our traditional - you might say, taken for granted - faith in democracy.”

Professor Gillard then asked Professor Wallace what differences she’d discerned in the spread of disinformation in small islands and throughout the Pacific, Professor Wallace’s area of expertise.

“In the Pacific, the government is very close to you,” said Professor Wallis. “You have a much more close personal relationship with your member of parliament; they're much more accessible… because government is the main source of resources across the Pacific.”

“I think another important thing to learn from the Pacific is the importance of social cohesion,” she continued. “Pacific misinformation and disinformation [gets] far less traction because people have that basic sense of cohesion and trust that makes them question that misinformation [and] disinformation.”

Professor Gillard asked Professor van den Hengel what were the major developments from over the last 12 months we should be focused on.

“When the internet first started, I was one of the first million users,” he responded. “We had this… idea that we all had to get an internet education and we're going to run courses and we're going to figure out what to do.”

“Now every child knows how to use the internet better than I do and we don't teach people how to use the internet. It's just part of how we work. That will happen with AI.”

During his talk, Professor van den Hengel reiterated his years-long advocacy on the importance of building sovereign AI capability here in Australia.

“We are many orders of magnitude short on our investment in sovereign AI,” he said. “Sovereign AI means developing the AI capability we need as a nation to be able to determine our own destiny.”

“We don't need to replicate the whole American system in Australia. We just have to have enough expertise to be able to navigate our own path in this very dynamic, technological landscape.”

In addition to our lack of sovereign AI capability, Professor van den Hengel noted that countries similar in size to Australia are investing billions more in AI than we are as nation.

“Countries [we] compare ourselves against and play cricket against are spending a lot more than we are,” he said.

“The AI that we use is built in California and in China. You can put guard rails up, [but] we are a very small market,” he said. “The only way that we gain control is to build our own AI and become a participant in that modern economy. Being a spectator has never worked.”

University of Adelaide law student and Rhodes-scholar elect, Jessica March, closed the lecture by delivering the vote of thanks on behalf of the university to all panelists and attendees.