To understand Australia’s approach to artificial intelligence, you have to understand the colonial mindset that enfeebles Australian politicians.Australia has a long history of giving away its resources. Soon after white settlement, governors saw their role as supplying England with everything from Norfolk Island pine for ships to wool for mills.The mindset has continued and worsened. Australian politicians will frequently see foreign business interests as the answer to Australian problems. They will make huge concessions in negotiations, and come back with very little to show for what they have given away.They will almost always assume a foreign company can do something better, that a foreign businessman is smarter, that the country has to rush lest it miss out.With all that in mind, the way Australia treats gas is instructive in considering how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese intends to treat the copyright of writers and musicians when negotiating with AI companies.Fresh from defending his government’s right to give away more than half the gas Australia exports, the prime minister has been flirting with the idea of giving away the copyright of Australian creatives in exchange for tech companies building giant data centres that no one but the tech companies want built.Different resource, same extractive solution. Same trading of cows for beans.The exploitation of Australian resources by foreign companies is so vast, and has been happening for so long, that it is hard for most Australians to comprehend just how royally we have been shafted. Unfortunately for the AI industry, however, they come offering a dud deal just as Australians have begun to realise how easily foreign grifters beguile governments. Hopefully the public outrage about gas has stiffened the government’s resolve in negotiations with the tech industry. Australia’s approach to the export of resources is a joke. The so-called Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) collects less revenue than the beer excise. Even though Japan has no gas reserves of its own, the Japanese government collects more revenue from importing gas than the federal government collects from its export. New Zealanders have experienced no shortage of diesel in recent months, even though New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon failed to fly around Asia promising “gas for diesel”.None of these facts are in dispute. They all come from official sources of data. What’s alarming is that the same prime minister who wants to negotiate a deal with big tech continues to insist we are getting a good deal from the gas industry.It was a pity that INPEX Holdings Australia paid zero company tax and zero PRRT between 2015/16 and 2022/23, while selling our gas abroad. To their credit, Chevron did pay $30 in company tax in 2020/21. That’s not a typo: not $30 million; $30.Australia has a long history of giving away its resources ... The mindset has continued and worsened. Australian politicians will frequently see foreign business interests as the answer to Australian problems. They will make huge concessions and come back with very little to show for what they have given away.After Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the world price of gas more than doubled, not even the best accountants and lawyers could convince the Australian Tax Office that the gas industry made no profit here in Australia. As a result, gas exporters paid $12 billion in 2022/23 on the sale of $92 billion worth of our gas. To put that into perspective: it accounts for 1.8 per cent of Commonwealth revenue and 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product.To be clear, the reasons the profits are so high is because Australia is literally giving these companies most of the gas they export free. Imagine how profitable Coles would be if we made farmers give them free fruit and vegetables.A country whose leaders are willing to give away gas to Chevron, Shell and INPEX simply can’t be trusted to negotiate with global tech companies about how best to protect copyright or the terms on which data centres can be built in people’s neighbourhoods and use copious amounts of energy and water.There has always been something deeply insecure about Australian governments when it comes to negotiating with foreign companies and foreign countries. Their fear of missing out in relation to foreign investment is such that while Qatar exports about the same amount of gas as Australia, they collect about five times as much tax revenue.While Norway has used its resources industry to provide free university and build a $3 trillion sovereign wealth fund, in Australia voters are told we have to cut the National Disability Insurance Scheme and charge young people $50,000 for an arts degree because we can’t stop giving away so much gas.In what Senator David Pocock describes as “the ultimate dirty deal”, a draft of which was leaked to him, United States tech companies are seeking exemptions from copyright laws in exchange for building the data centres they need to mine the life’s work of Australian writers and musicians, in order to “train” the artificial intelligence they sell around the world.In the words of songwriter Paul Dempsey, “The idea that copyright law should be watered down or chiselled away at to provide a freebie or a handout to gigantic multinational, multibillion-dollar companies to train their AI models makes absolutely no sense to me. I simply don’t get it.”Bizarrely, under the “dirty deal”, the “pay-off” for letting the big tech companies train their algorithms on creatives’ work is that the tech industry will do Australia the favour of building data centres most voters don’t want. Put simply, if we give our intellectual resources away, the tech industry will take all our renewable energy and turn it into noise.While such an agreement may seem laughable, that is exactly the deal our governments have repeatedly settled for when dealing with foreign business interests. For decades our “best negotiators” have agreed to give away our gas for free to “encourage the gas industry to invest in Australia”. Few people realise the “investment” in Australia is really just the construction of export hubs required by these foreign companies to haul away all the free gas we gave them. This week Prime Minister Albanese gave a major speech on AI, spelling out the need for a “framework” to ensure both “faster approvals” for big tech and “genuine community consultations”. If that sounds familiar, it’s the same kind of promise we have been making to frackers and coalminers who want rapid approvals to destroy farmland as they boost profits.While Albanese made it clear he wants to protect artists’ copyright, he also made it clear that a lot of details are yet to be determined. Australian authors, songwriters and the communities faced with the construction of enormous data centres in their midst will need to be hypervigilant while the prime minister’s “framework” is being developed. History suggests governments will agree to almost anything if they get to be photographed with a shovel and can make vague promises about future economic benefits.Just as most people can’t imagine how big a coalmine is – the biggest in New South Wales is more than nine kilometres long – most people can’t quite comprehend how big the proposed data centres are likely to be. While we used to pretend data was stored “in the cloud”, the people of Plumpton, about 30 kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district, have recently realised the cloud is more like an enormous vibrating factory that will cover about 490 soccer fields or 8700 residential blocks of land. So much for the housing crisis.If the Plumpton data centre goes ahead, it will use more energy each year than all of the electricity generated by Victoria’s largest remaining coal-fired power station at Loy Yang. So much for the climate crisis.Then there’s the noise. Unlike factories, which start and stop, AI data centres never sleep. Their cooling fans, pumps and electrical equipment generate a constant low-frequency hum, 24 hours a day. Even where operators meet noise limits, nearby residents often complain that the persistent background noise, especially through the once-quiet nights, now defines their lives.Other countries know how to stand up for themselves. While just over three years ago many people at the top of Australia’s national security apparatus were warning of Chinese invasion “within three years”, countries such as Ukraine, Norway and Finland, all of which share a border with Russia, have a far more independent approach to foreign policy than Australia.Likewise, while Norway is a much smaller country than Australia, it has accumulated a $3 trillion sovereign wealth fund by heavily taxing the same gas companies that say they won’t invest in Australia if the government taxes them. Maybe Australia should ask Norway to negotiate with the big tech companies on our behalf.If Anthony Albanese is serious about progressive patriotism – a term he offered up last year, hoping it would appeal to the instincts of the left and right – he needs to put the interests of ordinary Australians first. Just as the Australian public, including both One Nation and Greens voters, overwhelmingly supports a 25 per cent gas export tax, the vast majority of Australians want our communities and culture protected from big tech companies. The prime minister might settle for vague promises of future benefits, but Australian voters want concrete promises, not the promise of a handful of concreting jobs.