Australia’s advertising and marketing industry has been handed a challenge dressed up as a roadmap, and the person delivering the message helped write parts of it.
Writing in Mumbrella, Nick Hunter, chief executive and executive creative director of Sydney agency Paper Moose, argues that the federal government’s National AI Plan is less a policy document for adland than a warning: evolve now, or quietly slide into irrelevance.
The plan itself was announced in Canberra on 2 December 2025 by Industry Minister Tim Ayres and Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton, built around more than $460 million in existing funding and three stated pillars: capturing opportunity, spreading the benefits, and keeping Australians safe.
Hunter, who says he advised on parts of the plan, is blunt that the ambition outstrips the money. He describes the funding as “a drop in the ocean” next to the balance sheets of the global hyperscalers, and says the plan “isn’t enough” on its own.
What is actually in the plan
The government’s approach is deliberately light on new law. Rather than the AI-specific mandatory guardrails floated in earlier consultations, it leans on existing, technology-neutral rules, supplemented by guidance and a new watchdog.
The centrepiece safety measure is an AI Safety Institute, funded at $29.9 million and due to be operational in 2026, tasked with monitoring, testing and sharing insights on emerging risks.
For the small and mid-sized firms that make up most of the marketing services sector, the more practical levers are modest. The industry body ADMA points to a $17 million AI Adopt Program aimed at helping SMEs, alongside a government AI platform and tailored support through the National AI Centre.
ADMA notes that more than one-third of Australian SMEs already use AI, and that Australia ranks among the heaviest global users of the leading tools. Its verdict for marketers is pointed: “AI fluency will increasingly be a core marketing capability, not a specialist skill.”
The creative industry’s uneasy read
Hunter’s argument is that AI has already moved through advertising quietly, carried by “curious early adopters and a few brave marketers” across insights, optimisation and content creation. The plan, in his telling, drags that shift into the open and puts the onus on agencies to lift their game rather than wait for a client brief to force the issue.
That framing lands on a nervous sector. AI is shifting from a novelty experiment to baseline infrastructure for creative businesses, and the arrival of clearer expectations around transparency, consent and content labelling is, as ADMA puts it, overdue.
There is also a sore point the plan pointedly avoids. Analysis by law firm Piper Alderman notes the government has ruled out a copyright exemption for AI companies training models on protected works, while offering little detail on how those companies are meant to access the material they need. For an industry whose stock-in-trade is original creative work, unresolved copyright is not a footnote.
Why it matters
For Australian agencies and marketing teams, the stakes are jobs, skills and who owns the tools.
The plan’s emphasis on digital literacy and lifelong learning, with employers and unions expected to help ready workers for AI-driven change, is a tacit admission that roles will be reshaped. Junior production, media buying and content roles are the most exposed, and the burden of retraining falls largely on agencies themselves.
There is a sovereignty angle too. The plan opens a path to locally relevant models trained on Australian data and to partnerships with domestic providers that understand local audiences and regulation. Whether that materialises, or whether the market simply defaults to the US hyperscalers Hunter warns about, will shape how much of the value stays onshore.
And the transparency question is commercial, not just ethical. Marketers now face greater scrutiny of AI-generated content, audience targeting and automated decisions, meaning disclosure and provenance are becoming client requirements rather than nice-to-haves.
Experts want safety to lead
Adland is not the only sector telling the government its plan is a start rather than a settlement. Academics canvassed by the University of Sydney raised similar doubts from a different direction.
AI ethicist Dr Rebecca Johnson questioned whether existing, tech-neutral laws can cope with AI systems that act autonomously, arguing “safety needs to lead, not follow.” Computer science expert Dr Armin Chitizadeh called the plan a promising first step but warned against a “build first, fix later” habit, pushing instead for international cooperation.
Emeritus Professor Joseph Davis welcomed the worker-rights and workforce provisions and the Safety Institute, but flagged the environmental cost of the data-centre build-out and the limits of relying on existing regulation.
The forward look
The near-term test is execution. The AI Safety Institute stands up in 2026, the SME adoption programs begin flowing, and the copyright consultation the government signalled earlier in 2025 remains unresolved, which leaves the sharpest question for creative businesses open.
Hunter’s wake-up call is really a bet that agencies who treat the plan as a floor, not a ceiling, will pull ahead of those waiting for certainty. On the government’s own numbers, the funding is finite and the ambition is not, which means most of the lifting will happen inside agencies and marketing teams over the next twelve months.
For an industry that has spent two years experimenting at the edges, the message from Canberra and from one of its own is the same: the experiment phase is over.
Sources: Mumbrella, Department of Industry, Science and Resources, ADMA, University of Sydney, Piper Alderman, Minister for Industry and Innovation.
