The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has written the rules for a game Australia doesn't play, yet.

Yesterday at Sydney University, the Prime Minister gave the most important technology speech an Australian leader has delivered in over a decade. An Office of AI inside PM&C. National Standards for AI. Data centres required to be net generators of renewable energy, not net users. A clear declaration that using Australian literature, music, art or journalism to train AI without the control is theft.

Give credit where it's due. This is a Prime Minister who understands that AI is the industrial revolution of our time, and that Australia's geography, climate, minerals, universities and stable democracy give us real leverage. He's right that we cannot renegotiate the terms after the data centres are built. He's right that social licence must be earned now, not retrofitted later.

So, what's the problem?

Here's our take: Australia just announced world-leading rules for a game we don't yet play. We have written the referee's handbook but have not yet fielded a team.

Read the speech again. There is an office, a framework, standards, consultations and a National Cabinet agenda. What there isn't is a commitment to build a single sovereign Australian AI model. No compute strategy. No capital. No national champion. The word sovereignty appears throughout, but sovereignty built on someone else's models is a subscription.

Twice this year, decisions made overseas switched off or delayed access to leading frontier models for Australian users overnight. When your most important productivity technology can be revoked by another government's export policy, you are not sovereign. You are a tenant with a nice view.

The uncomfortable truth the speech talked around is that regulation without capability risks making us the world's best governed data warehouse. The PM said Australia can be "much more than a data warehouse for AI products made overseas." We agree. But not enough of what was announced yesterday builds the alternative.

Now for the optimistic part, because this is where it gets exciting.

It is not too late. It has never been too late. France's Mistral didn't exist until 2023. Three years later it's the flagship of European AI, backed by Bpifrance and the European Investment Bank, and treated by the French state as critical infrastructure. Canada put real public money into Cohere's compute through its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, paired it with a multi-billion-dollar national AI plan for Canada, and lined up its banks and telcos as anchor customers. Cohere just went transatlantic by combining with Germany's Aleph Alpha. These are middle powers, our size, our GDP class, proving that you don't need to be USA or China to matter in AI. You need conviction, capital and customers.

And we don't have to do it alone. If the conflict in Iran has taught us anything, it's how fast supply chains, shipping lanes and technology access can be taken hostage by events on the other side of the world, and how much we lean on trusted partners when they are. Australia, New Zealand and Singapore are three like-minded democracies with complementary strengths: our energy and land, Singapore's capital and connectivity, New Zealand's talent and trust. Cohere just went transatlantic because it understood that middle powers are stronger together. A tripartite sovereign AI, built across our three nations, would give the region a frontier capability none of us can credibly build alone, and an insurance policy against the next shock.

We have a superannuation pool worth more than four trillion dollars hunting for productive AI assets. We have one of the sunniest continents on earth to power training runs with clean energy, at a moment when the world's AI is increasingly gas-fired. We have world-class research talent that currently gets on planes. And thanks to the copyright position the PM staked out yesterday, we could have something nobody else has: the world's first frontier-class model trained entirely on licensed, consented, paid-for creative work.

Every other major model on earth carries the original sin of scraped training data, and the lawsuits to prove it. An Australian sovereign model would be different by design. Fair trained, with our writers, musicians, artists and journalists paid at the source, turning our creative canon from a casualty of AI into an asset of it. Fair governed, under the very standards announced yesterday. Fair powered, by the renewable-backed data centres those standards will require. That's not a compliance story. That's a product story. In a world of AI stolen data, provenance becomes the premium. "Trained fairly in Australia" could be to AI what "Made in Australia" is to everything else we're proudest of. GPT no longer should stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, we support FairGPT, Fair Trained, Fair Governed and Fair Powered.

The PM invoked Medicare yesterday, and it's the right analogy but for the wrong reason. Medicare wasn't a framework for regulating overseas providers and hospitals. We didn't beg or borrow it, in his own words. We built for the best, by building for ourselves. That's the standard his AI announcement should be held to, and it's the piece still missing.

So, here's what we'd add to the agenda before National Cabinet meets next month.

Commit to building our own AI computing power here in Australia, the way Canada did.

Fund an Australian team to build a world-class AI model, with long-term investment and the government signed up as its first customer, the way France did.

And turn the copyright debate into a working marketplace where AI companies pay to license Australian creative work, so "anything less is theft" becomes a real way for creators to get paid, not just a talking point.

We founded Meliora on a simple belief: technology should enhance human creativity, never replace it. Yesterday's speech shares that instinct, and we applaud it. But instinct without ambition is how nations end up as customers of the future instead of authors of it.

The PM says there's nowhere else you'd rather be than Australia. He's right. Now let's build something here that proves it.

Jack Lonergan and Clive Dickens are the partners of The Meliora Company. Meliora invests in AI that makes humans more creative and more productive.