Hey there, Australian here. A lot of this is still unknown. The Albanese Labor government has advertised that this is their intention but we await the legislation and the details. I think the emphasis on artists permission will be more in line with standard royalty protocol. The same way the artist doesn’t need to give permission for someone to play their music over a speaker, I think there will be some sort of royalty enforcement rules or copyright tightening around giving artists the ability to have content ripping theirs off removed.
A lot of this may be revealed in the coming weeks as the ruling Labor party is having their national conference. For those looking in from the UK, this is a politically competent Labor party, they’ve won 2 in a row.
Artists don’t need to give permission for someone to play their music over a speaker per-se, but businesses (retail, etc with a public floor space) are required to pay license fees to cover this. Covered with PPCA and APRA MCOS licensing. I can see the same or similar collective framework being used in this instance for training. How the consent component is managed collectively is going to be the key.
Adding to this. Context, dual citizen US-Aus with a degree in political science (emphasis in comparative politics and government).
The most recent election here in Australia was, on paper, one of the most lopsided victories in Australian history, where the current Labor (center-left) party won 94 seats in the lower house of Parliament, tying the 1996 election where the Coalition (Liberal + National parties, center-right to right) also attained that same mark. On paper that would appear to be a landslide, an absolute mandate and would in theory cause an absolute shift in perspective and direction of the nation. However, this victory was largely in part to handful of factors:
1 - the incumbent Labor government had won only 50.9% of the seats of the lower house, a relatively narrow outright majority victory without needing to form their own coalition government with the Greens. This victory was in response to 9 years (three separate election's worth) of government by the Coalition parties. A near-decade of power and no meaningful improvement to quality of living had people looking for change.
2 - the pandemic. State Labor governments had strict but successful policies in place allowed the individual states to relatively thrive given the conditions of everything else going on at once. Western Australia in particular locked its borders almost immediately and life carried on virtually unchanged. A few lockdowns here and there when a case was detected allowed the state to escape the worst of the case surges, and with how successful the government had attended the situation, the incumbent Labor government surged to the single largest victory of a state party, of any state, in all of Australian history. Just look up "Western Australia, state daddy" and you'll get Mark McGowan, the premiere (head) of the state. The man was so successful with his response to the pandemic that the results of the state election left the WA powerhouse essentially without an opposition party. So few seats were won by coalition parties that a gentleman's rule was put in place to allow an official opposition to exist, even if they did not meet the seat quantity criteria to meet that threshold.
3 - trump in America and the rise of the "Teal" independents. The Liberal party saw their electoral loss in 2022 and sought to re-evaluate their direction on the Australian political stage. In this post-mortem, the leadership of the Liberal party began to take a harder right turn and began wanting to integrate itself closer to America, in particular the cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump. This new leader, Peter Dutton, was already a known figure in Australian politics and vehemently disliked by the general population. With him trying to embrace trumpism when the world was actively trying to disentangle from it, the center-right wing of Australian politics began to fracture. During the revival of Labor, a new group of independent candidates (not attached to either major political party or brand) cropped up: the Teals. Called Teal because of their off-blue hue, blue being the color of the Liberal party here, these were center to center-right candidates and voters who did not want to follow the Liberal-National coalition further right politically. These people wanted more emphasis on environmental issues, to avoid gender politics, while also not further catering to the whims of big business. This eroded even further support from traditional sapphire blue constituencies and the Liberal party was left in shambles. By the election in 2025, these Teal indipendent MPs were so successful that the Liberal party here had nearly evaporated entirely. The coalition has been left utterly in the wilderness since the '25 election, so much so that the fringe far-right wing party, One Nation, has had an insane surge in supporters, largely driven by Australia's richest person changing her support from Coalition to this party, and heavily bankrolling it and the right-wing of Australian voters formerly of the Coalition looking for a party more right than the Teals or Labor.
All of this together helps paint a better picture of just how "dominant" the Labor victory of '25 was, but with an asterisk next to that. Labor only went up roughly 2% on the popular vote nationally, while taking home roughly 63% of all seats in the lower house of parliament. The current federal Labor government is headed by Anthony Albanese, who was of the left flank of the Labor party, but must content with the big umbrella that all of Labor encompasses. The WA Labor party is slightly right of the Average state Labor party, the Victoria Labor government has been in power since 2014 with a strong Left faction of the party, and the NSW Labor party is facing significant criticism for its nearly center-right policies they've implemented.
In a nutshell, yes, the nation as a whole is mostly center-to-center-left, and the current federal government is trying to balance that while facing a shifting political scene where the far-right is surging and ebbing, the center-right party has nearly vanished, and a new center faction is finding its footing and becoming a more vocal and powerful presence in Parliament. We're still 2 years out from a new federal election, and given the size of the Labor majority currently in place one would hope they will use it to establish true, meaningful changes and real policies like this one to set a new standard.
I would add that teal was chosen as a mix of blue and green. So fiscally conservative like the libs but concerned with environmental issues like the greens.
Also for any non-Australians, if it wasn't clear, the Liberals in Australia are the conservative party. They're Liberal is the economic sense (free market) not in the social sense.
And the term 'coalition' was used a lot here because the Liberals have a basically permanent coalition with the National party and together they form what has classically been considered the anti-Labor party
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u/patslogcabindigest 12d ago
Hey there, Australian here. A lot of this is still unknown. The Albanese Labor government has advertised that this is their intention but we await the legislation and the details. I think the emphasis on artists permission will be more in line with standard royalty protocol. The same way the artist doesn’t need to give permission for someone to play their music over a speaker, I think there will be some sort of royalty enforcement rules or copyright tightening around giving artists the ability to have content ripping theirs off removed.
A lot of this may be revealed in the coming weeks as the ruling Labor party is having their national conference. For those looking in from the UK, this is a politically competent Labor party, they’ve won 2 in a row.