McKinnon Institute

Dr RAHMAN (Fong Lim): Madam Speaker, the McKinnon Institute is Australia’s only nonpartisan organisation dedicated to strengthening the performance of our governments and parliaments.

It is best known for the McKinnon Prize, which has been awarded for a number of years. It is notable that the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory was nominated this year in the state and territory category of Leader of the Year, something that received little attention and is worthy of recognition. It is not an insignificant achievement in my opinion.

The other thing the McKinnon Institute is known for is professional development and its Advanced Political Leadership course which seeks to equip politicians with the skill sets and mindsets they need to better serve Australian communities by addressing the big challenges that Australia faces.

Over the last six months I am pleased and proud to report—in fact, it was my great privilege—that I was the beneficiary of a professional development opportunity under the auspices of the McKinnon Institute. It involved learning from a wide range of experts. It was a phenomenal opportunity to be able to learn from practitioners in politics, the media and industry—people at the top of their game. Equally, and more importantly in some ways, there was the opportunity to connect with colleagues from across Australia.

I will share a little about my most recent experience with the McKinnon Institute. On 5 and 6 November I spent time in Canberra in the Australian Parliament, meeting with federal colleagues from across the aisle. It was an invaluable opportunity. All of us in this place are afforded the opportunity to spend some of our electorate allowance on professional development. It is great to see how other parliaments function and to learn how we might better function.

I am grateful to the Member for Nicholls for being kind enough to host me on my stay and to his staff, Mark Skilbeck and Morgan Dyer, for taking such good care of me and helping me to arrange all the logistics and the meetings that I had.

It was an opportunity to do things for the benefit of the Northern Territory in many ways, because connection matters. It was a chance to learn about process, build bridges with others and plant seeds for the future.

I am also grateful to the Members for Parramatta, Cook, Lyons, Fairfax, Flinders and Swan, amongst many others, and the staff of all the aforementioned for helping me to make progress in Canberra.

It was a great opportunity to meet with economists from across the aisle. We face great economic challenges in the Northern Territory, as we all know. To be able to speak with the likes of Steve Hamilton and Jonathon Deans was important.

For those of you who have not done it in person, it is a lot of fun and a learning experience to witness a Question Time in federal parliament. It was extra special to watch our Member for Solomon being mercilessly roasted, quite frankly, by the Member for Cook. It made for entertaining viewing from the gallery, but it raised a serious point about the quality of our federal representation. The Northern Territory has profound economic and social challenges. The likelihood of us resolving any of those things is negligible to zero unless we can not only work with the federal parliament but also have people in the federal parliament who are working for us. Connection matters.

I am grateful for the opportunity that the McKinnon Institute afforded me to spend time looking at the Victorian, New South Wales and federal parliaments. Being in spaces like that means you get to meet mayors and other industry players.

In the short space of time I was there, I met with the Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association, whose work is important in the Northern Territory in relation to boarding school students and the challenges they face.

Australian Pathology had things on in the federal parliament at the time. It was Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. I am pleased to say that I finally had a PSA test done. At least that is not a problem I have to worry about. The Pharmacy Guild had its annual parliamentary dinner, and I am grateful to Keely Quinn for the opportunity to participate in that.

Canberra, however, was the precursor to the main event I attended on 7 November called Future-Ready Government in the Opera House. That McKinnon scholars’ day focused primarily on what artificial intelligence means for future-ready governance and our democracy at this moment.

We are all aware that there are challenges in this space. It is a fast-moving area. Indeed, even today in federal parliament there were Bills introduced relating to artificial intelligence regulation and moving forward constructively.

It was fascinating to learn about the new frontiers of AI from Ashley Llorens, Corporate VP of Microsoft Research; AI in Australian industry from Lee Hickin, the new Executive Director of the Australian National AI Centre; and AI regulatory frameworks from Felix Kartte from the European Commission. Perhaps no-one was more instructive than Professor Anthea Roberts at ANU and the CEO of Dragonfly Thinking, who has made the profound shift from being a gold-star legal scholar to an AI trailblazer. Her new focus is on how people in technology together can help navigate complex challenges, including Australia’s slow productivity growth.

Why does this matter to us? It matters because the Northern Territory has complex challenges. Structural economic reform, productivity reform and public sector reform will all need to be addressed in the coming years, and we need tools to do that. Technology drives GDP growth and the pace of change is accelerating. If you think about the printing press, electrification, assembly lines, synthetic fertilisers, the internet and AI, you see that it is an exponential curve of growth.

In a 2025 global study on trust attitudes in the use of AI, Australia is the most worried jurisdiction and the least excited. We are risk-averse and worried about job losses and have little homegrown success and low AI literacy. What we have in Australia are either non-critical users just generating cat memes or critical non-users, people who are putting their heads in the sand.

I confess to being in the latter category despite my previous academic work in this space, so over the forthcoming period I will try to remedy this by diving in the deep end to improve my AI literacy, ideas and output towards augmentation because the goal is to augment, not just automate, processes. I look forward to reporting back to the Assembly on that.

I am already beginning to learn and appreciate that LLMs are not stochastic systems nor vending machines; they do not deliver the same results over and again. If you start to understand context windows, temperature setting, path dependence, prompt engineering, token prediction, epistemic hygiene and agentic systems, you realise that this is the vernacular of productivity reform going into the next century and that these are things we will all have to know about. We have to move away from jobs-apocalypse thinking towards using agentic systems as thought partners.

Why does this matter? It matters because smart teams have a diversity of cognitive thinkers. They allow for multi-lens analysis of challenges, which is what we will need to do.

It is possible there is an AI investment bubble forming that may burst, but equally it is probable that AI and LLM technologies are here to stay, to say nothing of more advanced machine-learning applications. On that basis it is prudent for all of us to lean into rather than out of these systems. It will form part of our education, infrastructure and problem-solving. If we want to do more with less we will have to learn how to employ these new technologies in not just Canberra and the APS space but also the Northern Territory public service.

I am grateful to the McKinnon Institute for the opportunity this year to learn and build bridges, particularly the McKinnon team and Professor Rod Glover, the outgoing CEO, and Professor Anne Tiernan. I encourage all parliamentarians in this room—as they are encouraged elsewhere—to explore the McKinnon Institute and all the resources it offers to improve systems and to help us help ourselves. There is not a lot of professional development for parliamentarians. Almost everybody who participates or engages with the McKinnon tools and processes ends up coming away saying that it was a great opportunity and helped them be a better politician, parliamentarian and problem-solver.

In summary, in a polarised world and uncertain times nothing gives me more hope for Australian democracy than the emergence of the McKinnon Institute and its impact on public policy across the country. I am grateful for its support throughout the course of the year. I look forward to continuing my association with the institute in coming years.