Labor Senator Richard Dowling brings tech mindset to government

As someone who has always worked at the intersection of policy, politics, economics and technology, the Australian Labor Party’s newly elected Senator for Tasmania, Richard Dowling, understands technology has a crucial part to play in the country.

Dowling was elected as Senator for Tasmania in the federal election on 3 May, appearing as the second candidate on Labor’s ticket, following the retirement of long-serving Senator Catryna Bilyk.

However, up until January 2024, Dowling was VMware senior director and head of Asia Pacific, government relations and public policy.

He spent four years in the role, leaving after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware was finalised. Dowling then spent five months at Meta as its director of public policy.

“The great privilege of the role I’m coming into now is it allows me to make a contribution across the whole of society, the whole of the economy and for the longer term,” Dowling said to ARN.

“I was just really excited by the opportunity to not just make a contribution at an individual company level or even at an industry level, but at a whole of society level.”

Dowling said his own experiences with the “unique blend” of economics and technology is something he can bring to the Labor party.

“If you look at just the Labor Party today, it’s got a very diverse group of people from a range of backgrounds and experiences,” he said. “I think my own experiences can provide a valuable contribution … to the mix.

Dowling’s campaign focused on big ticket issues like the cost of living, where Tasmania has “severe challenges” creating long term disadvantage. This includes access to cheaper medication, easier access to GP and Medicare urgent care clinics.

“I remain passionate about areas like our service delivery, improving how we deliver services and technology has a big part to play in that,” he said. “Coming from Tasmania, we’re very regionalised [with] decentralised populations.

Tech productivity and renewable energy

Another aspect Dowling wants to work towards as a Senator is using technology to improve productivity, which he said “has stalled for a long period of time now”.

Additionally, he also wants to deploy digital tools and technologies into the hands of workforces and train them to use them, which Dowling believes “will be quite critical to addressing the productivity challenge”.

“I have the opportunity to now make to make a contribution to that [discussion],” he said. “That’s exciting.”

Another key focus for Dowling is the issue of energy and there were some stark choices “at this election” about the utility.

“Labor’s commitment to continuing the renewable energy transformation resonated really strongly in Tasmania, which is already 100 per cent renewable energy,” he said. “Tasmania is on track to become 200 per cent renewable energy and provide a contribution to the rest of the nation in that sense.

“I think providing that vision for long-term transformation of our energy system for cleaner, cheaper and more reliable energy really resonated strongly in Tasmania as well.”

Dowling said that cheaper energy will also make the economy more competitive and reliable.

Having this investment in Australia will help also help create a “clean, green vision” which is something that companies that invest in the economy can leverage on, he said.

Powering AI

According to Dowling, data centres can play a role in “rewiring” the electricity grid, especially as with the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), the demand for compute and storage is “just going to be exponential in the future”.

“There’s going to be a significant expansion of data centres and they play a really important role in the grid,” he said. “They can help underpin and be an anchor tenant for new renewable energy projects.

“You can put them out where renewable assets like the sun shines the brightest [and] the winds blow the hardest in quite remote areas.”

This then provides data centres with reliable demand and becomes a great “asset for grid stability as well”, Dowling said.

“The technology sector and the renewable energy focus actually pair really well together for the decade to come,” he said, which

He said the demand for AI and data will also drive demand for compute power.

“The compute that AI is going to be driving is something that’s pretty much baked in for the next two decades at least,” Dowling said. “You just have to look at where technology investment is going and it’s a race for compute.

“They’re all massively investing in data and compute to try to [and] keep up with that demand curve, which has grown so much faster than anybody anticipated and will continue to grow.”

He noted that the demand for energy is “going to be extreme”, which he believes will lead to a race to build out a clean energy network of renewable energy.

“The transmission network to transport that power to where it’s needed is a challenge we’re going to face, but … having a data centre driven by AI is going to be important as [it] will advance cloud and trying to have more sovereign capabilities for cloud in Australia,” he said.

“You can already see that through things like the [government’s] $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund.”

Dowling said $22.5 million of that fund will go into hyperscale cloud infrastructure provider Vault Cloud, which offers secure, sovereign cloud services hosted within Australia.

He added that advanced cloud, AI and quantum computing aren’t just used in the technology industry, so it’s “critically important to have that clean energy and reliable grid as well to help support those advancements”.

Critical to a clean and reliable national energy grid is its security, Dowling said.

“We need to make sure that that is absolutely secure at all times with redundancies in place and security methods intrinsically baked in,” he said.

“We need to make sure our energy system is secure [and] if we want major industrial users to continue to invest, they need to know they’ve got access to reliable energy around skills shortages.”

Tailor offering to user needs

Dowling noted that about a “million Australians now work in the technology sector” and demand is growing.

“It’s estimated about 50,000 new workers will be needed every year from now through to 2030 and we need to do a lot more to invest in areas like STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics],” he said. “We need to make sure the curriculum is properly tailored to meet industry demands.

“Software development, AI [and] cyber security are all areas where no matter how many people we train, it’s always going to be a race to keep up with demand.”

It’s vital for the economy to keep pace with the rapid advancement of technology, especially as the sector evolves so quickly.

“If we want our economy to be productive and competitive, we need to be trying to keep up with that,” he said. “That [includes] making sure that our workforce is technology literate [and] AI literate.

“More training and literacy need to be provided and making sure that our firms are also adopting technology and remaining competitive.”

Dowling said skills, cyber security and staying ahead of the tech curve are three significant areas he has been thinking about.

The tech industry can “play a really important role in helping to build intrinsic security” as well, he said.

“Most people still see security as more of an add on, rather than something intrinsic to what they do,” Dowling said. “If we could make it easier for users to where they don’t have to think about adding security layers later because it’s part of the way we design our technology products, that would really help.”

“I’d encourage when firms, whether it’s through MSPs [managed service providers] or others, to try to tailor their offerings more to user needs,” he said. “We’ve moved a long way from just providing off the shoot off products and making sure that they are much more user centric.

“That’s the real strength of the technology sector … they’re agile and they think about users a lot more.”

Ethical lens

Dowling noted that the government operates with a much more of a policy or compliance mindset and bringing a technology point of view into government to help the user experience will be a real strength, particularly in keeping Australia nimble when it comes to how AI is adopted and used.

“There are firms in Australia that are doing cutting edge work at the foundational level of AI, as well [as] quantum and cloud,” he said. “We shouldn’t underestimate our ability to be innovative in some of these areas.”

However, a critical counterbalance to transformative technologies like AI is the way it impacts “every aspect of society”.  

“It’s not just the technology being [adopted],” said Dowling. “We need to get people comfortable that they can trust these systems and they’re being deployed ethically as well.

“We do need to move fast, but with caution, to make sure that we are building trust in these systems.”

There needs to be evidence that the technology will actually improve lives, service delivery and productivity and not not just generate profits for a narrow subset of companies, he said.

“Having that ethical layer is absolutely critical [and] that can’t just all fall on government or on a regulatory agency,” Dowling added.

According to the Senator, if everyone is going to make the best use of this technology, having that ethical life in the beginning is critical, otherwise it will fail without trust.

“At the moment, trust levels in AI are not where they need to be. They’re still very low, particularly in Australia,” he said.

What’s needed is an “ethical foundation with deployment”, and much like security, ethics also needs to be baked in and become “intrinsic” in discussions.

Outside of the bubbles

This is why Dowling plans to continue to talk to the people in the community who he said can provide significant insight.

“My term doesn’t start until July, officially,” he said. “Then I’ve got a six-year term, so it does afford me the chance to think a bit longer term and not be as driven by quarterly earnings like the private sector”.

However, the great risk in these jobs is spending a lot of time a lot of time in Parliament and the “Canberra bubble”.

“You can quickly lose touch with what issues are important,” said Dowling. “Always getting back into the community as much as possible will help as well to inform you of what issues matter.”

However, this isn’t too different from being wrapped in the tech industry bubble, he added.

“When you get deep into an industry, and technology particularly, you can get lost with how little people actually think about it the way you do,” he said. “The amount of amount of jargon; … I had to try to change my entire vocabulary.

“I came in from the outside of the tech sector originally and some of the terminology was really inaccessible.”

Dowling believes the tech sector could think about a bit how to make it more accessible for everyday people.

“Whether it’s government or technology, it needs to be user centric, user driven and get people more engaged in how they interact with some of these products,” he said.