Jun 5, 2026 – 8.50amIt was in the middle of Tuesday afternoon that Sally McManus, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, accidentally nailed Australia’s great artificial intelligence conundrum.“The union movement’s not saying AI is a terrible thing. It could be a really fantastic thing, and we’d like that to happen,” McManus told a sold-out audience at The Australian Financial Review AI summit in Sydney. “We’d like that to happen for our country, and we’d like to see a time when jobs are more interesting, when we can somehow tax those big companies, and we can share the benefits, and we can all be working a three-day working week.”Subscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? James ThomsonColumnistJames Thomson is senior Chanticleer columnist based in Melbourne. He was the Companies editor and editor of BRW Magazine.Fetching latest articles