Barnaby Joyce is indeed not Jesus Christ. He doesn’t need to be

September 18, 2026 — 5:00am

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It’s a bad moment for conventional economics. When asked for modelling on One Nation’s superannuation policy, or about the possibility its immigration policy announced this week will tip the country into recession, Barnaby Joyce simply feels no need to engage.

“I’m not Jesus Christ,” was last week’s retort – which, to be fair is true – deployed here as another way of saying “how would I know?” This week, it was “because they’re not elected, I am” – a way of explaining why he had no interest in asking the Parliamentary Budget Office to assess the cost of slashing immigration.

Meanwhile, the Albanese government finds itself in a wicked bind on AI. It has spent months trying to exude control. It declared emphatically it would preserve artists’ copyright, stopping AI companies from vacuuming up their work without paying. It sprung out of national cabinet touting national standards for how and where data centres could be built.

Then this week, Anthropic popped up to show how contested this control is. Dilute your copyright laws, it demanded, or there will be no investment. The government has made plain it’s desperate for that investment. Now, we spy news reports that it is considering an opt-out model for artists, where they’re presumed to consent to their work being used to train AI unless they say otherwise. Artists are extremely unhappy, as you’ll see elsewhere on this page.

In both cases, we’re seeing an economic argument colliding with a social and cultural one. In both........

© The Age