The Joe Walker Podcast

This episode is best watched on video, as we often refer to some calculations I wrote on a whiteboard. 

[Recorded 30 September 2026.]

Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to work out what it would take, on the energy side, for Australia to build 10 to 15 gigawatts of AI compute by 2030.

So I sat down with Tim Nelson, one of Australia's foremost energy economists. Tim chaired last year's independent review of the National Electricity Market, known as the Nelson Review. He was previously Chief Economist at AGL and is currently Head of Markets at Snowy Hydro (though he joins me in his own capacity).

We discuss whether data centres could eat half of Australia's electricity grid, how they could actually lower power prices for everyone, what smelters can teach us about building renewable generation quickly, what could bottleneck the compute build-out, and why the best place to train AI might be off-grid in the outback.

Sponsors

• e61: a non-partisan economic research institute focused on Australian public policy. To receive a copy of the new essay I co-authored with e61 on data centres and the compute economy, go to https://www.e61.in/joewalker.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the second episode in a multi-part series called 'Compute in Australia'. Series announcement here. More episodes to follow over the coming month.

[Recorded 24 August 2026.]

Janet Egan is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on the national security implications of artificial intelligence. She was previously the inaugural director of policy in Australia's Office of Supply Chain Resilience.

I caught up with Janet while she was home in Australia to stress-test the strategic case for building a large compute industry here. We discuss why training compute gives Australia more leverage than inference compute, whether hosting compute could also give us influence over AI safety, why copyright is a red line for the AI companies, and why Australia's window to act is "a month or months, rather than a year". 

Sponsors

• e61: a non-partisan economic research institute focused on Australian public policy. To receive a copy of the new essay I co-authored with e61 on data centres and the compute economy, go to https://www.e61.in/joewalker.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the first episode in a multi-part series called 'Compute in Australia'. Series announcement here. More episodes to follow over the coming month.

[Recorded 7 August 2026.]

Dr Andrew Charlton MP is an Australian economist, entrepreneur and politician. As Cabinet Secretary and Australia's Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, he is one of the key leaders shaping the Australian government's AI strategy.

Andrew shares his internal model for how AI plays out economically and what a middle power like Australia should do about it. We discuss whether data centres will yield large economic rents, the geostrategic case for a compute industry, and how the government plans to use compute to climb the stack to "sovereign AI".

Sponsors

• e61: a non-partisan economic research institute focused on Australian public policy. To receive a copy of the new essay I co-authored with e61 on data centres and the compute economy, go to https://www.e61.in/joewalker.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

https://josephnoelwalker.com/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Patrick Weller is emeritus professor of politics and public policy at Griffith University and the author or editor of some forty books.

Pat wrote what was the first (and may still be the only) Westminster-system equivalent to Robert Caro's epic meditation on Lyndon Johnson: a detailed study of how Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser wielded power. First published in 1989, it's a fascinating study of how one individual climbed into the hermit-crab-shell that is the prime ministership and made it his own.

Pat is also the author of two other detailed studies of Australian political leaders, and the definitive history of cabinet government in Australia.

Pat's work offers a picture of how human institutions – in this case, Westminster cabinets – work in practice and on a day-to-day level. Understanding the messiness, the beautiful malleability of the institutions, and their human bottlenecks has helped me build a more accurate model of the world – useful for predicting how governments may both respond to and utilise powerful new technologies.

Sponsors

• Effective Altruism Australia: how Australians give to GiveWell's top charities — tax-deductibly, and with 100% pass-through. Until June 30, 2026, EAA is matching new donations up to $300,000. Donate at https://www.eaa.org.au/joewalker.
• e61: a non-partisan economic research institute focused on Australian public policy. To receive a copy of the new essay I co-authored with e61 on data centres and the compute economy, go to https://www.e61.in/joewalker.

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Danielle Wood is an Australian economist and the current chair of the Australian Productivity Commission.

Had a lot of fun chatting with Dani about how she's making sense of AI and its implications for policy. We discuss:

• whether AI will be more like the internet or the Industrial Revolution,
• where in the AI stack the profits will ultimately flow (and why it might not be the model layer),
• why diffusion is the "main game" for Australian policymakers,
• whether there's a case for government support of data centres,
• why the AI jobpocalypse story is too crude (and why humans may still have jobs even under transformative AI),
• whether AI will turn out to be a normal or abnormal technology, or both,
• and why in either case Australia shouldn't follow the EU in legislating an AI Act.

Sponsors

• Effective Altruism Australia: how Australians give to GiveWell's top charities — tax-deductibly, and with 100% pass-through. Until June 30, 2026, EAA is matching new donations up to $300,000. Donate at https://www.eaa.org.au/joewalker.
• e61: a non-partisan economic research institute focused on Australian public policy. To receive a copy of the new essay I co-authored with e61 on data centres and the compute economy, go to https://www.e61.in/joewalker.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at https://www.vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part 3 of a three-part immigration series this week. Martin Parkinson (economics) available here; Mark Cully (history) available here.

Mike Pezzullo ran the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (2013-2014), then the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (2014-2017), then the Department of Home Affairs (2017-2023). For more than a decade across those three roles, he was responsible for how Australia selects migrants, screens for risk, and thinks about social cohesion under stress.

We discuss the central but underappreciated fact about how Australia selects migrants: the diversity of our intake is a happy accident of global migration flows, not engineered policy. We also walk through how the visa system actually screens for security and character, why Pezzullo doubts the Bondi terrorist's father would have been refused a student visa in 1998 even with today's tools, what a 2027 China-Taiwan blockade would mean for the Australian migration system in real time, and a never-aired proposal for fixing Australia's "permanent temporaries" problem — a constitutional amendment Pezzullo calls "the Pezzullo special." We finish with: should "populate or perish" return as defence policy? 

(Episode recorded on 16 March 2026.)

Sponsors

• Eucalyptus: the Aussie startup providing digital healthcare clinics to help patients around the world take control of their quality of life. Euc is looking to hire ambitious young Aussies and Brits. You can check out their open roles at eucalyptus.health/careers.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part 2 of a three-part immigration series this week. Martin Parkinson (economics) available here; Mike Pezzullo (acculturation, social cohesion, security) drops Friday.

Mark Cully was the inaugural chief economist at the Australian Department of Immigration (2009-2012). His forthcoming book, Waves of Plenty (September 2026), is (to my knowledge) the first truly general history of immigration to Australia. It will fill a remarkable gap in our literature, given the centrality of immigration to the Australian story.

We discuss Australian exceptionalism in migration policy. The only country to have run assisted passage at scale (around 3.5 million people whose fares were subsidised). The first country in the world to have a dedicated Department of Immigration. The first country to offer migrants English-language training. Per capita, the world's largest receiver of international students for decades. Today, one of only three countries – alongside Switzerland and Singapore – with an overseas-born share above 30%. On current trends that share is projected to approach 40% by mid-century, a level likely not seen since the 1880s.

We walk through six decades that built the nation – the 1830s, 1850s, 1890s, 1950s, 1970s, and 2000s. We discuss why Australia eschewed slavery, why the 1850s might be the most important decade in the making of modern Australia, and what the White Australia policy was really about. We also explore what made the post-war migration program the most epic policy experiment in our history, whether migration has increased Australian living standards, and what history can teach us about the rise of One Nation.

(Episode recorded on 23 February 2026.)

Sponsor

• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part 1 of a three-part immigration series this week. Mark Cully (history) drops Thursday; Mike Pezzullo (acculturation, social cohesion, security) drops Friday.

 Martin Parkinson ran the Australian Treasury (2011-2014), then the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet (2015-2019). He's also thought deeply about the economics of migration policy, not just in those roles, but also in his past academic life and as chair of the Australian government's 2023 Migration Review (the most significant review of our migration system in more than three decades).

We discuss the central but underappreciated issue with Australian migration policy today: we've drifted into a quasi-guest-worker system without anyone voting for it. About 2.3 million people in Australia now go to sleep here every night with work rights, but without being citizens or permanent residents.

We also work through how migration affects living standards, the "Soviet-style" occupation list that governs our skilled program, how to attract true global talent, how international student fees came to subsidise roughly half of Australian university research, and what should be the upper and lower bounds for net migration. We end up in an unexpected place: how much more geopolitical weight would a larger population actually buy us?

(Episode recorded on 27 February 2026.)

Sponsors

• Eucalyptus: the Aussie startup providing digital healthcare clinics to help patients around the world take control of their quality of life. Euc is looking to hire ambitious young Aussies and Brits. You can check out their open roles at eucalyptus.health/careers.
• Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE".

To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A short intro to my three-part immigration series. Episodes with Martin Parkinson, Mark Cully, and Mike Pezzullo are out this week.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.