Peter Garrett
Musician and Former Environment Minister
Midnight Oil frontman and former Australian environment and arts minister who has led artists’ fury against proposals to let AI firms train on copyrighted work, condemning “big tech aiming to pillage other people’s work” as galling and shameful.
In his words
The rampant opportunism of big tech aiming to pillage other people’s work for their own profit is galling and shameful.
Biography
Peter Garrett (born 1953) is the towering, bald-headed frontman of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, whose anthems fused music with activism. He later served in federal parliament as a Labor MP and held ministerial posts including environment and, briefly, the arts.
Against AI “pillage” of artists’ work
In August 2025 the Australian Productivity Commission floated giving AI developers a copyright exemption — a “text and data mining” carve-out — to unlock what it estimated as billions in economic value. Garrett became one of the loudest voices against it, joining musicians such as Missy Higgins and The Presets’ Julian Hamilton in blasting the plan and casting the fight as a matter of national sovereignty.
The threat here is literally to our cultural, political, social and economic sovereignty.
Garrett framed the issue as a test of political will, demanding a “robust response” from lawmakers and accusing tech advocates of arguing, in effect, that “we should be allowed to steal people’s copyright so we can make more money.” His stance aligns him with the global artists’ movement resisting uncompensated AI training.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/peter-garrett