Anthony Albanese will use a speech in Sydney on Wednesday to announce a new Office of AI inside his own department, along with a national framework for artificial intelligence he says will be the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

The office begins work inside the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet immediately. Its job, in excerpts of the speech released ahead of delivery, is "to co-ordinate the design of our new Australian Standards and to bring together the work ministers are undertaking across government".

“Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," the Prime Minister says in the excerpts. "AI touches on the work of every minister and department, so it is only natural that, up until now, our response has been issue-by-issue, sector by sector.”

The comparison he reaches for is historical: governments built co-ordinated approaches to civil aviation in the 1920s and genetics in the 1990s, and AI, he argues, requires the same treatment. The pitch is aimed at investors as much as voters. Getting the settings right, the excerpts say, would mean faster and clearer approvals and a single process for verifying compliance.

The framework is intended to take in energy, copyright, education and labour rights, along with the risks chatbots pose to children, a digital duty of care, and the use of AI in defence and national security. The office will work with Industry Minister Tim Ayres and Andrew Charlton, the assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy.

The world-first label comes with a qualifier. The European Union already has an AI Act in force and a European AI Office to administer it. What Australia is claiming as first is the consolidation: one national framework covering the field, rather than separate laws answering separate problems.

The companies the framework is meant to attract are already inside the building. A five-year Microsoft deal covering the federal public service commenced on July 1, alongside what the government has described as a $25 billion investment framework, and Canberra signed a memorandum of understanding with Anthropic on AI safety and research in March. The same companies have told the government their investment levels depend on where Australia lands on copyright, the piece of the framework now sitting with Attorney-General Michelle Rowland.

Ed Husic, the former industry minister, spent Tuesday arguing the rules need teeth. Giving big tech social licence to write its own, he told Sky News, is a path "sadly doomed to failure". "We tried self-regulation for ... a couple of decades, found out that it didn't work, and it won't work on a financial basis for these firms," he said. "None of these firms will go one out from the other to bring in guardrails to limit the risks."

The Coalition had not responded by Wednesday morning. The office exists from today; the standards it is supposed to design do not, and the first hard test is copyright. The companies whose money the government is courting have said their spending depends on it.