Notes

🎉 Yesterday was the final Asian Australian Voices workshop — and I got my first op-ed published in The Mandarin.

It has been a joy learning to navigate the media landscape and find our voices. The piece is on the opportunity for Australia and New Zealand to build robust, innovative digital public infrastructure. A big thank you to Asia Society Australia, the ASEAN-Australia Centre, NFACR and the Centre for Australia-India Relations.

🧮 In high school I used a calculator to get through maths without really understanding it. AI can feel the same.

My friends in Extension 2 already understood the mechanics, so the tool was an accelerant, not a shortcut. The harder question with AI: do you know enough about what you're delegating to judge whether the output is any good? If you don't, you're not saving time — you're outsourcing your understanding.

🌾 My grandma used to tell me stories of riding buffalo and working her family's farm in the Mekong Delta.

We understand farming instinctively in Australia — it's a value we share with Vietnam. Right now the Delta faces saltwater intrusion, flooding and displacement. This McKinsey report reads as data and dollar figures, but for diaspora families the connections it draws are deeply personal ones.

🔓 The Canvas breach in May took down learning systems across ANU, Melbourne and UTS — affecting 275 million users.

AI is pushing innovation forward faster than I've ever seen, but the security and privacy conversation isn't keeping up. The infrastructure underneath — learning systems, health records, government platforms — is what people actually depend on, and it's still failing in ways we've known how to fix for years.

🩺 Stories like this give me real excitement about where the Australia–Vietnam relationship is heading.

UWA's Marshall Centre and Vinmec have partnered to tackle gastric cancer detection across Vietnam — a disease that kills roughly 13,500 people a year and is one of the most preventable when caught early. Australian research expertise paired with Vietnam's clinical reach, and a focus on prevention rather than reactive care.

📊 Every team I work with has AI tools. The motions of working and thinking haven't changed.

MIT Sloan just published a 3-year study of 300+ senior finance leaders with the same finding: the teams with the best tools weren't getting the best outcomes — the ones that changed how they worked were. It's not a technology gap. It's a permission gap.

🤖 I recently joined our AI Tiger team at AWS to test AI automation — and the AI part is often the easiest part.

The harder work is everything around it: understanding where a solution touches existing processes, aligning stakeholders, and testing against real workflows, not ideal ones. Enduring solutions need a digital transformation mindset first. AI doesn't replace that work — it just makes it visible when it's been skipped.

🚶 Da Nang has banned commercial activity on sidewalks — no signage, no boards, no stalls.

I see it from two sides. In Cabramatta, where my family has a shop, night vendors directly hit businesses paying rent and rates. In Vietnam, many vendors have no fallback. The hard question isn't whether footpaths should be cleared — it's whether the people who depend on them have somewhere else to go.

👓 I've been on the fence about smart glasses — until I read these letters in The Guardian.

A man with juvenile macular dystrophy used Meta glasses to read a newspaper for the first time in 30 years. This is where the tech gets interesting for me: not a gadget, but infrastructure. Imagine glasses translating an ATO or Centrelink letter in real time for a CALD family. The next generation will be shaped by who we design it for.

⚖️ Vietnam's first standalone AI law took effect on 1 March 2026 — one of the first in Southeast Asia.

It offers incentives — a national AI development fund, regulatory sandboxes, tax breaks — alongside a firm emphasis on sovereignty, data autonomy and human control. Vietnam isn't waiting for the technology to mature before setting the rules. It's building the rules into the foundation.

🛡️ A defence contractor's lead leaves. Their AI twin stays behind, trained on their full working life. Who owns it?

ASPI makes the case that Australia needs to govern AI digital twins before they become widespread — updating the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act and extending the Defence Industry Security Program to cover AI twins in the supply chain. Australia has a window here. I hope we use it.

🏟️ I've walked into Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe and Old Trafford. Vietnam is building that feeling from scratch.

Trống Đồng Stadium in Hanoi — 135,000 seats, the world's largest retractable roof, Đông Sơn bronze drum motifs across the facade. Part of an Olympic Sports City at a reported US$38 billion. What I want to know is what comes after it's complete: which artists perform, which tournaments call it home.

💡 Every census night, I sit at the dining table translating the questions for my mum and aunt.

This week India began counting 1.4 billion people — its first census since 2011, fully digital, with 3 million workers going door-to-door. Australia's census night is 11 August. Digital-first doesn't mean digital-only: the bridge between data infrastructure and the people it serves is almost always a person, or a kid at a dining table.

🌏 Australia just signaled a pivotal shift in how democracies should approach AI governance: regulatory restraint as strategy.

The Productivity Commission's December 2025 report delivers a clear message: resist premature AI regulation. Instead of rushing to create AI-specific laws, conduct systematic gap analyses to identify where existing frameworks fall short.

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới 2026! 🎊

Chúc mọi người năm nay nhiều sức khỏe và thành công! 🐴🔥 Wishing everyone across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Europe, US and around the world a joyful and prosperous Lunar New Year!

✨ Interesting fact: In Vietnamese culture, the first person to cross the threshold of your home on Tết is believed to set the tone for the entire year ahead. Their energy, character, and fortune become the family's. This tradition is called "Xông Đất". 🙏

🏠 Listening to Bloomberg News's recent episode on the housing backlash in Sydney's wealthiest suburbs got me thinking — and not in a straightforward way.

Woollahra has shrunk 11% in population over 50 years, while Greater Sydney grew 74%. That's not a local quirk. It's a policy failure sitting next to a train line. We are not land-scarce like Hong Kong. What we lack is the political will to have uncomfortable conversations about where and how we build.

🧠 When housing is precarious, people don't take risks. They don't think expansively. That's not just a housing problem — it's an economic strategy problem. You cannot build a productive economy on a foundation of financial anxiety.

🧠 We are trying to solve 2025 problems using 1990s mental models.

My final reflection from Wellington is on Mental Models. We often fall into the trap of simply layering new AI tools on top of old, inefficient ways of working.

If you don't have a GenAI Council, you probably have a shadow IT problem.

The most tactical takeaway from the 2025 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Day in Wellington wasn't about which AI model to use but it was about the org charts.

🇳🇿 Last week, I was in New Zealand to join the AWS team in Wellington and learn about the reality of public sector AI adoption.

The conversation here has decisively shifted from the "hype" of innovation to the sustainability of the model.

🌏 As part of the Asian Australian Voices program, last week I was in Canberra for two incredible days, seeing Australia's "policy engine" for Asia engagement up close at Parliament House and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

It was a privilege to have a direct discussion with Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Special Envoy for Indian Ocean Affairs Tim Watts to engage with passionate, community-focused leaders like Dai Le.

🌐 The World's First Regional Digital Economy Agreement is Almost Here

Last week, ASEAN reached a "substantial conclusion" in negotiations for the Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) - set to be signed by 2026 and potentially worth $2 trillion by 2030.

🏛️ Does ASEAN and South-East Asia Actually Matter?

This week had no shortage of news from the region with President Trump attending the ASEAN Summit in Malaysia to Prime Minister Albanese elevating discussions around economic growth, regional security and stability.