Australia’s 2026 Intergenerational Report has identified artificial intelligence as one of five major transitions expected to reshape the economy over the next four decades while leaving cryptocurrency and digital assets outside its long-term framework. Treasury describes AI as a “defining influence” on the economy through 2065-66, alongside geopolitical fragmentation, the energy transition, population ageing and Australia’s continuing shift toward services.
The official 2026 Intergenerational Report projects that Australia’s economy will more than double in size and income per capita will rise 55% by 2065-66. Its central scenario retains a long-run labour productivity assumption of 1.2% per year, while emphasizing that AI could materially affect productivity depending on adoption and implementation. The 1.2% figure is Treasury’s economy-wide productivity assumption, not a forecast that AI alone will add 1.2% of growth each year.
AI Takes a Central Role in Australia’s Economic Outlook
Separate modelling helps illustrate why AI received such prominence. EY-Parthenon estimated in August that wider AI adoption could add between A$95 billion and A$116 billion to Australian GDP by 2036, equivalent to a 2.6%-3.2% uplift, while supporting a net 36,000-44,000 additional full-time-equivalent jobs. Those numbers provide outside estimates of AI’s potential economic impact rather than forecasts produced by the Intergenerational Report itself. EY also projected a 2.0%-2.4% increase in multifactor productivity under its scenarios.
Digital assets, by contrast, do not feature among the IGR’s major structural transitions. Coinbase Australia country director John O’Loghlen argued that the omission leaves out the financial infrastructure autonomous AI systems could eventually require for automated economic activity. That criticism is an industry interpretation rather than Treasury’s explanation for excluding crypto, and the absence of digital assets from the IGR should not be read as evidence that Australia has stopped developing policy around tokenisation or digital money.
Digital Asset Policy Continues on a Separate Track
Australia has in fact advanced several digital-finance initiatives outside the IGR. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre completed Project Acacia in May, finding that tokenisation and new forms of settlement infrastructure could improve the efficiency, functionality and resilience of wholesale financial markets. The RBA has since moved into a broader work program covering tokenised assets, digital money and settlement infrastructure, including consultation on how RITS could support tokenised markets.
Treasury’s September 3 Financial Innovation Strategy provides an even clearer connection between technological change and financial infrastructure. The strategy coordinates government work around areas including digital financial markets and AI-enabled financial services, while regulators are considering new sandbox arrangements for both categories. This shows that tokenisation and digital finance remain active policy areas even though they were not elevated to the IGR’s list of economy-wide 40-year transitions.
The regulatory framework is also moving from proposal to legislation. Parliament enacted the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 in April, establishing a financial-services framework covering digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms. The core regime is scheduled to commence on April 8, 2027, making it a separate regulatory program rather than part of the IGR’s macroeconomic modelling.
The policy picture is therefore more nuanced than AI being embraced while crypto is rejected. Treasury has placed AI inside its long-term productivity and economic-transition framework, while tokenisation, stablecoins and digital-asset infrastructure are being addressed through financial regulation, settlement experiments and innovation policy. The next concrete milestones will come from implementation of the Digital Assets Framework and the RBA’s post-Acacia work program, which will show how far Australia moves from experimentation toward production-scale tokenised financial infrastructure.
