You are the Director of AI Adoption & Enablement at the Department of Public Systems. A branch wants to start an AI trial on grant assessments next Monday. A Deputy Secretary has already seen the demo and liked it. Nobody has told you anything that is untrue, and nobody has told you everything.
You cannot approve it. You cannot stop it. You have four staff, eight hours a day, a committee that meets on Thursday, and the whole of the Commonwealth’s policy apparatus sitting quietly underneath the problem. Your job is not to solve it. Your job is to make it possible for somebody to decide it, defensibly, and to still be able to explain that decision in six months.
Real Australian Government policy sits under this game — the Policy for the responsible use of AI in government, the Privacy Act, the Archives Act, the PSPF, the CPRs, the PGPA Act and the rest — thirty-nine instruments in all, each with its status, its source, the evidence it expects and the question it does not answer. The department is invented. The policy is not. It is still a game: check the primary source before you rely on anything here.