No People-Centred Vision: Why the Silence from Canberra Matters

By Steve Davies  

Despite my concerted efforts, there has been no substantive engagement on the part of the Australian Public Service with the work I have been doing on AI and moral disengagement. On Sunday 9 August, the Australian Public Service Commission shut the door to any further dialogue – including on the measured, safeguarded opening up of the GovAI Use Case Library to public view.

This did not happen out of nowhere.

The work behind it goes back to 2022, and formal outreach to government has followed a year of patient, professional contact. On 1 October 2025, I wrote to Senator the Hon Katy Gallagher, Minister for the Public Service, setting out a report recommending AI-driven moral engagement scans in the APS, and pointing to the Robodebt Scheme as a case study in exactly the kind of harm such a scan could have detected and prevented.

The reply I received in December, on the Minister’s behalf, thanked me for the report, pointed to the newly announced APS AI Plan, and said nothing about whether the specific proposal had been considered at all.

I kept going. I approached the Commission again. I approached PM&C. I approached DISR. In each case, the pattern held: courteous acknowledgment, no engagement with the substance.

On 9 August, that pattern reached its clearest point yet. The APSC’s reply to my most recent correspondence states plainly that it is “not in a position to undertake any further review, assessment or consideration of this content, including subsequent versions or related development activities,” will not be “providing comment on the substance of the material,” and is “not able to facilitate the uploading, promotion or inclusion” of this work “on GovTEAMS, the GovAI Use Case Library, or any other APS platform.”

I want to be fair to the person who wrote that letter. It is a polite, professionally worded reply, and I have no reason to doubt its sincerity. But politeness is not the same as engagement, and a considered reply to specific findings would need to say something about those findings. Across a year, three points of contact, and a Minister’s office, nobody has.

What this silence is actually telling us

I offered, from the outset, to sign a confidentiality agreement – to make it as safe as possible for anyone in government to sit down and talk this through properly. That offer stands. It has not once been taken up.

So it is worth asking plainly: why would an initiative built to help government detect the kind of harm Robodebt caused – and built to give the public a genuine, positive voice in how AI is used on their behalf – be met with avoidance rather than curiosity? I don’t know the full answer. Nobody in government has told me. But whatever the reason, the pattern itself is the finding: this isn’t a case of government looking at the work and deciding it isn’t useful. It’s a case of government choosing, repeatedly, not to look.

Underneath all of this sits a bigger problem than any one piece of correspondence. There is no cohesive, people-centred vision of what AI in government is actually for. Not a vision borrowed from a world of paper-shuffling and box-ticking, dressed up in new language. A real one – grounded in what actually happens to people when institutions get this wrong, and in what would need to be true to stop that happening again.

The vision is not complicated. AI in government should put not harming people at its core and should help organisations avoid causing harm in the first place, rather than finding out afterwards, in a Royal Commission, what went wrong. That means normalising moral engagement – genuine accountability, named decisions, honest language – as the ordinary standard, not the exceptional one. Everything I have built since 2022 has been an attempt to make that practical, not theoretical.

A question for the Prime Minister

Given the history of these interactions, and the scope of what the APSC’s letter forecloses, I put this plainly: if this does not reflect the Government’s position, the Prime Minister – or the APSC – has the opportunity to say so.

Until then, the record speaks for itself. Two stories, written a year apart, already show where this trajectory leads if they do not.

The Last Days of Disconnection 1 – A Commemorative Reflection from 2050

 

The Last Days of Disconnection 2 – 2026 The Year of the Pattern

 

 

Steve Davies is a retired public servant. His expertise is in the areas of organisational research and people development. He’s always been attracted to forward looking work. He’s a vocal critic of destructive, cruel and backwards looking behaviours and practices.

Over the years he’s spoken in depth with whistleblowers and advocated the use of technology (including social media tech) to empower people to do great things together.

His thinking and work have been heavily influenced by such great thinkers and researchers as Shoshana Zuboff, Albert Bandura and Peter Senge for decades.