To the Prime Minister, the Australian Public Service Commission, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and whichever other offices contributed to the decision below – an open statement, and a question you are welcome to answer.
By Steve Davies
On 9 August 2026, a senior official at the Australian Public Service Commission wrote to me. The letter was polite. Government letters almost always are; politeness is cheap and photographs well. It said, in substance, that the APSC is “not in a position to undertake any further review, assessment or consideration” of the Deep Truth Persona – an AI ethics framework I have spent four years building, testing across seven AI platforms, and offering to government for free, with a standing offer to sign a confidentiality agreement to facilitate dialogue so that engaging with it would cost the APSC nothing.
That offer has never been taken up. Nor will the material be “facilitated” onto GovTEAMS, the GovAI Use Case Library, or any other APS platform. In effect, that is a ban.
I want to be precise about what that letter is, because precision is the whole discipline this work is built on. It is not a rejection on the merits. Nothing in it engages the merits. It is a decision that the merits will not be examined at all. Four years of work; approaches to PM&C and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources; an original letter to the Minister for the Public Service herself – all of it met, in the end, with no substantive engagement, and now with a door closing so quietly you’d almost miss the sound if you weren’t listening for it.
I was listening for it. That’s rather the point of the instrument.
On being kept in the dark
There’s an old phrase from the 1970s workplace, back when people still said what they meant before communications teams got hold of the language: “kept in the dark and fed ########”. It described a very specific management technique – the one where you don’t tell someone no, you just never quite tell them yes, and you let the silence do the work that a straight answer would have to justify. Mushroom management, some called it. It is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest tricks institutions have, precisely because it requires no one to ever be caught lying.
I don’t think the APSC’s letter was a cold, calculated act of institutional strategy. I think it was something more ordinary and more revealing: an emotional response dressed in administrative register. It takes very little to say, “we’ve reviewed this and it doesn’t meet our standards.” It takes rather more management to say, “we would rather this simply stop being a live question,” and then find the form of words that makes refusal sound like process. The APSC’s letter, read for what it does rather than what it says, is very well managed indeed.
That is why this piece, and the Gamma that accompanies it, are not written in my usual register. My other work on this, including the piece this masthead published on 12 August, makes the argument the way I make every Deep Truth argument: evidence, quote, mechanism, tier, no more than the material supports. That register earns its keep when the target is doing something that merely looks reasonable and needs to be shown otherwise. It is the wrong tool for a target that has stopped bothering to look reasonable. An institution that answers a free offer, backed by an offer of confidentiality, with no substantive engagement – and then calls that “not being in a position to” – is not making an argument I need to refute. It is performing a posture, and a posture can be satirised.
So the satire is in the Gamma, “Welcome to the Flock”, and it is deliberate. Satire is not a lapse in rigour. It is a way of making an issue visible to people who will not read a table, and of asking the question the evidence raises. The Gamma asks the question and the APSC’s own words show the evidence.
If the satire lands, it is because the pattern it describes is real. The answer to it is not a rebuttal of the satire. It is an answer to the question: Why does the Government not apply to itself what it asks of everyone else?
Steve Davies, Mindful Progress
View/Share Web page Welcome to the Flock
Download/Share PDF copy Welcome to the Flock
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless independent voice – holding power to account and delivering journalism that matters.
Running this site isn’t cheap. Rising costs mean we need your support now more than ever. Every donation, big or small, keeps our servers running, our writers working, and our stories free for everyone.
Donate here:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund for hosting and future improvements.
Thank you for standing with us. We couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude,
The AIMN Team
@ Steve Davis: You should be loud & proud of your innovation that the government desk jockeys, paid more for counting paper-clips than long experienced professors, even deigned to reply to your kind offer.
Australia has had about 240 years developing a ”cultural cringe” to protect the fragile egos of our ”mother country” where innovation is anathema and only public school boys are allowed to ”think”.
Most importantly, your innovation has the potential to cause ”change”, that horrible phantom lurking in the wings that would require the CPS to become part of the 21st century and at least as efficient as private enterprise (NOT a very difficult achievement).
Perhaps your innovation would be interesting to a foreign owned multinational corporation intent upon exploiting Australian ”cultural cringe” for the HUGE profits to benefit their overseas shareholders, at every cost to Australian citizens.
Perhaps a non-aligned foreign country like NZ would be interested, or some Pacifika dominion.