Dear Minister

Dear Minister,

On 15 July the Government committed to building Australian standards for AI: an Office of AI, an AI Safety Institute already testing frontier models, existing regulators with strengthened powers, and legislation flagged for early 2027. It is the right direction, and the consumer safety priorities statement due in the coming weeks will begin to set the shape.

Building the standards will need reference material - defined terms an examiner can apply, a model instrument that reads as draft law rather than principle, a way to test conformity that does not collapse into an annual paperwork exercise. We have written that material and published it, dated and attributed, before any consultation opened. It sits at meanwhile.computer, one page per artefact: a glossary, a model data-governance and consent instrument with a running reference implementation, a conformity test procedure, a schema annex, a comparison against other jurisdictions, and a short list of measures that need no legislation at all. The capability-licensing research it rests on was published before the announcement, which is the plainest evidence we can offer that this is a standing programme and not a submission written to a deadline.

Working reference code. A running reference implementation of the licensed-capability mechanism is published at git.meanwhile.computer/meanwhile/research - clone it and check the claims yourself.

We are not asking you to adopt Meanwhile. We are asking you to consider adopting the pattern. It is published, specified and running, so it can be adopted without us - by the Office, by a department, by another supplier, or by Meanwhile, or something very similar. The standards will need a reference implementation; this one exists, it is Australian, and it is open.

One request belongs on the record because the framework will be judged by whether it survives the process that follows it: that submissions to the standards consultations be published, meetings logged, and adopted text attributed to its source - and that secondments and paid advisory relationships into the Office appear in its first annual report. It is the discipline this work applies to itself, and it is the cheapest anti-capture measure available.

We would welcome the opportunity to present this work to the Office of AI or any consultation the Government convenes.

A closing thought, on a phrase the Government has used well. Social licence is usually spoken of as something to keep and, if neglected, to lose - but a licence that exists only as goodwill, assumed by those who hold it, is the weakest version of the idea. It is now both possible and expected that the interests of a population can be represented digitally: consent as a record, a grant as something a person issues, a permission they can withdraw and have the withdrawal mean something. The duty of a government shaping the terms of what we are entering is to codify that licence - to make it enactable, so that a society holds a functioning licence it grants to governments and companies, rather than a sentiment those parties assume is still theirs. That is the thing a standard can do that a speech cannot: turn social licence from a mood into a mechanism.

You have said the words - that unlicensed training is theft, that the rules should be faster rather than fewer. Keep the words in the instruments.

Yours sincerely,

[Signature] Meanwhile meanwhile.computer

Prepared with model assistance and signed by its human author.