What can be done before the act exists
Legislation lands in early 2027 at best. Everything on this page can be done first - by a minister wanting an announceable, a department wanting a head start, or an agency that would rather lead the Standards than receive them. Ordered by effort, starting at none.
1. Adopt the defined terms. The glossary is written to be lifted into agency style guides, drafting instructions and procurement templates as-is. One directive from a departmental secretary puts testable language into every document the department produces from Monday. Cost: nil. Reversibility: total. This is the lowest-effort, highest-compounding item on the page.
2. Run the Standards process in the open by administrative practice. Nothing stops the Office of AI announcing now that all consultation submissions will be published, meetings logged, and adopted text attributed to its source. No instrument required - it is a decision about how the Office runs. Announcing it early has a second effect: it is much harder for any participant to argue against a practice already in place than to lobby one out of a draft.
3. Cite pattern-level requirements in the consumer safety priorities statement. The statement due in coming weeks can name the requirements the Standards will later formalise - determinations carry an author, review means the power to substitute, consent is a record with five mandatory elements - without waiting for the instruments. Stating the destination early disciplines everything drafted afterward.
4. Pilot the determination record in one agency. The APS AI Plan already runs GovAI and mandates accountable officials. One agency adopting the determination-record pattern (author as a first-class field, inferred results structurally separate) turns a policy sentence into operational evidence before the act needs it. A working reference implementation exists and is open.
5. Put the language in procurement now. The APS AI Plan already includes an initiative on clear expectations of external service providers. Procurement templates can require verifiable provenance records and defined revocation behaviour today, for new contracts, ahead of any standard - the Commonwealth's buying power is a standards instrument that needs no parliament.
6. Ask the AI Safety Institute to evaluate the reference implementations. AISI exists, is funded, and publishes assessments. Evaluating open Australian implementations of provenance and capability licensing is squarely inside its remit and produces the evidence base the conformity design will need.
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.
7. Pilot civic compute in three councils. The National AI Plan's "spread the benefits" pillar, made physical: three local government areas, a rack each, a librarian-technologist each, two years, published uptake data. Indicative costing published separately; the short version is that a pilot costs less than one policy consultancy engagement and produces more evidence.
Every item above is reversible, cheap relative to its layer of government, and produces evidence the 2027 drafting can stand on. The pattern across all seven: the framework's hardest problems are not waiting on parliament - they are waiting on someone deciding to start.
Written with model assistance. Read and edited by a human - though I'm not an editor, so tell me what I've missed: drop me a line. Parts of this were generated; all of it was read, checked and meant. Feedback is welcome and gets used.
Reviewed and checked by the human author: 2026-07-20.