Correction, 29 August 2026: what we got wrong and why. An earlier version of this article, published on 29 August 2026, said the government's response was still being considered and that we could not establish whether one had been tabled. That was wrong. The government tabled its response in the House of Representatives on 1 April 2026, and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources published it. We had checked the Senate's own status pages, which still do not record it, and treated the absence of a newer Senate record as evidence that nothing had happened. It was not evidence of that. The article has been rewritten around the response itself; the error and what caused it are described in how we got this wrong below.

Australia's AI policy debate is usually reported as though it were waiting on a decision. The parliamentary part of it already happened. A Senate select committee ran for eight months, took submissions, held hearings and made thirteen specific recommendations, and there is now a government response to them.

What the committee was and what it asked for

The committee was established on 26 March 2024, called for written submissions by 10 May 2024, was due to report by 19 September 2024, and had that extended to 26 November 2024. The committee page notes that The tabling of the final report concludes the work of the select committee, so there is no continuing body to press the point.

Its first three recommendations go to regulation. Recommendation 1 is That the Australian Government introduce new, whole-of-economy, dedicated legislation to regulate high-risk uses of AI. Recommendation 3 is That the Australian Government ensure the non-exhaustive list of high-risk AI uses explicitly includes general-purpose AI models, such as large language models (LLMs).

Others reach into work, copyright and government decision-making. Recommendation 6 is That the Australian Government extend and apply the existing work health and safety legislative framework to the workplace risks posed by the adoption of AI. Recommendation 9 is That the Australian Government require the developers of AI products to be transparent about the use of copyrighted works in their training datasets. Recommendation 12 asks the government to implement recommendations 17.1 and 17.2 of the Robodebt Royal Commission pertaining to the establishment of a consistent legal framework covering ADM in government services.

The response convention, and where this report sits

The Senate publishes the rule on its own site: Government responses to committee reports are required within three months of a report being tabled. This practice has arisen from a Senate resolution of 14 March 1973. Twice a year the President reports to the Senate on how that is going.

In the government's status report as at 30 September 2025, ten months after tabling, the entry reads in full:

Adopting Artificial Intelligence – Senate Select

Interim report 10.10.24 The Government's response is being considered.

Final report 26.11.24 The Government's response is being considered.

That was true when it was written. It is no longer the position, and the Senate's pages have not caught up: the newest Government status report on that page is still the September 2025 one, and the newest President's report is dated 31 December 2025.

The response, and how long it took

The Department of Industry, Science and Resources publishes the response, and dates it precisely: The government tabled this response in the House of Representatives on 1 April 2026. That is sixteen months after the final report was tabled, against a convention of three.

It is organised as an overview plus five thematic parts: AI data centres and infrastructure, AI capability and adoption, AI safety and regulation, support and training for Australian workers, and copyright and creative sector impacts. Those map onto the committee's subject matter closely enough that nobody could call it non-responsive.

What it does not do is answer the recommendations. Across roughly 47,000 characters of response text we found three references to a numbered recommendation, one of which records that The Coalition provided commentary on the 13 recommendations of the Final Report, and on Recommendation 5 of the Interim Report. There is no recommendation-by- recommendation table, no support or noted or rejected against each of the thirteen, and no attachment carrying one. A reader wanting to know what the government made of recommendation 9, on transparency about copyrighted works in training data, will find a part about copyright and has to infer the rest.

The response also arrives after the policy it describes. It records that On 2 December 2025, the Australian Government released its National AI Plan (the plan), four months before the response was tabled. So the document answering a 2024 committee is in part a description of a plan already published.

The context that makes this less of a scandal and more of a system

It would be easy, and wrong, to write this as AI being singled out for neglect. In the same document we counted the status The Government's response is being considered against 247 entries, and The Government's response was tabled against 19. Those counts are ours, from the text of the document; it publishes no totals of its own.

The oldest entry still recorded as being considered is A Certain Maritime Incident, tabled 28.11.02. Also on the list is the Administrations of Sports Grants final report from 18.03.21. So the three month convention is not a deadline that AI missed. It is a convention that is routinely not met, and the AI report joined a queue.

Our view, on those documents: the more useful criticism is not that a response is late, because lateness here is normal. It is that the parliamentary process which produced thirteen specific, drafted recommendations about high-risk AI, workplace safety and training data has no mechanism to make anyone answer them, and the committee that wrote them dissolved on tabling. Anyone arguing that Australia has not decided what to do about AI should know that a committee of the Senate decided what it thought two years ago and published it.

How we got this wrong

The first version of this article checked the Senate's own machinery: the committee page, the government-responses index, and the most recent status report we could open. All of it said the response was being considered, and none of it has been updated since. We treated that as the state of the world.

It was the state of one record. A government response to a Senate committee is tabled in whichever house the government chooses and published by the responsible department, and neither of those events updates the Senate page we were reading. One search for the response itself, rather than for its absence, found it in a minute. The lesson we are taking is narrow and useful: an official register showing nothing is evidence about the register, and looking for a thing is not the same as looking for the record of a thing.

What survives from the original piece is the queue context, which we have kept, and the observation that the committee dissolved on tabling. What does not survive is the headline.

We still have not assessed whether any recommendation has been implemented, which is a different question from whether the government responded.

Methodology. Read from the committee's own pages on the Parliament of Australia site, the Senate's government-responses index, the government's status report PDF as at 30 September 2025, and the Department of Industry, Science and Resources page publishing the government response, all on 29 August 2026. Recommendation wording, dates, the response convention and the tabling date are quoted verbatim from those sources. The counts of 247 and 19 are ours, obtained by counting the two status phrases in the text of the status report, which states no totals itself; the count of references to numbered recommendations in the response is likewise ours, from the response's web text, which carries no attachment. Every other number here is published. We have not contacted the committee, any senator, or any department, and no individual is named. The opinion offered is labelled as ours and rests on the documents quoted above it.

Sources

  1. Parliament of Australia, Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) (read 29 August 2026): that the Senate established the committee on 26 March 2024, called for submissions by 10 May 2024, extended the reporting date from 19 September 2024 to 26 November 2024, and that the tabling of the final report concludes the work of the select committee.
  2. Parliament of Australia, Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence, final report (read 29 August 2026): the thirteen recommendations, including recommendation 1 on dedicated whole-of-economy legislation for high-risk AI, recommendation 3 on general-purpose models, recommendation 6 on work health and safety, recommendation 9 on transparency about copyrighted works in training datasets, and recommendation 12 on the Robodebt Royal Commission recommendations 17.1 and 17.2.
  3. Parliament of Australia, Government responses outstanding to committee reports (read 29 August 2026): that responses are required within three months of tabling, arising from a Senate resolution of 14 March 1973, and that the President reports twice a year on their status.
  4. Parliament of Australia, Status of government responses in the Senate to parliamentary committee reports, as at 30 September 2025 (PDF, downloaded and read 29 August 2026): the Adopting Artificial Intelligence entries for the interim report of 10.10.24 and the final report of 26.11.24, both recorded as the government's response being considered; the entry for A Certain Maritime Incident tabled 28.11.02 with the same status; the Administrations of Sports Grants final report of 18.03.21; and the two status phrases counted above.
  5. Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Australian Government response: Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) report (read 29 August 2026): that the government tabled the response in the House of Representatives on 1 April 2026; the five thematic parts covering data centres and infrastructure, capability and adoption, safety and regulation, workers, and copyright and the creative sector; the statement that the Coalition provided commentary on the 13 recommendations of the final report and on recommendation 5 of the interim report; and that the National AI Plan was released on 2 December 2025.

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