Digital Rights Watch testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (July 2024)

On 16 July 2024, Digital Rights Watch — Australia's leading civil society digital rights body — appeared before Australia's Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence, with Chair Lizzie O'Shea presenting oral testimony as part of the committee's inquiry into the opportunities and impacts of AI adoption in Australia. Digital Rights Watch had also lodged Submission 156 as written evidence — one of the submissions received from civil society, labour, and industry stakeholders across the inquiry — with the July 16 hearing providing the opportunity for oral evidence and questions from committee members.

Committee context

The Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence was established on 26 March 2024, tasked with investigating and reporting on the opportunities and impacts of AI adoption in Australia. Its terms of reference covered recent trends in generative AI; risks and harms including bias, discrimination, and error; emerging international regulatory approaches; opportunities for health, climate, and economic gain from responsible AI adoption; and potential threats to democracy from AI-generated content. Submissions closed in May 2024. The committee conducted six public hearings across 2024, with the July 16–17 sessions among the middle hearings in that series. The final report was tabled on 26 November 2024, containing 13 recommendations to the Australian government — proposing a shift from Australia's voluntary, principles-based approach to AI governance toward mandatory regulatory guardrails for high-risk AI uses, alongside enhanced financial support for AI capability building, worker-rights protections, and environmental-impact requirements for AI infrastructure.

DRW's testimony: outdated law, structural critique

Digital Rights Watch — founded in Melbourne in 2016 in response to Australia's mandatory telecommunications data retention scheme — has positioned itself as the civil society counterweight to commercial framings of AI adoption. Its July 2024 hearing appearance was characterised by a structural critique of Australian law as fundamentally inadequate for the AI moment: in O'Shea's direct formulation to the committee, "It is clear that our laws are decades out of date."

The affective anchor of the testimony was the case of Cooper Mortlock — a voice actor whose employment contract was terminated and whose voice was subsequently cloned without his consent to complete a production, a case O'Shea cited as demonstrating the absence of enforceable protections for Australians' personal biometric data under existing law. DRW's position was that this was not an isolated edge case but symptomatic of a regulatory framework never designed to handle AI systems' capacity to replicate, deploy, and commodify human voice, likeness, and biometric attributes at scale.

DRW called for three categories of reform: enhanced statutory rights over biometric data — voice, likeness, and biometric identifiers — as a distinct category attracting heightened consent requirements before any AI use; tighter consent mechanisms for personal information in AI systems more broadly; and, most structurally, what O'Shea described as interventions that would "limit the use of personal information and seek to put limits on data-extracted business models." This third demand located the underlying problem in DRW's frame as architectural: not merely a gap in AI-specific rules, but the design of commercial AI systems as optimised to extract and commodify personal information at scale — a design that no amount of consent granularisation or harm-specific prohibition could resolve without structural constraint of the underlying business model. The final committee report acknowledged support from Digital Rights Watch alongside the Human Rights Law Centre, unions, and industrial lawyers for moving Australia to a mandatory AI regulatory framework with specific obligations for high-risk applications.

Significance

The July 2024 hearing is the corpus's primary documented instance of Australian civil society digital rights advocacy directly engaging the federal AI-governance legislative process — closing the Oceania parliamentary-hearing event anchor (previously zero) and situating Digital Rights Watch as the Australian civil society voice on AI governance most comparable to the European digital-rights field's intervention in the EU AI Act or the Brazilian civil-society field's engagement with PL 2338/2023 (documented in the corpus as the Brazil Senate CTIA public hearings on AI Bill PL 2338/2023 — civil society participation (2023)). DRW's testimony framed Australia's AI-governance question not as a technical regulatory-design matter — which risk tier, which disclosure standard — but as a structural political-economy question: whether data-extracted business models would be constrained. This framing distinguishes the Australian civil-society position from purely risk-classification approaches and locates it within the broader movement argument that beneficial AI requires structural constraint of commercial AI architectures, not only marginal governance of their worst individual applications.

DRW's intervention is also notable for its affective grounding: where technically-framed submissions catalogue categories of harms and governance failures, O'Shea anchored the structural critique in a single worker's experience of voice cloning — routing the abstract architecture of data-extraction into the concrete terms of a creative worker losing income and bodily autonomy simultaneously. That rhetorical move — scale problem, individual body — is characteristic of the broader civil society AI-governance advocacy register the corpus is mapping, and sits in direct continuity with DRW's longer work on Australia's data-retention and surveillance infrastructure, where the organisation has consistently argued that individual harms are symptoms of systemic design, not correctable bugs in an otherwise sound framework.