Reset.Tech Australia

Reset.Tech Australia is the Australian arm of the global Reset.Tech network — a Sydney-based research and policy organisation working to advance fair rules and standards for Big Tech and the principal Australian civil-society pole on the regulation of digital platforms, automated decision-making, and increasingly the deployment of AI systems in the Australian public-policy and consumer-protection environment. Its mandate is structural rather than user-blaming: the organisation's working theory is that the targeted-advertising business model of the major platforms — and the recommender, ranking, and increasingly generative-AI systems built on top of it — is itself the upstream cause of the disinformation, polarisation, and algorithmic-harm phenomena that downstream campaigns try to address, and that the right object of intervention is platform business design, not individual users.

Founding and structure

Reset.Tech Australia was launched on 11 November 2020 as Reset Australia, the Australian affiliate of the global Reset initiative that had been established in 2020 by Luminate and the Sandler Foundation as an experimental initiative to counter rising digital threats to democracy, incubated for its first four years inside Luminate's London headquarters before transitioning to fully independent operation on 1 January 2024. The Australian entity grew out of the earlier Responsible Technology Australia project — both the predecessor name and the current operating name are carried by the same registered charity, reset.tech Australia Limited (ABN 87 636 477 177) — and was co-incubated by Purpose Asia Pacific and Luminate's Digital Democracy Lab before standing up as its own Australian charity.

The organisation's founding executive director was Chris Cooper, a strategic-communications and advocacy operator, with an initial board drawn from across the Australian tech-policy and ethics community: Dr Catriona Wallace of Ethical AI Advisory, the Hon Pru Goward (former Sex Discrimination Commissioner), Amit Singh (managing director of AlphaBeta), Matthew Beard (then a fellow of The Ethics Centre), and Ben Scott in his capacity as global Reset Executive Director. Cooper was succeeded by Alice Dawkins as Executive Director by mid-2023; Dawkins had previously established the Frontier Technology Initiative at the Minderoo Foundation and read AI governance and Chinese entrepreneurship at Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. The organisation operates as a small policy-research team out of Sydney with a research-and-advocacy posture rather than a membership or mobilisation posture.

Programme areas

The organisation opened with three named priority areas — foreign interference in elections, online threats to the safety of young people, and the amplification of fringe and extreme voices on platforms — and has since broadened into a four-pillar structural-policy frame covering competition and digital-markets policy, consumer protection and data protection, online safety, and platform transparency and accountability, with AI-specific policy work running across all four rather than sitting as a fifth separate file. The throughline argument across the four pillars is that platform and AI regulation in Australia should be aligned with the international benchmark of binding, enforceable rules with statutory transparency and independent-research data-access obligations, rather than the voluntary industry codes that successive Australian governments have leaned on for content-moderation and platform-accountability obligations.

The team works principally through evidence-led research — empirical testing of platform behaviour, document and policy analysis, and quantitative work on the data-broker and advertising ecosystem — and channels findings into government submissions, parliamentary engagement, and named coalitions with consumer and media-policy partners. Its first-period output footprint, per Purpose's case study, included more than 100 partner organisations engaged, more than 50 meetings with politicians, nine research reports, more than 350 news articles generated and 14 policy submissions filed. The organisation's posture across all four pillars is to treat tech and AI companies like other industries — expected to deliver fair markets, safe products, and proactive risk mitigation — rather than as a sui-generis sector entitled to exemption from independent oversight.

Australians for Sale and the data-broker complex

The organisation's signature publication on the consumer-protection side is the December 2023 report "Australians for Sale: Targeted Advertising, Data Brokering and Consumer Manipulation", co-published with CHOICE and the Consumer Policy Research Centre, which used the Xandr File — a data set briefly made public by Microsoft in 2021 listing the "audience segments" data brokers hold on Australian consumers — to document the concrete mechanics of how Australian users are profiled and sold across the targeted-advertising stack, with sub-sections on people who gamble, people who consume alcohol, people experiencing financial stress, and children and young people. The report's headline recommendations included an opt-in-consent requirement on inclusion in the targeted-advertising and data-broker market, a prohibition on the disclosure of or trade in personal information without express informed consent, and binding obligations on data brokers and ad-tech operators rather than the reliance on the Privacy Act's general principles that the current Australian regime defaults to. The report has been carried through to the Attorney-General's Privacy Act review and the ACCC's digital-platforms inquiry process as Reset.Tech's signature empirical artefact on the consumer-protection side of the platform-regulation file.

Disinformation and the misinformation-code fight

The organisation's signature work on the platform-governance side has been a sustained line of critique of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, the voluntary self-regulatory instrument administered by the Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) on behalf of Meta, Google, Microsoft, Twitter / X, and other Australian platform members. Reset.Tech Australia's empirical evaluation report, "Functioning or Failing? An evaluation of the efficacy of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation", argued that the Code is too limited in obligatory commitments, too dependent on binary self-assessments, and too short of independent-data-access mechanisms to constitute effective oversight, and that the only credible path is binding statutory obligations with platform-data access for vetted independent researchers. The organisation's March 2024 enforcement complaint against Meta, in which Reset.Tech submitted 152 posts containing fact-checked falsehoods to test Meta's transparency-report claim that it applies warning labels to all such content and found only 8 percent received labels, was rejected by the DIGI complaints subcommittee in favour of a Meta offer to add clarifying language in future reports — a resolution the organisation read as confirmation that "the decision today indicates that platforms can say what they like in their transparency reports" in Alice Dawkins's framing. The Code complaint is the public-record demonstration the organisation cites most often for the structural argument against voluntary platform self-regulation in Australia.

AI policy and the Australian regulatory file

Reset.Tech Australia's AI-policy work runs across the same four-pillar structure — algorithmic-accountability claims sit inside the online-safety and consumer-protection files, AI-driven recommender and ranking systems inside the platform-transparency file, and generative-AI deployment inside the competition and digital-markets file — rather than being treated as a separate fifth subject. The organisation has filed submissions across the Australian government's AI-regulation process, including the September 2024 mandatory-AI-guardrails consultation and the subsequent shift in 2025–2026 away from binding AI-specific obligations toward updating technology-neutral law and standing up an Australian AI Safety Institute, the standing position being that voluntary AI guardrails will fail for the same structural reason voluntary platform-content codes have failed in the disinformation file. On children and AI, the organisation has been a sustained interlocutor of the eSafety Commissioner's industry-codes process and of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's Children's Online Privacy Code process, carrying the argument that the design of recommender, generative-AI, and platform-feature systems used by Australian young people requires statutory standards and independent oversight rather than industry self-attestation.

Funding and structure

Reset.Tech Australia is a registered Australian charity (reset.tech Australia Limited, ACNC-listed under ABN 87 636 477 177) and is philanthropically funded; its public-record historical funder set spans Luminate, the Sandler Foundation, the Minderoo Foundation, the Susan McKinnon Foundation, The Ethics Centre, Purpose Asia Pacific, the Australian Communities Foundation Impact Fund, the Internet Society Foundation, Reset Tech US (the North American sibling entity in the post-2024 independent Reset structure), and Mannifera. The Luminate / Sandler line is the principal incubation funding; the Minderoo, Australian Communities Foundation, and Susan McKinnon flows are the principal Australian-philanthropy lines that gave the Australian entity continuity through the global Reset transition to independence in January 2024. The organisation does not take Australian Commonwealth government funding for its policy-research work, consistent with the global Reset network's positioning as independent of state revenue in jurisdictions where it operates.

Posture in the movement

Reset.Tech Australia's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the principal Australian grassroots-style policy-research pole on the regulation of digital platforms, ad-tech, and AI deployment in the Australian public-policy environment. Its working theory of change is that the platform and AI files cannot be separated from competition, consumer-protection, and online-safety law — the four pillars together are the regulatory stack — and that the Australian regulatory frontier should be aligned with the binding-rules-plus-statutory-transparency international benchmark rather than the voluntary-code default that has shaped Australian platform governance to date. The organisation's structural critique of voluntary codes, the Australians for Sale empirical line on the data-broker and targeted-advertising market, and the Meta / DIGI Code complaint together constitute the public-record artefacts on which the organisation's case for binding Australian platform and AI rules rests. Reset.Tech Australia is — within this corpus — the Australian-anchor entity for the broader Reset network and the principal pole for engaging Australian publics, parliamentarians, and consumer-protection partners in shaping how big-tech and AI systems are deployed in the Australian context.