Alice Dawkins

Alice Dawkins is the Executive Director of Reset.Tech Australia, the Sydney-based research-and-policy pole of the global Reset.Tech network on platform regulation, digital-democracy oversight, and AI policy in the Australian public-policy environment. She is in the make-AI-good corpus as the principal Australian voice carrying the structural-policy argument for binding statutory rules and independent platform-data access on big-tech, automated-decision-making, and generative-AI systems in Australia, and as the Australia / Oceania anchor opposite the Reset.Tech Australia organisational entry from a smaller-country vantage outside the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union platform-regulation cohorts.

Background and entry into technology policy

Dawkins holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from the Australian National University awarded in 2016 and a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) from the same institution in 2018, where she was a Hawker Scholarship recipient. Between her ANU degrees she undertook a New Colombo Plan-funded period as a lecturer in political science at the University of Yangon and an Australian Government-funded researcher period in Myanmar during the 2010s working with public-interest lawyers in the country's pro-democracy movement, which her own ANU College of Law alumna profile records as having included a digital-ethnography study of Burmese-language Facebook content moderation in the run-up to Myanmar's democratic regression. That fieldwork — observing minimal platform content moderation in a critical Burmese-language democratic period that immediately preceded the country's documented platform-amplified destabilisation — is the entry point Dawkins herself names in subsequent public material for the structural argument she now carries on big-tech accountability in the Australian environment.

Following her ANU degrees, Dawkins completed a Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua University in Beijing with research focus on Chinese entrepreneurship and AI governance and was named a Global Policy Fellow with the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is a 2024 Asia cohort fellow with the International Strategy Forum.

Minderoo Frontier Technology Initiative

Dawkins's principal pre-Reset role was as the inaugural employee of the Frontier Technology Initiative at the Minderoo Foundation, where her own ANU profile records that she foundationally established the Minderoo technology-policy programme before moving across to Reset.Tech Australia. The Minderoo years are the bridge between her Myanmar-period digital-rights work and her current Australian platform-regulation role; her Tech Policy Press author bio frames the same trajectory in the form of a completed Schwarzman Scholarship followed by Frontier-Technology programme establishment at Minderoo and the current Reset.Tech Australia executive directorship as one continuous arc.

Reset.Tech Australia executive directorship

Dawkins succeeded founding Executive Director Chris Cooper at Reset.Tech Australia by mid-2023 and has carried the organisation's standing structural-policy argument across the four-pillar Australian platform-regulation stack — competition and digital-markets policy, consumer protection and data protection, online safety, and platform transparency and accountability — together with AI-specific policy work running across all four pillars rather than as a separate file. Her tenure has overseen Reset.Tech Australia's signature March 2024 enforcement complaint against Meta under the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, in which the organisation submitted 152 posts containing fact-checked falsehoods to test Meta's transparency-report claim that all such content receives warning labels and found only 8 percent did, with the DIGI complaints subcommittee rejecting the complaint in favour of a Meta offer of future clarifying language; Dawkins's verbatim post-decision framing was that "the decision today indicates that platforms can say what they like in their transparency reports", which the organisation cites as the empirical centre of its case against voluntary platform self-regulation in Australia.

She is the public-facing carrier of Reset.Tech Australia's submissions to the Australian platform-and-AI regulatory file — the Privacy Act review, the Australian Communications and Media Authority's misinformation-and-disinformation regime, the eSafety Commissioner's industry codes process, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner's Children's Online Privacy Code process, and the federal mandatory-AI-guardrails consultation — and a regular public-event interlocutor on the same file. The Mandarin's October 2024 reporting on her appearance at the New South Wales / South Australian social media summit records her then-Perth base, frames her as an internet democracy expert, and paraphrases her standing argument that many social media platforms are making design and moderation decisions in the dark and are hostile to the independent scrutiny that effective regulation requires.

Public posture and writing

Dawkins's standing public-policy posture across these venues is that tech and AI companies should be treated 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, and that the Australian regulatory frontier should be aligned with the international binding-rules-plus-statutory-transparency benchmark rather than the voluntary-industry-code default that has shaped Australian platform governance to date. She carries that argument both into Reset.Tech Australia's organisational submissions and under her own byline as an author at Tech Policy Press and a columnist contributor at Crikey, the two principal English-language platform-policy outlets in which her individual public writing appears.

Posture in the movement

Dawkins's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is the build-out of Reset.Tech Australia as the principal Australian civil-society pole on the regulation of digital platforms, ad-tech, and AI deployment in the Australian public-policy environment, carried from a Myanmar-period digital-ethnography starting point through a Schwarzman-Scholar-grounded engagement with Chinese AI governance and an inaugural role establishing the Minderoo Foundation's technology-policy programme. Her organising trajectory sits in the corpus as the first Australian-anchored career arc carrying both the platform-regulation register that Reset.Tech founded on and the AI-and-human-rights register that the organisation's mandatory-AI-guardrails, eSafety codes, and Children's Online Privacy Code work has been building out since the late 2023 transition, opposite the Reset.Tech Australia organisational entry as the Australia / Oceania anchor on the person side.