Nobody’s Actually in Charge: Who Governs AI in Australian Education?

by | Sep 1, 2026 | Education in the Age of AI

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ByThe Good

Readers of this series' earlier discourse on clean energy will recognise the shape of this problem before they even reach the details: a fast-moving national challenge, a federal government with plenty of money and moral authority but no direct constitutional lever, and state and territory governments that ultimately run the institutions where the policy actually has to land. Swap "transmission lines" for "classrooms" and the structural argument is almost identical. What makes education a sharper live example this month is that two states have just made opposite bets in public, within days of each other, without waiting for Canberra to referee.

The layered, non-binding system

As the primer article in this series set out, there is no single AI law for Australian education. The Department of Education's national framework — six principles, endorsed by education ministers, reviewed in 2025 and found fit for purpose — is policy, not legislation. It sets a shared floor. What sits on top of that floor is decided separately by TEQSA for universities, by each state and territory education department for the schools it runs, and by national privacy law and the eSafety Commissioner wherever student data or online safety is involved. No single body owns the whole stack, and no single decision-maker can force consistency across it.

Two states, two bets, ten days apart

The clearest evidence that state governments aren't waiting for national consensus arrived almost simultaneously in August 2026. On 10 August, NSW's Deputy Premier asked NESA to consider restricting take-home HSC assessment — the beginning of the process that produced a binding, statewide cap by 1 September, covered in detail in this series' assessment article. On the same day, 10 August, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas announced Australia's first royal commission into artificial intelligence, an inquiry with a three-member commission, an estimated $3 million budget and a mandate covering education alongside the economy, public services and the creative sector. The two states chose opposite instruments for the same underlying anxiety: NSW moved fast and unilaterally with a specific, binding rule; SA chose a slower, more deliberative, evidence-gathering process, while continuing to expand AI's footprint in its own schools through the Microsoft-built EdChat tool and, days before the royal commission announcement, a memorandum of understanding directly with OpenAI to explore AI skills and investment. Neither state coordinated its move through the national framework, and reporting on the SA announcement noted Malinauskas reportedly did not flag the royal commission with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in advance.

Where Canberra's levers actually work

The Commonwealth isn't powerless — it just operates the same way it does in energy policy: through money, standards and partnership rather than command. The national AI literacy curriculum is a funded, centrally coordinated program reaching public, independent and Catholic schools alike — exactly the kind of national initiative the Commonwealth can run because it's building something new and offering it, rather than overriding what states already control. The National AI Plan, unveiled roughly a month before SA's royal commission, pledges consistent national AI standards and flags legislation to enact them in 2027 — a timeline that means Canberra's own coordinated response arrives after both NSW's assessment reform and SA's inquiry will already have run their course. On security specifically, the Commonwealth's directive banning DeepSeek on federal devices did get uniform-ish uptake — NSW, SA, Queensland, WA, the ACT and the NT all followed with their own bans covering school and department systems — but even that consistency wasn't universal or immediate: Tasmania was still weighing its position on the same app weeks after the other jurisdictions had already acted, illustrating that even where states do fall in line with Canberra, they don't all do it on the same clock.

The clearest example of a federal power that actually bites

The clearest instance of a federal regulator with genuine, uniform teeth sits slightly outside education policy proper: the eSafety Commissioner, who published a new advisory in 2026 after receiving more than one hundred reports of anonymous accounts targeting schools and staff with AI-manipulated content harvested from school social media. That's a national child-safety and online-harms power that applies the same way regardless of which state a school sits in — a reminder that where the Commonwealth does hold a clean constitutional lever, like online safety, it can move fast and apply nationally in a way the broader education-AI framework simply can't.

The parallel worth naming

Critics of the current setup make the same complaint heard in the energy discourse: as of 2026, the lack of a unified national AI governance framework is producing genuinely inconsistent policy across states and sectors, and there are active calls for a national quality-assurance process to vet AI tools before they reach classrooms, so a product judged fine in one state doesn't quietly widen equity gaps in another that's never reviewed it at all. South Australia's own opposition made a related point about the royal commission itself, arguing a parliamentary committee had already examined AI and made 15 recommendations, and that a second, multi-million-dollar inquiry risked duplicating work rather than accelerating a decision. Whether the answer is more binding national coordination, or whether state-level autonomy is exactly what let NSW move on assessment integrity in three weeks flat while SA builds a more deliberative evidence base in parallel, is a genuinely open question — and it's the same question this series' clean energy discourse ended on, just wearing a different uniform.

The question worth sitting with

Australia effectively ran this same argument twice in 2026 — once over who gets to set the rules for data-centre power, and now, in real time, over who sets the rules for AI in classrooms, with NSW and South Australia landing in different places within the same fortnight and neither waiting for the other or for Canberra. If the answer keeps turning out to be "a non-binding national floor plus whatever each state decides to build on top of it, on its own timeline," is that a sensible way to regulate something this fast-moving in a system meant to educate the same generation of students no matter which side of a state border they happen to live on — or does education need its own version of the reckoning energy policy has already had this year?

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