Canberra Just Outsourced Thinking

The Australian government’s move to install its own ChatGPT instances isn’t foresight—it’s capitulation. It’s not a step toward sovereignty in the age of machine intelligence; it’s bureaucratic cosplay. They’re outsourcing cognition under the illusion of control. The irony is brutal: the very act of delegating thought to generative models is being framed as thought leadership. But there is no leadership here—only latency dressed up as initiative.

This isn’t about tools. It’s about a structural evacuation of intellectual responsibility. You can’t outsource your sense-making machinery and then express shock when your workforce forgets how to reason. You can’t gut your epistemic institutions and then blame the AI for hallucinating. What they’re building isn’t infrastructure—it’s dependency. And what’s lost in the process isn’t just jobs or roles—it’s the capacity to distinguish truth from noise, signal from simulation.

The most dangerous part? They don’t know they’re doing it. They believe they are managing risk, increasing productivity, keeping pace. But what they’re doing is training a generation to look outward for judgment, inward for doubt, and upward for permission. The moment machines become default arbiters of coherence, people stop exercising their own. That’s not empowerment. That’s erosion.

And when the consequences land—when no one in the room can answer a question without a model to prompt—there will be no one to blame. Because the system will be working exactly as designed. That’s the final trick: the illusion of intelligence becomes the architecture of control. Not imposed. Invited. Welcomed. Automated.