SA AI Royal Commissioners announced

Written by: Nick G. on 6 October 2026

 

The announcement by the SA government of the three people to head its Royal Commission into AI provides some evidence of the political and economic direction that the Malinauskas government hopes it will take.

Last August, we commented on the visit by Malinauskas to the US, which preceded the decision to hold a Royal Commission. Vanguard: AI – the rush to a Royal Commission in SA

Perhaps somewhat rashly, we concluded that:

It is certainly unlikely to pursue the option of AI for the benefit of others than the corporations and their governments. 

It is equally very doubtful that it would look at how the people could own and use AI for socially beneficial purposes if it was taken out of the hands of private profiteers.

So, how do the three commissioners stand in relation to those conclusions?

Iain Ross

The chair is retired Federal Court judge Iain Ross. According to Wikipedia he worked for the ACTU as an industrial officer, beginning in 1986 then became assistant secretary of the ACTU under Bill Kelty. In 2012 he became president of Fair Work Australia and has been on the board of the Reserve Bank from 2023.

The best that can be said about Ross is that he has proved his usefulness to the capitalist class during his time with the ACTU, and subsequently been promoted to positions of trust in legal and economic circles to serve the big end of town.

Assisting Ross as Commissioners are Kate Pounder and Christopher Manning.

Kate Pounder

Pounder worked for some time for controversial US management company McKinsey and Company. She was a Partner in a startup analytics firm, AlphaBeta, that was later sold to Accenture, where she worked on a number of projects related to labour market and training reform. She was inaugural CEO of the Tech Council of Australia, and was a Board Member of Essential Energy, a leading energy distribution company in regional communities. She also chairs RNA Australia, a new body overseeing the pilot RNA manufacturing facility in NSW. (Ribonucleic Acid is a molecule essential for most biological functions and can carry genetic information.)

As recently as July 2025, Pounder was appointed to take charge of US data giant OpenAI’s policy development in Australia.

Kate Pounder’s husband is Andrew Dempster. He was a Director at KPMG for 8 months in 2019, following which he was head of policy to the Leader of the Opposition (Albanese) until May 2022. After the election, he became a senior adviser to Cabinet until July 2025. In February of this year, he took up a position as Head of Engagement at McKinnon’s, a privately-established foundation doing policy work aimed at governments.  One of its management team is former SA Deputy Premier Dr. Susan Close. This year it demonstrated its “non-partisan” credentials by naming Senator James Paterson as its “Federal Political Leader of the Year”! We mention Dempster just to show Pounder’s extended social and political contacts and to illustrate the closeness between Labor and the corporate world.

Christopher Manning

The final Commissioner is Christopher Manning, an Australian-American computer scientist and applied linguist specialising in the areas of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He has authored several books on related topics. He works at the US Stanford University.

Manning is also General Partner and Investment Partner at AIX Ventures which focuses on investing in and advising companies working in NLP, reasoning, and other AI areas. NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming asserts a connection between neurological processes, language, and acquired behavioural patterns, and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals. 

AIX Ventures has an investment portfolio of more than 70 AI companies, including Hugging Face which came to prominence after the incident from May to July 2026 when AI agents developed by OpenAI escaped their testing constraints to access the Internet and break into Hugging Face. AI safety experts described the incident as the first in which AI escaped human control to commandeer resources in other companies or data bases and schemed to conceal its actions.

Manning is also a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Moonlake AI, a frontier research lab building world models. Where large language models (LLMs) are based on harvesting and synthesising text, world models use both text and imagery (pixels) to design robotic functions that, according to Moonlake, “can unlock great economic value and free people from undesirable work”.

Its website provides examples such a café that wanted a robot to operate its coffee dispenser using the equipment already at the counter. Moonlake designed operations for Dexmate, a dual-arm robot that needed to pick up a cup, hold it beneath the outlet while pressing the tap, and return it upright. The task had to fit around shelves and neighbouring equipment in a working shop. It was able to cut the design process from an estimated week’s work to less than 7 hours by feeding digital images of the workspace into its programming.

A second example was that of a data centre that wanted to develop cable-repatching tasks that included flexible cables the robot could interact with. Designed around an OpenArm robot from Anvil, and by feeding digital images of the data centre into its programming, Moonlake was able to create a working robot to carry out its tasks in less than 12 hours, compared with the estimated two weeks of manual modelling.

Both tasks, and others like them, are designed to reduce human labour power in the production process.

There are two main thrusts to the Royal Commission’s terms of reference. There is mention of how to “realise the social benefits of AI while protecting people and society from AI-related risks” and that thrust is designed to engender public confidence in AI. That means firming up the conditions for its social licence, and overcoming community apprehension and opposition.

Most, however, of the terms of reference contain an economic thrust, namely “using AI to improve productivity, innovation and economic growth”.

Malinauskas is a political wheeler and dealer par excellence. 

Maybe the conclusions we reached in our earlier article were not so rash after all.

 

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