This week, the Albanese government made a landmark decision:

Australia will not introduce a Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception that allows companies to freely scrape creative work for AI training without consent.

In their own words, art, writing, music, images — human expression — are not “raw materials” for algorithms.

This matters.

It matters because the government has now recognised, at a national level, exactly what our petition has been saying:

Creative work is not free input.
It is not a dataset.
It is not institutional property.
It is not a training set for systems you never agreed to.
This principle must extend to universities.

Because even with this new national stance, nothing in the legislation prevents higher-education institutions from:

storing student work indefinitely,
circulating it internally for performance metrics,
placing it in shared academic drives,
using it as teaching exemplars without credit,
or funnelling it into internal AI systems and “learning tools” like VAL.
These practices fall through a policy gap — one that disproportionately harms emerging designers, artists, writers, and researchers who rely on consent, attribution, and authorship to build their careers.

The government has drawn the line.
Now universities need to follow it.

If Australia recognises that creators deserve consent, then our universities must uphold that same principle for their own students.

It is unacceptable for institutions to claim student work as institutional property, reuse it for KPIs, or feed it into internal AI frameworks without clear, explicit, ongoing consent.

That is why this petition exists.

That is why we are calling for:

explicit opt-in consent for every use of student work
a ban on compulsory retention and reuse clauses
transparent records of where student work goes
protection from internal AI training pipelines
and a public commitment that student creativity is not training data.
Australia just took a stand for artists.
Now we ask its universities to do the same.

🔗 Please share this petition.
Every signature helps push this into policy and public view — and protects the next generation of creators from having their work silently absorbed into systems they never agreed to.

#MyBodyMyWork
#HandleWithConsent
#CreativeRights
#StudentsAreCreators