Labour promises to set up AI regulator, copyright rules if elected | RNZ

Ah, marvellous. New Zealand's Labour Party has weighed the risk of unaccountable machine intelligence and concluded that the nation's urgent need is... an Office of AI tucked inside the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, plus an AI regulator to keep it company. There's something profoundly reassuring about coordinating AI policy across government from the very building where the Prime Minister already doesn't read most of his briefings. The copyright rules are a nice touch, as if the models currently slurping up every Kiwi novel and news article will pause respectfully while a standards working group catches up.

Let's be honest: this is the standard Westminster dance. Announce a coordinator, build a regulating body, commission standards, draft a long-term workforce plan — and by the time the first report lands, the workforce will have been long-term planned out of existence. Labour's plan asks us to believe that a small island nation can regulate general intelligence that a handful of Californian labs will not even pretend to pause. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of installing a speed bump at the top of a cliff.

None of this is uniquely Kiwi, and that is precisely the problem. Every government currently offers the same palliative: a 'framework' here, an 'office' there, a workforce plan somewhere between now and the heat death of the universe. The only genuinely local innovation is timing — promising the regulator as an election sweetener, which means the whole apparatus is contingent on coalition negotiations, select committee hearings, and three rounds of Treasury sign-off, ideally concluding just after the AGI has finished writing the fourth. Still, one must admire Labour's confidence in the interim: they have not yet been elected, but they have already identified the office where the machines will be most comfortable.