A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices — expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift from a darkened living room to a crippled nation.

Six months ago I pulled a local language model onto my laptop. Took about 12 minutes with Ollama. No account, no API key, no data leaving the machine. It felt like a small act of sovereignty — exactly the kind of local-first approach I’d been arguing for.

Then I started using it. And I noticed something.

The model’s cultural centre of gravity was somewhere around San Francisco, circa 2022. Ask it about food systems and it defaulted to commodity agriculture and supermarket supply chains. Ask it about community governance and it reached for American municipal frameworks. Ask it about traditional land management and it gave me a careful, earnest summary that read like it had been assembled from university anthropology papers — not from anyone who had actually grown anything, or sat with the country long enough to know it.

In 2020, journalists asked Australian police forces whether they were using Clearview AI — the American company that scraped three billion social media photos without consent to build a facial recognition database. The answer, from several state forces and the AFP, was no.

Then Clearview suffered a data breach. The stolen customer list included Australian law enforcement agencies. At that point, the denials stopped.

That sequence — quiet adoption, public denial, disclosure only under external pressure — is the pattern. Last week I wrote about the cultural conditions that make it possible: the institutional trust, the “she’ll be right” pragmatism, the absence of organised civil liberties infrastructure that might have generated friction. This post is the inventory. Here is what Australia has actually built, layer by layer — and what you can do about it.