OpenAI’s secret lobbying dinner with top Canberra bureaucrats

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI has exploded from a little-known not-for-profit to one of the world’s most influential tech companies, helmed by its mercurial chief executive Sam Altman.

Having helped send the artificial intelligence boom into overdrive, it was only a matter of time before OpenAI would let its lobbying muscle loose on Canberra, where politicians have historically been a little flat-footed in the face of new technological developments.

The OpenAI circus came to town in June for a widely publicised lobbying blitz, led by chief economist Ronnie Chatterji, who met with a posse of Labor frontbenchers including Andrew Leigh, Tim Ayres, Andrew Giles and Andrew Charlton. Lots of policy wonks are called Andrew, apparently.

Less attention fell on OpenAI’s wooing of senior public servants. After a busy day on the hill, Chatterji and the company hosted a private dinner for top public servants at the Boat House, a modern Australian fine diner on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.

On the dance card was the newly appointed Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson (just days into the job), Australian Bureau of Statistics’ top statistician David Gruen, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Deputy Secretary Nadine Williams, IP (intellectual property) Australia director general Michael Schwager and Peter Anstee from the Department of Home Affairs.

The Canberra dinner was just another part of the Australian lobbying effort that is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The firm recently hired former Tech Council of Australia boss Kate Pounder to lead its local push as Australian policy liaison.

Before the Tech Council, Pounder co-founded analytics firm AlphaBeta with Labor assistant minister Charlton, who would later parachute from Bellevue Hill into the federal seat of Parramatta.

CBD was not a fly on the wall, and although it was a fairly standard reception for a visiting expert – Chatterji was an economic adviser in Joe Biden’s White House – all parties remained shtum on the finer details of the discussions.

Nonetheless, we’ve many questions we’d love to grill OpenAI on. Will AI destroy work as we know it or trigger a robot apocalypse? How can we stop the public discourse from being flooded with slop? What did poor Hayao Miyazaki ever do to hurt you? Perhaps this will come up at the next roundtable.

Renaissance man

Former Howard government communications minister Richard Alston’s quiet post-political life became a whole lot more taxing when he was tapped by former opposition leader Peter Dutton to co-manage the perennially troubled NSW division of the Liberal Party last year.

Alston and fellow octogenarian party elder Alan Stockdale were part of a trio of administrators called in after the division failed to nominate hundreds of candidates for local government elections last year.

Their control was effectively nuked by Stockdale’s off-colour comments, reported in this column, about the party having a problem with “assertive women”.

Now relieved of his duties, Alston can return to his real post-political career as a man of letters. CBD readers might recall that the former federal senator and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom wrote a tome on medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri last year.

Alston’s latest work, released last month, concerns a subject more unfamiliar to most readers – the great Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, a country he travelled to last year and told CBD was an “extraordinary place”.

“It’s a rapidly growing new economy, a president who’s been in power for nine years and transformed the country, moderate Islam – they hate extremists – a phenomenal history, and three to four amazing cities,” Alston gushed.

Alston told us he’d been drawn to Uzbekistan because he collects Suzanis – a traditional Central Asian decorative embroidered wall hanging.

“They’re amazingly colourful and by our standards, ridiculously cheap,” he told us.

ANOTHER WORLD: An Australian in Uzbekistan was released by boutique conservative publishers Connor Court last month, and promises “a fascinating blend of personal reflection and historical analysis”.

As for Alston’s next project, he’s beavering away on a book about Australian pulp novelist Morris West.

Unless another Liberal Party implosion calls him up to duty.

Jobs for the boys

Right after School Infrastructure NSW boss Anthony Manning described PR operative Kathy Jones as his “communications fairy godmother” at an Independent Commission Against Corruption hearing, CBD reported that she left her job on the board of Metropolitan Memorial Parks, which operates cemeteries on Crown land.

Now, the Minns government has come up with a replacement for Jones – in fact, two replacements – with both former Liberal minister David Elliott and ex-Labor MP Walt Secord getting tapped for government appointments.

Both have had plenty of CBD moments. Secord, who quit politics in 2023 following bullying allegations, later became public affairs director for the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council after converting to Judaism.

Elliott has a lengthy history, which includes the time the former police minister told a teenage P-plater “I pay for the badges” during a road rage scuffle on the mean streets of Castle Hill.

After rumours of Dom Perrottet handing him a lucrative overseas job turned out to be just hot air, as did whispers about him running for a federal seat, we’re thrilled to see Elliott finally get a gig that really exists.