§29 · Lane 7 — Australian Regulatory Primary Instruments
DISR Voluntary AI Safety Standard
DISR (2024) · DISR Voluntary
Bibliographic data
- Title
- DISR Voluntary AI Safety Standard (September 2024)
- Authors / Issuing body
- Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), National AI Centre (NAIC)
- Venue / Publisher
- Commonwealth of Australia
- Year
- 2024
- Designation
- Standard
- Licence
- Stable URL — refer to publisher for full licence terms.
How to cite
DISR (2024). DISR Voluntary AI Safety Standard (September 2024). Commonwealth of Australia. https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/voluntary-ai-safety-standard.
Australia's voluntary AI safety standard — ten guardrails covering accountability, risk management, data governance, testing, human oversight, transparency, contestability, supply-chain accountability, compliance with laws, and stakeholder engagement. The closest AU analogue to the EU AI Act provider-side obligations and the most directly operationalisable AU national AI standard.
Why it matters for NETEVO
The Voluntary AI Safety Standard is the AU national standard NETEVO cites as the federal-government-issued template for what good AI governance looks like, sitting between Australia's AI Ethics Principles at the abstract end and the NSW AI Assurance / Assessment Framework at the operational end.
Commonwealth-government vocabulary. The ten guardrails — accountability, risk management, data governance, testing, human oversight, transparency, contestability, supply-chain accountability, compliance with laws, and stakeholder engagement — are published as the federal answer to here is what good AI governance looks like. NETEVO work citing this standard therefore operates in Commonwealth-government-issued language rather than vendor language, which matters to AU listed-company boards evaluating governance posture against an authoritative AU anchor.
Voluntary today, evolved tomorrow. The standard pairs with the now-withdrawn DISR mandatory guardrails consultation paper, giving the voluntary today, mandatory tomorrow framing that shaped much 2024 and 2025 board discussion. The DISR / NAIC Guidance for AI Adoption (initial October 2025; current 5 May 2026) has since consolidated the ten guardrails and the eight AI Ethics Principles into six essential practices. The Voluntary AI Safety Standard remains the foundational late-2024 baseline against which that successor instrument is the current operational form.
Cross-walks to the ISO stack. The guardrails map cleanly onto ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 42005, ISO/IEC 23894, and ISO/IEC 38507. Adopting the AU voluntary baseline while operating an ISO-aligned AI management system produces a single integrated posture against both AU and international anchors — the integration thesis NETEVO's Law-to-Code Methodology operationalises into engineered controls.
Where NETEVO applies this
- AI Governance in ANZ Whitepaper — central AU citation