Linking a person's input to the final text
Letting a submitter show how their text was built: which parts they wrote, which came from a tool or a template, and what sources fed it. Reviewers can give a submitter's own account the weight template text can’t claim.
The impact of agents
As tools that assemble polished text from multiple contributors, AI assistance, or a campaign template become the default way submissions are drafted, the final submission obscures the contribution of individual thought. Decision-makers cannot tell genuine deliberation from assembly-line production by reading the submitted text alone.
What must be verified
What has to be confirmable is the working itself: which parts of a submission came from the submitter, a tool, or a template, not just a yes-or-no declaration about the whole. Confirming the working has to set a disclosure norm rather than depend on technical enforcement, because a determined submitter can defeat any detection. The agency running the consultation platform must hold that disclosure norm and apply it consistently across submissions.
Protecting access
Documenting how a piece was built is a literacy task in its own right. An individual writing from lived experience, in a second language, or in distress can be deterred by an apparatus that reads as built for institutions with staff. Once annotated submissions read as more credible, the unannotated submission from the person the consultation most concerns counts for less, for no difference in truthfulness.
Keeping the path open
- Keep every show-your-working feature voluntary, with the plain declaration ('I wrote this myself, based on my own experience') the fastest route to submit.
- Instruct readers that an absent provenance note is not evidence of assembly-line production.
- Make the provenance-note and source-annotation controls operable by keyboard and assistive technology, ignorable at no cost in steps, and legible in plain language. Announce each control's state non-visually.
Response surface
Showing your working is offered as a voluntary norm rather than enforced, so a submitter who chooses the plain declaration pays no extra steps.
Review and submit
Check your submission below. Showing your working is optional. You can submit as soon as you’re ready.
The proposed levy will fall hardest on long-term residents on fixed incomes. My pension has not moved in two years, and an added charge of this size is not something I can absorb.
I would support the plan if the foreshore path were kept step-free the whole way. As a wheelchair user, the current route is the only one I can take to the shops.
Described by you, not recorded by the system. Included with your submission only if you choose to share it.
The plain declaration sits first, and selecting it is an affirmative act: Submit stays inactive until a declaration is made. Showing your working is never required to submit.
‘Add a source’ and the provenance notes work with a keyboard and a screen reader, and skipping them adds no extra steps. Nothing in the interface suggests that a missing note is suspicious.
Maturity
Frontier. Letting a submitter show how a piece was built is a response no government consultation platform yet offers. The building blocks (document timelines, contribution attribution, source annotation) exist in collaborative editing tools but have not been adapted to the submission intake context. The academic disclosure model is the closest analogue, but it works after the fact in a published paper rather than at the point of submission, so the response still has to be designed for intake.
Precedents
ISO 15489-1 records management. The standard separates version history, which records what changed in the content, from the audit trail, which records who accessed, viewed, shared, or approved it, and treats an immutable event log as the basis of a defensible chain of custody. Document platforms implement both, down to per-character authorship attribution. The distinction is settled records-management practice.
Shape of AI disclosure patterns. The pattern library documents disclosure labels that name the operation performed, such as summarized with AI, rewrote with AI, or translated with AI. Granular verbs communicate the nature and extent of AI involvement that a generic marker cannot.
Elsevier's generative AI policy. Authors must name the tool and the reason for its use in a set statement, and take responsibility for the reviewed output; the wider academic convention extends the same statement to version, access date, and the sections affected. The declaration has moved from a binary checkbox to a structured statement.
What carries over to agent use
Medium transferability. The document audit trail model works when drafting happens within a controlled environment. A consultation platform cannot assume one: submitters draft wherever they like. What transfers is the disclosure shape, not the capture: a provenance note in the submitter's own words ("Drafted over the week", "From my own notes"), optional source annotation ("this section draws on [organization]'s position paper"), and a contribution breakdown for organizational submissions.
The legal profession model proves a voluntary norm can take hold: once disclosure is expected, staying silent becomes the anomaly that draws scrutiny. What doesn't transfer is the disciplinary backdrop that model relies on. A lawyer risks bar sanctions for non-disclosure; a consultation submitter risks nothing equivalent. The same pressure would have to come from norm-setting alone, with no professional body standing behind it.
Where things go wrong
'Show your working' targets the provenance of inbound submissions, so on its own it does not constrain the agency side. Applied to the agency's own reasoning, the same principle (an inspectable chain from each input to the final output) is precisely what exposes an unjustified leap, such as deriving a fortnightly liability from annual data, before it stands as fact.
Sources
5 references
The instrument, the operating deployment, or the official record itself.
Writing about the subject rather than the framework itself, including vendor commentary.