Symmetric duties on the state's agent

As government deploys agents that initiate adverse action, the duties will run one way. A person's agent is expected to produce action receipts, disclose a liability allocation, and classify reversibility before it acts on the state; the state's agent, acting with more power over the same person, owes none of these duties anywhere in statute. Australian law runs the other way. Deeming provisions attribute a computer's output to the minister while imposing no duty toward the person acted on. One of them disclaims any obligation to correct a certified computer malfunction even when the affected person asks. And case law lets the state disown its own automated letter because no human 'mental process' stood behind it. The person must treat every automated notice as real; the state need not.

As initiating fleets scale, that asymmetry stops being a legal curiosity and becomes the operating structure of government: machine-speed demands from an actor that keeps no receipt the person can see, names no owner, and answers for nothing.

Canada's Directive on Automated Decision-Making, Appendix C. At impact Levels I-II 'the system may make decisions and assessments without direct human involvement'; at Levels III-IV 'the final decision must be made by a human' and decisions 'cannot be made without having clearly defined human involvement during the decision-making process'. Approval for the system to operate escalates with impact, reaching Treasury Board itself at Level IV. A government mandates human decisions for its own high-impact automation, on the same impact scale as its notice and explanation duties.

Legal Services Directions 2025, model-litigant obligations. The Commonwealth's model-litigant obligations bind only the state's side of a dispute, because of the power asymmetry: acting honestly and fairly; never requiring the other party to prove a matter the Commonwealth knows to be true; never taking advantage of a claimant who lacks the resources to litigate; and apologizing where the Commonwealth has acted wrongfully. A Commonwealth instrument already binds the state alone to a duty set, on the reasoning that its power over the other party is the greater.

Migration Act 1958 ss 495A and 495B, and Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 s 6A. Sections 495A and 6A deem a computer program's output to be the minister's or the secretary's decision, which solves attribution for the state while imposing no notice, explanation, or contest duty toward the person. Section 495B allows a more favorable substitution only after a formal certificate that the program malfunctioned, imposes no duty to consider one even when the affected person asks, and overrides any contrary law. The statute is explicit that the state need not fix its own known automated errors.

Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [2018] FCAFC 79. A computer-generated ATO letter ostensibly waived most of the interest on a tax debt, and the Full Federal Court majority held that no decision had been made absent a human mental process, so the taxpayer could not hold the Commonwealth to its own automated communication. The ATO's View of Decision records that the template was used 82,217 times in the twelve months to October 2018. The risk of the state's automated output falls on the person who receives it.

Two components transfer as working practice. The model-litigant obligations prove that duty sets binding only the state's side, justified by the power asymmetry, are a settled Australian instrument; this card extends their logic upstream from litigation conduct to the point of automated initiation. Canada's Appendix C proves an impact-scaled mandatory-human-decision rule can operate inside a government at directive level, with an escalating approval chain to match.

What breaks in transit: the model-litigant obligations attach when a dispute exists, not when an agent acts, so the transposition is an extension the instrument's text does not yet make; and Canada's Directive is internal administrative policy, a discipline on departments rather than a right the affected person can enforce. The receipt, liability and reversibility mirrors have no state-side instrument in any surveyed jurisdiction, and the Australian deeming provisions actively occupy the ground with the opposite rule. The aggregate half of the duty belongs to a fleet-level circuit breaker that catches the systemic fault; this card holds the state's agent to account one affected person at a time.