- Posted on 9 Apr 2025
- 3-minutes read
Responsible Technology Policy Specialist Lauren Perry features in HTI’s Staff Spotlight
Responsible Technology Policy Specialist Lauren Perry features in HTI’s Staff Spotlight
Lauren Perry is HTI’s Responsible Technology Policy Specialist, analysing and developing policy on how governments in Australia and abroad are regulating new technologies. She came to HTI as one of the founding staff members after working on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s landmark Technology and Human Rights project. She has a lifelong interest in social justice, research, language, cultural studies and understanding how people connect and interact.
She is a poet and writer in her spare time with a long history of creative pursuits including a stint in the Australian Girls Choir and performing at Hugh Jackman’s 40th birthday party.
Lauren became interested in human rights from an early age, growing up in Sydney with her mum, a teacher of students with disability, and her dad, a Uniting Church Minister.
“The Uniting Church is quite a social justice oriented church, so I had a lot of early experiences volunteering in the community on issues relating to children, refugees and homelessness ...without really knowing that it was human rights at the time,” Lauren said.
As a child she was part of the Australian Girls Choir, performing hits like I still call Australia home for major Qantas and sporting events. In 2008, she was part of the chorus for the Sydney season of The Boy From Oz musical, even earning a spot singing at Hugh Jackman’s 40th birthday.
Lauren studied Communications and International Studies at UTS, majoring in Social and Political Science and Spanish language and culture, which included a 12-month placement in Chile in her final year of study.
“I have always been interested in the nature of human interactions and social structures,” Lauren said. “Social and political sciences tend to dig into the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of these phenomena, while studies in communications and languages reveal the ‘how’. I think it’s important to consider policy issues through this multifocal lens if you want to create real, positive change in society.”
Australian Human Rights Commission
After uni, Lauren spent around 18 months working as a producer in commercial conferencing, but quickly realised that she wanted to work in public policy. She landed a role at the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) as then-Commissioner Ed Santow’s executive and research assistant, where she worked for three years before being appointed a Policy Officer to the Disability Discrimination Commissioner.
It was during her time at the AHRC that Lauren had the opportunity to work on the Human Rights and Technology report, which was one of the first studies to comprehensively examine the potential human rights risks and opportunities presented by technological advances including AI, automation, big data, and surveillance technologies, and where her interest in technology’s impact on human rights was sparked.
“I was there for the really early stages, sitting in a room with Ed [Santow] and Sophie [Farthing, now HTI’s Head of Policy Lab], trying to grapple with what these new tech-based issues were and how they were impacting people,” Lauren said.
“And I mean, the three of us initially knew very little about this topic, but we understood that it was really important, and that it was moving so fast... In some ways it felt quite novel to think about technology in the context of its impact on people's rights. But then again, the story of human evolution has forever been shaped by our development and use of new technologies.”
Lauren is also proud of her work on the AHRC Disability Rights Team, where she worked on the Includeability – Equality at Work Program. “That involved pulling together a network of about 10 of Australia's biggest employers who all made an explicit, CEO-level commitment to improving disability employment opportunities within their organisations…I was really proud of that.”
Human Technology Institute
Ed Santow then came to UTS Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion in 2021 as an Industry Professor for Technology and Human Rights, and Lauren followed a few months later to work with him as a project manager, before they both became founding members of HTI in 2022, where Lauren now works in the Policy Lab.
Since then, Lauren has had her hand in a number of HTI policy projects, including the Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) model law, a world-leading piece of work which outlined a law to govern the rapid growth of FRT, including how to prevent its harmful use while fostering innovation for public good.
“This work felt so important and timely. We were developing the model law at a time where use of FRT was proliferating, not just in Australia, but around the world, and we were seeing some pretty significant harms occurring, particularly discrimination, but also over-surveillance and intrusion on privacy.
“We came up with an approach that wasn't just a hardline ban, but a nuanced regulatory model which accounts for the fact that there are some great benefits of the technology. We wanted to ensure the model law wouldn’t curtail innovation, while still establishing some really robust safeguards for people.”
Poetry writing
In her spare time, Lauren writes poetry – she’s even had some of her work published in poetry anthologies.
Lauren says she writes about, “reflections on youth, what it means to grapple with your own sense of identity in a constantly changing world.
“I love grabbing a proper notebook and a pen and just writing words down…Something will happen, or I'll have a few words bubble up in me, and then I know that's the start of something – it's a fairly fluid, organic process. If things come to me in the moment, that's when I have to just sit and write them. As the brilliant author, Ray Bradbury, once said ‘“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way!”
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Lauren speaking at the launch of UTS Young Alumni Committee in 2020. Image supplied by Lauren Perry