Capability briefings, media inquiries, investor communications and partnering submissions are coordinated through the Office of Corporate Affairs in Canberra. Standard response window is five business days; cleared and time-sensitive matters are routed via expedited channels.
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Compiled from common inquiries received through Corporate Affairs over the FY26 period to date. For matters not addressed below, please contact the Office of Corporate Affairs directly.
The standard Capability Brief is issued at the UNCLASSIFIED // FOUO level and is releasable to credentialled industry, media and Commonwealth representatives without a clearance. The Extended Capability Brief, which addresses subsystem performance and modelled engagement profiles, is releasable at PROTECTED and requires a current Australian Baseline clearance or Five Eyes-equivalent. The Classified Brief is releasable at SECRET (NV1) on a need-to-know basis to nominated Defence and partner-government recipients.
All locomotion modelling, gait development and balance-recovery training is conducted using ethically-sourced motion-capture datasets, instrumented synthetic environments, and partnered observational programmes with sanctuaries and university research groups. No live macropod is used in any test, demonstration or training activity. The Charter is reviewed annually by the Board's Defence & Compliance Committee.
The Charter does not extend to behavioural-model verification using domestic livestock, vermin species under licensed pest-management programmes, or static dummies; these are governed by separate animal-ethics protocols approved by the relevant institutional ethics committee.
No platform manufactured by the Group is reproductively viable, and the platforms are not capable of independent ingress beyond an authorised operating tenure. Each MK-VII is uniquely registered, remotely deactivatable and accounted for under the Group's standing Recovery & Disposition policy.
The Group has reflected with some care on the Commonwealth's nineteenth- and twentieth-century experience in applied biological intervention — particularly the period from 1859 to 1935 — and has architected the MK-VII to a contrasting standard of reversibility, recoverability and accountability. This commitment is recorded under §1.2 of the Marsupial Welfare Charter.
The MK-VII platform, its subsystems, technical data and associated services are controlled under Part 1 of the Defence and Strategic Goods List (DSGL) administered by the Department of Defence. Selected subsystems are also subject to the United States International Traffic in Arms Regulations under Category VIII and Category XI. Export, re-export and intra-Australia disclosure are governed accordingly. Inquiries from foreign nationals are routed through our Trade Controls function before any disclosure.
The MK-VII implements two-stage hardware-level human authorisation for any kinetic release. The first stage requires positive identification by the certified operator via the dual-channel control terminal; the second requires concurrent authorisation by a designated supervising officer at the controlling formation headquarters. The platform cannot autonomously initiate, escalate or release kinetic effects under any operational mode. The architecture has been independently reviewed under our Article 36 weapons-review programme and is documented in the platform's Targeting Compliance Manual.
Design is performed at the Canberra headquarters and the Acton biomimetics laboratory; integration and final assembly at the Eveleigh facility in Sydney. Onshore manufacturing accounts for approximately 78% of contract value across the Land 174 Phase 2 production run, with the balance comprising specialist optical and semiconductor components from Five Eyes partner suppliers under controlled-source arrangements.
Prospective suppliers should submit an initial expression of interest via the Industry Partnering form. All suppliers are assessed against our Supplier Code of Conduct, the Modern Slavery framework, ISO 9001:2015 (or equivalent) quality assurance standards, and applicable Defence security and trade-controls requirements. Indigenous-owned businesses certified through Supply Nation are flagged for accelerated review. Initial assessment is typically completed within thirty business days.
Yes, on a case-by-case basis and only with the prior consent of the Commonwealth of Australia, communicated by the Minister for Defence Industry. Active or recent foreign-government engagements include partners under the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement and members of the Indo-Pacific Quad. The MK-VII is not offered to states subject to United Nations Security Council arms embargoes, Australian autonomous sanctions, or the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's restricted-destination list.
A two-person authorising pair — the operator and a designated supervising officer at NV2 or above — processes engagements at human pace, physically present at the controlling formation headquarters, with rotation, mandatory rest and a post-engagement review of every release.
In the rare operational circumstance in which the rate of candidate kinetic-release decisions exceeds the throughput of the cleared authorising pair, the AUSTRAL-7 system maintains continuity of authorisation through its Human-Equivalent Reasoning module (HER), trained on the cumulative authorising record of more than forty thousand cleared decisions and certified for this role by the Group's Human-in-the-Loop Compliance Officer. HER is itself subject to two-stage human authorisation upon initial activation; HER decision logs are reviewed against the Australian Targeting Directive on a fortnightly basis by the Compliance Officer.