Status: voluntary. Australia does not yet have stand-alone legislation protecting Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP); the Australian Government is exploring legislative options. Copyright law protects some expressions of culture but not communal knowledge. The commitments below go beyond what the law requires.

Cultural safety

• Koaching the Gap is 100% Indigenous owned and led. Cultural safety is not a policy we apply to our work; it is the ground the work stands on.
• The people we work with choose the setting, who is present, and whether an Elder or community member is part of a conversation.
• Sorry Business and cultural obligations are respected and reset any timeframe.
• Cultural supervision for First Nations staff and reflective practice for non-Indigenous staff are run as separate streams, not mixed in one group.
• We hold ourselves to the Supply Nation Member and Supplier Code of Conduct, which includes respect for Indigenous traditional knowledge.

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property

• Cultural knowledge, practices and material carrying cultural authority are excluded from any licence we grant. They are not transferred, licensed, reused or commercialised, and they stay with the people and communities who hold them.

• Our rules for cultural knowledge shared with us:

  1. we do not use it for marketing
  2. we do not share it without express consent
  3. we keep it out of the artificial intelligence (AI) tools we use

  If it ends up somewhere it should not be, we tell the people it belongs to, remove it, and record what happened.

• Where we draw on published work by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors or organisations, we cite and attribute it by name. We do not absorb it into our own material as our own.

• Welcome to Country is given by an Elder or Traditional Owner of the Country concerned, not by us, and we do not arrange one. If asked, we may point people to the Traditional Owner organisation or to an Elder directly, at no charge.

• When we partner with other First Nations businesses, their intellectual property stays theirs, and anything created together is agreed in writing before it is built.

• Decisions that touch culture are not delegated to any automated or AI process, and we intend them to sit with cultural governance, beside the business and not under it.

Reference points

We work with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research and Indigenous data sovereignty principles as our standard, even where no law requires them. Our statement on Indigenous data sovereignty sets out what that means in practice.