Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the last few months, we've seen thousands upon thousands of tech workers retrenched due to AI—workers who were right to believe and who had been made to believe that they'd have a job for life. AI has busted open the sanctuary gates. If those jobs are no longer sacred in an AI future, then what about the rest of our workforce? Because, while a serious danger before us is that a lot of jobs will profoundly change or disappear due to AI, the greatest danger is that, as Professor Toby Walsh has put it, we will sleepwalk into an AI future not shaped by us at all. It's a question of power, of control, of sovereignty.

Governments have a responsibility to think ahead, step up and act in the national and local interest, looking out for communities that might be impacted. Governments can't just be cheerleaders for novel uses of AI; they must prepare and dilute the associated risks. We can't be scared to act because we're worried about the reaction of the Trump administration. We can't have a hands-off, laissez-faire approach to AI or respond in a knee-jerk, spasmodic way to the AI risks that only threaten the loudest or most powerful voices in society. Saying we want overseas generated AI models to bake in Australian values is a terrific rhetorical sweetener, but, without any legal or enforcement power, it simply melts in the heat of big tech obstinacy. We need a comprehensive, national, economy-wide AI act that identifies risks and sets out our expectations on how to manage them and build sorely needed confidence in AI.

Sixty-five per cent of Australians believe that, overall, AI creates more problems than it solves. That's up eight percentage points since 2023, according to Roy Morgan Research. Linked to this mad rush around AI is a frenzy to build data centres. There are now more than 250 data centres operating in Australia. We attracted $10 billion in data centre investment in a single year. But this expansion is not without consequence. Data centres are extraordinarily energy intensive. Their impact on carbon emissions doubled over five years. They could represent 11 per cent of Australia's electricity consumption by 2035, up from one per cent today.

The demand on our labour force to build this new wave of data centres is also significant at a time we're 90,000 workers short in construction and trying to build 1.2 million homes by 2030 and roll out more renewables and deliver a major infrastructure pipeline. Many of these overseas tech firms want governments to move faster, water down regulations, speed up access to land energy infrastructure, while, in some cases, even threatening not to build data centres if they're forced to pay tax. Those points bring into scope fundamental questions about the social licence of many of these tech firms.

I want to be clear: I am not anti data centre, but I am anti hype, and I'm very pro getting our act together to devise a structured approach to infrastructure, energy, workforce, taxation and sovereign capability. If overseas tech firms want to build data centres here, then spell out the benefit for the country. Will their computing power be set aside for Australian industry and researchers to help Australia tackle our challenges? That should be a condition of the Foreign Investment Review Board when they attach approvals on data centres that overseas firms want to build here. Overseas tech should be required to show that, when they build data centres, they're not going to negatively impact on the power and water supplies of our communities. They should demonstrate they won't compete for labour, especially in regional Australia, which is helping build more homes or infrastructure work that's vital to the nation.

There's something else that needs to be taken up. Many data-centre builders say they'll build new renewable supply to meet their needs. They can't always do that onsite. They have to draw supply from elsewhere. That means energy needs to be moved around. Data-centre builders should be required to pay the cost of that, specifically via transmission levies, contributing to the cost of building transmission lines. That's not radical. Canadian provinces have introduced a data-centre levy applied to data centres connected to the grid with electricity capacity of 75 megawatts or more. This means power-hungry facilities pick up a slab of the cost associated with the energy demand that they created, shielding residential and business customers from paying for this through their energy bills.

We need to debate AI openly and have a wider public discussion about artificial intelligence and the infrastructure needed to support it. Yes, we have to act fast. Yes, AI has benefits, but we can't allow AI to reshape our economy or sovereignty on terms the Australian public does not choose or support.

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