David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I don't care if you're making money off data centres, gas, solar, wind, groceries, social media or AI. I don't care if you're making money off selling Pokemon cards. If you make money here in Australia, you should pay tax here in Australia.

Not content with having given big gas a free ride for the past few decades, it looks like the government is now proposing to do the same for big tech. Rather than regulating the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and data centres in our country, the government has released a new national interest framework with five national expectations related to national security resilience and maintaining social licence. Expectations! Not laws, not regulations, not guardrails—just expectations.

It's clear to me that when it comes to big tech, expectations are not going to cut it. We expect petrol companies not to jack up the price unnecessarily, but they do. We expect big supermarkets not to price gouge Australians, but they do. If we're going to expect big tech to do the right thing, I can almost guarantee you that they won't.

While there are clear economic and sovereign capability benefits that AI offers, we need to be equally clear-eyed about the risks as well and actually regulate to protect Australians against them. AI data centres in Sydney alone are forecast to need more water than the whole of Canberra's drinking supply within the next decade. Eight days ago, we saw that Google was threatening to withhold $20 billion in data centre investment because they were worried that it could expose them to paying tax in this country. That says everything we need to know.