Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) | Hansard source

The issue here is really: what are we going to do to ensure that we can get the most from this revolution? These organisations probably have more power and control over our lives than any other organisation in the history of humanity. What are we going to do to ensure that we get a reasonable deal from them operating on our shores? This is going to be one of the great policy judgements over the next decade.

I would say that the case for having a role in the new world of artificial intelligence is a solid one. We're not going to become like Taiwan; we're not going to be manufacturing semiconductors here in Australia. It is important that we have some role in the value chain—in that ecosystem. If that is going to be data centres, then that is going to be a positive thing, because those, by definition, are going to bring investment, capability and employment into this country.

But these centres use a great deal of electricity. They use a great deal of water. And, generally speaking, these organisations in this technology space, the big tech space, have been negligent and criminal when it comes to the payment of taxes. I make the distinction that organisations like Anthropic or OpenAI are distinct from social media companies. But to bundle the technology sector together, perhaps in a crude way, these organisations have not been good taxpayers. They have created tax schemes through transfer pricing, which has allowed them to raise billions of dollars of revenue in this country and billions of dollars of profit and pay very low levels of taxation.

We must ensure that our tax systems and our regulatory systems move and adapt with changing technologies, so it is critical that the government and the parliament do consider the standards that should apply in relation to water, in relation to electricity and in relation to taxation and stewardship. These are all reasonable questions to raise. In relation to electricity, we should, by virtue of our solar capacity, be able to provide very high levels of computational capacity with the lowest level of environmental footprint. We should be able to do that. In relation to water, we should be able to provide reasonable levels of water, but we should be able to do it on the basis that it is sustainable.

These are the sorts of things that I don't think the government have really thought about. We have an incoherence from this government on the question of artificial intelligence. We have the former minister saying he wants to regulate it into oblivion. We have the current minister saying, 'Well, we're not really quite too sure.' It goes to this broader question of how we set Australia up as a country that is going to be able to avail itself of this new technology but is going to be smart about how we actually derive some public benefit from that.

One of the things that have frustrated the Australian people has been that we are a country which has great concentrations of power, which is not unusual. You can see concentrations of power in this government with the influence that the unions and the big super funds have over their day-to-day policy. We have huge concentrations of power in the finance sector, and we will have a huge concentration of power in the tech sector, just as we have today. The fact that the large technology companies are able to violate the principle of paying a large amount of tax where it is adjacent to the large amount of revenue and profit that they collect shows you that they are already in a very strong position, and so these are reasonable questions to raise. I think we want to avail ourselves of this technology, but we want to make sure that we get our pound of flesh along the way and that it's done in a sustainable fashion.