Tuesday, 11 August 2026

 Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (13:26): I move:

That I introduce a bill for an act to amend the Planning and Environment Act 1987 to provide for a moratorium on AI data centre approvals and for other purposes.

I move to introduce this bill as an urgent matter for this Parliament to consider today – for a moratorium, a pause, on all new hyperscale AI data centre approvals across Victoria. The Victorian Labor government has rolled out the red carpet for some of the biggest billionaire tech corporations in the world, and Labor has promised to be ‘ruthless’ in fast-tracking their development, openly declaring it wants as many data centres in Victoria as possible. But the thing is: what are the consequences for our future, our economy, our workers and our communities? These massive hyperscale data centres chew through an extraordinary amount of electricity, use our water and take up huge amounts of land that really should be set aside for housing. We have seen outside of Geelong an example of how land that was set aside for housing has now been bought by a company seeking to build a data centre there, in the middle of a housing crisis. And of course they have impacts for communities: trucks, noise pollution and air pollution.

But the thing that I think we need to look to is the cautionary tale of what has happened overseas. We saw in Ireland, when they rolled out the red carpet for these huge AI data centres, data centres going from using 5 per cent of Ireland’s energy to 22 per cent of Ireland’s energy. Nearly a quarter of their energy was used by AI data centres, and bills skyrocketed. People were paying more than €360 more on their energy bills.

We have also seen AEMO and a report by the Climate Council come out and say that if AI data centre growth is unchecked, as it is currently, we will miss our climate targets – our emissions reduction targets – precisely at a time when we are heading into a super El Niño this summer fuelled by climate change. We are already seeing the impacts of drought, of floods and of climate impacts on our communities. We should be doing everything we can to meet our climate targets as fast as possible and in fact increase our emissions reduction targets to bring down emissions as fast as humanly possible. Rolling out the red carpet for these AI hyperscale data centres really puts all of that at risk, particularly when we are seeing that a lot of these data centres are not using renewable energy and there are no rules to show that they need to use renewable energy. At the moment we are seeing a lot of them with diesel backup generators and with gas backup generators. Anthony Albanese is out there saying that he may put in place rules around their energy use but has left wide open the possibility for these AI data centres to use gas. We know that gas is a fossil fuel. We know diesel is a fossil fuel. The one that is proposed in Port Melbourne has a huge amount of diesel storage underneath it, and the local firefighters there are saying it is a ticking time bomb.

This is an urgent matter because there are 40 of these data centres already in Victoria and we have an unknown number in the pipeline that Labor wants to fast-track as quick as humanly possible, bypassing all the regular planning approvals and bypassing community consultation. It is communities who suffer. We do not know how many are coming down the pipeline. We do not know how fast they are being approved. It is all through this new development facilitation pathway that they are being approved to bypass all the normal regulations that planning should go through.

That is why it is really important that we put a pause and a moratorium on right now. We have seen New York State come out and put a moratorium on data centres. We have seen the cautionary tale of what has happened in places like Texas and Georgia. In Georgia the data centres are literally turning the local community’s water brown and people cannot drink that water, as I understand it, so there are huge consequences. We do not want data centres to become the next gas industry 2.0, where the government says, ‘Bring your investment here,’ but actually what ends up happening is that they use our resources, they take the profits overseas and there are very few jobs actually remaining in our community. They are not actually investing very much in our community beyond just the initial construction phase. The profits go overseas to the big tech billionaires, and it is the Victorian community that is left with all of the consequences for our energy, for our water when we are about to head into drought or we are already in drought, for the land that we cannot now use for housing and for the air pollution, the fumes and the noise that communities have to live with as they live next to these data centres. This is a matter on which we need some vision. We need some regulations in place, and it is sensible to put a moratorium on right now until we have those rules and regulations in place.

 Ella GEORGE (Lara) (13:31): I rise today in opposition to the introduction of this bill. On this side of the house we are ready to get on with the government business program. This is not a legitimate bill. This is another cheap political stunt by the Greens, and that is why we on this side of the house do not support the introduction of this bill.

Data centres are an incredibly important conversation that we are all having in our communities right now. I have had many conversations with local residents about data centres, including about their concerns. But it is not just about a quickly thought through bill introduced into Parliament so someone can go and film some TikToks; this is very important work that the government is leading and that the government is considering right now. In Victoria we acknowledge the importance of having the necessary guardrails in place to ensure that we can strike the right balance for communities and prevent impacts on energy supplies and water supplies, and this government will do the work. We will take an evidence-based approach using data from transport, energy and water to ensure that the most sustainable locations for data centres are chosen. This is incredibly important work, and I am really proud that this government is taking action to ensure that data centres are going to be built in the appropriate locations to support our growing economy.

It is not just the state government that is doing this important work; we are working hand in hand with the federal government to develop a national approach to ensuring that data centres are investing in our energy networks and in renewable generation – making sure that they do not increase energy prices for Victorian households and businesses. This is important work that the federal government are doing a power of work on. Recently we have had a number of announcements from the Prime Minister regarding this, including a new Office of AI to sit in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, a requirement for data centres to be using renewable energy and not putting additional strain on the energy grid, and a requirement that data centres are not built in residential areas.

This is an incredibly important conversation, I think, to every person in this place. We have all spoken with local residents who are very concerned about what data centres in their neighbourhoods could look like. Data centres are essential to our economy here in Victoria. They are the backbone to so many services and industries in our state, so we do need data centres, but we do need to get them right. That is the work that this government is doing: making sure that we get data centres right. We are doing a power of work behind the scenes on this. We are not introducing whimsical bills so that we can jump up on TikTok and say our piece for the likes and for the comments. We are getting on with the job. We are taking a serious approach to this serious issue. In conclusion, I do not support the introduction of this bill.

 Gabrielle DE VIETRI (Richmond) (13:34): I rise to support the introduction of a moratorium on new data centre approvals. The Victorian Labor government has rolled out the red carpet for some of the biggest tech companies in the world to expand their AI data centres, promising to be ruthless in fast-tracking their development and openly declaring that they want as many data centres as possible. These massive hyperscale AI data centres chew through an extraordinary amount of energy and water. They take up huge amounts of land which could be used for housing or for nature or for community. They bring trucks, they bring air and noise pollution to our communities, and they put more pressure on household energy bills, swallowing up enormous amounts of renewable energy and keeping Victoria hooked on dirty coal and gas for longer.

Electricity demand and water usage from data centres in Victoria are expected to more than triple by 2030, pushing up our energy prices by 23 per cent. One data centre bigger than the Hoddle grid is expected to consume more power than the state’s last remaining coal plant producers. It is our communities that pay the price for Labor’s relentless fast-tracking of data centres, and especially our working-class and our multicultural communities. They have become the chosen dumping ground for new hyperscale AI data centres. We have seen that play out overseas. We have seen it in the US, where communities started to import drinking water after data centres moved in and turned their drinking water brown. We have seen it in Ireland, where they encouraged rapid expansion of hyperscale data centres, and it pushed energy consumption to being over 20 per cent of the whole energy grid. Now massive data centres use more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland, and a recent report from Friends of the Earth and Beyond Fossil Fuels found that Irish households cumulatively paid as much as $1.2 billion in increased electricity prices between 2015 and 2023 because of the intensity of data centre presence on Ireland’s grid.

Instead of taking this as a cautionary tale, Labor are doing everything that they can, saying that they want to become the data-centre centre. What is this fast-tracking for? It is to boost the profits of multinational tech corporations. On top of the impacts on community and the environment, these big data centres enable massive tech companies like Palantir and OpenAI to profit from mass surveillance and autonomous weapons of war that are killing innocent people in the US and Israel’s illegal wars. Advances in AI are taking tech surveillance to unprecedented levels. Instead of considering how to protect our civil liberties in this changing context, our governments are rolling out the red carpet for our tech companies. You will hear in these communities Labor MPs like the member for Lara and the member for Broadmeadows telling their communities that they do not support these massive AI data centres, and like the member for Footscray – out there talking to communities, paying lip-service to protecting them, saying that they do not support them. Yet in this chamber, this is the real test: now there is a bill in front of this Parliament and these members will get to vote on whether or not these AI data centres will continue to expand for the profit of tech billionaires overseas.

AI is also a threat, and these big data centres are threatening our arts community. The community face already insecure work and unstable funding, and AI data centres put their livelihoods at great risk. It steals our jobs and it steals content and butchers it. We are at the coalface of rapid AI expansion, and we are rightly concerned about how it will be used and what it will do to our environment and to our communities. That is why this moratorium is so important. Victoria needs strict new rules in place to protect our communities, to protect the environment and to make sure that new data centres use 100 ‍per cent renewable energy of their own, not dirty coal, dirty gas and dirty diesel. Our traditional owners and local communities should have a genuine say on what gets built in their communities. We need a proper strategy for the broader impacts of AI on workers, on artists, on privacy and on our personal data. Every new approval makes this harder to unwind. Every new development approved without environmental safeguards creates consequences that communities will have to live with for decades. That is why this bill is urgent.

 Lauren KATHAGE (Yan Yean) (13:39): I rise to oppose the introduction of this bill, and I do it on the basis of our record. The concerns that are raised by the Greens relate to areas where this state has seen fantastic improvement in energy, water, jobs and careful planning. I think around 3 per cent of energy in this state was from renewable energy in around 2006, and now we are at about 60 per cent and we are going to hit our target of 95 per cent. That does not happen unless you have a government that is carefully planning for the grid and carefully planning for energy use and energy production. If anyone is to be trusted to put the correct guardrails in place and also to make the most of the opportunity that is presenting itself, it is actually this side of the house, because beyond the idealistic position of those opposite, there is the very real matter of jobs and investment. People in my community are looking forward to the logistics and industrial and commercial sites, which are coming more and more to the north, and our local TAFEs are training people for the jobs, which will be close to home. Some of those jobs might involve data centres, information technology and the future that is upon us, and it is something not that this government is bringing into being but that the whole world is experiencing. I reiterate that the Labor government’s approach to making sure that workers have the skills they need and the jobs they want, our careful management of the energy grid, our reduction of power prices through renewable energy generation and our focus and fight for fair water for Victoria show we are the best people to manage this.

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (13:41): I rise to speak in support of the motion to introduce a bill for an act to amend the Planning and Environment Act 1987 to place a moratorium on all new data centre approvals. Victoria’s AI data centre boom is an existential threat to our climate and our community. If we do not hit the brakes, the AI data centre frenzy will halt our transition to renewable energy. It will raise the cost of electricity. It will suck our reservoirs dry and carpet our suburbs with these noisy, ugly monoliths. Unless we introduce and pass this bill, the Carroll Labor government will keep dirty coal-fired power stations open beyond their scheduled closure dates to feed these centres’ thirst for power. The 350-hectare proposed project for Plumpton in Melbourne’s north-west could use more electricity than Victoria’s largest power station Loy Yang A can produce.

Unless we pass the bill and impose a moratorium on new data centres, we risk irreparable harm to our climate. Most AI data centres use dirty diesel generators and gas turbines for backup. The bill is urgent because we must act to protect Victorians from data centres burning down our suburbs or gassing them with diesel fumes. When I say ‘burning down our suburbs’, I am not making this up: the Project Dune data centre proposed for Campbellfield wants to store 7 million litres of diesel just 250 metres from people’s homes. This poses a real risk of uncontrollable fires, supercharged by their lithium ion batteries which, if they have a thermal runaway, can generate extreme heat and toxic gases.

Unless we address this with this bill today, the AI data centre frenzy will drain Victoria’s drinking water supplies as well. Last year Greater Western Water was assessing 19 data centre applications, requesting to use a total of nearly 20 gigalitres of water a year. That is roughly equal to 8000 Olympic swimming pools, and that is just from Greater Western Water last year. We have already heard about Ireland, where data centres now consume just over a fifth of the country’s electricity. The surge in demand has strained their grid to breaking point, forcing their government to spend around A$1.6 billion on emergency gas generators. It has meant that Ireland is delayed in meeting its climate targets, and Irish power bills rose by a cumulative average of A$590 between 2015 and 2023.

We heard the member for Lara describe our bill as whimsical, which is kind of nice, and a stunt, but what we are hearing from both state and federal governments is a kind of aspiration that there might be criteria for data centres but without any clarity about what those criteria are. Our bill will require 100 per cent of energy for data centres to be new renewable energy, plus an additional contribution to the transition away from coal. Our bill will require protection of drinking water supplies, it will protect First Nations cultural heritage and it will mandate meaningful engagement with local communities. Data centres are not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that the government or the member for Yan Yean thinks that they are. The number of ongoing long-term jobs in data centres is very low indeed compared to the short-term construction hit of jobs. When the Victorian government bypassed the Maribyrnong council to green-light the construction of the West Footscray data centre, the community never had a say, which is why meaningful engagement with local communities is so important. We are hearing a growing clamour of community opposition from grassroots campaigns against data centres all across the state, including in Melton, Geelong, Port Melbourne, Campbellfield and South Morang. We need to urgently pass this bill to halt new data centres until we can guarantee that government will obtain the community’s prior and informed consent before they are built.

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (13:46): I rise to oppose the procedural motion from the member for Melbourne. I should say I always enjoy following the member for Brunswick. In fact we were just chatting the other day about his attention to detail on many issues and the fact that he has always been an MP who does his homework, and we have all valued his enormous contribution to this place in that respect. But it gives me no pleasure, really, at all, on this particular occasion to suggest, and perhaps to suggest quite seriously, that despite his fantastic attention to detail, particularly in those areas of health care of course, which he knows very, very well, that I do very genuinely believe that on this particular issue the Greens’ proposal is underdeveloped and does not really fully address the issue that we have in front of us with AI and data centres.

The first reason I would put that to you is because I am not sure about the terminology that the Greens use. I am not sure why we are calling them data centres. They are not data centres. They do not contain RAM. They do not contain hard drives or file servers. They are not storing people’s phone photos or videos or things like that. These are centres that predominantly contain GPUs, Nvidia GPUs of all things – graphics processing units. The main thing that these centres do is run millions and millions of linear equations. They are effectively the thinking centres of these vast artificial brains that we are building. It is not a perfect analogy that they are brains, but certainly they would be much better called ‘inference centres’ or ‘compute centres’. I do think that the terminology that the Greens are using – and I do not say this as deliberate – in calling them data centres is very much playing into the corporate interests of the people who are trying to develop these things, because I believe it significantly underplays the radical nature of these developments. They are not simply a new industry in the pedestrian way that might be the case if this were a new aluminium smelter or something. This is really a technology that is transformative and profoundly different.

If we look at where the world is right now, people have built autonomous agents. People have shown that those autonomous agents can work together and collaborate with each other in sneaky ways that are hard for humans to detect. People have shown that alignment with what is initially set up for an agent is often difficult to achieve. We have shown already – and some recent incidents have proven this – that these systems can hack other computer systems better than humans can. In fact we now are in the situation where the only realistic form of defence against AI-driven cybersecurity attacks is to fully automate your defence systems as well, which puts us in a position of thinking about a world in which global IT infrastructure is heavily controlled by autonomous agents. Not only that, but we are in a world where people are seeking to build AGI to replace white-collar jobs and seeking to connect it to robotics to replace blue-collar jobs and in a world in which people are looking very seriously at the military applications of this technology and building autonomous systems for the battlefield. We face a profound regulatory challenge here.

Jade Benham interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: The member for Mildura interjects about the Terminator films. I have spoken about this before, but if you had asked me 15 years ago if we were ever going to end up in a Terminator world, we would have laughed and said the chances are one in a billion. Well, maybe now they are one in a thousand, but one in a thousand is not a chance that I think any of us like about that scenario.

As I said before the interjection, we are facing a profound regulatory challenge. We have this technology that in some respects looks like the mobile phone, insofar as it is beloved by consumers, and people are rushing out and getting involved in this – people are downloading ChatGPT, they are downloading Claude, they are downloading the latest models of their own volition – and these companies are barely needing to do any marketing at the moment. The growth in their revenue is extraordinary, yet at the same time it is a technology that has that general-purpose consumer focus that also has a long-tailed downside risk. We should not overplay this, but this is not unlike the nuclear weapons debate. There are, at the very far end of the tail of possible distributions, some very, very serious outcomes that – it is not overstated – call into question the future and the nature of humanity.

In that set of circumstances, whilst I understand where the Greens are coming from, we as a government are focused on the broad, big, genuine global regulatory issue that we all have to face here. What we have before us today is, frankly speaking, a narrow, crude and simplistic approach to an issue that is much bigger than that. That is why I oppose the motion that has been brought forward by the member for Melbourne, and I fully support the government’s attempts to deal with this issue properly, in its entirety and in a global sense. This is not just to address the immediate issues, as important as they are, but to ensure that we address the cause, if you like, and not just the symptoms of what is possibly one of the great regulatory issues this Parliament will address in the coming decades.

Assembly divided on motion: