Thursday, 24 September 2026

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:58): (2847) I will start by saying first of all that data centres are essential to our economic future; all our future businesses and industries are going to be built off the back of them. We must have data centres in Victoria; however, they are an industrial process, and they belong in industrial areas. About this time a year ago Victoria had about 22 per cent of the nation’s data centres whereas New South Wales had about 40 per cent, and this is a significant problem for us and for our economic future. The Labor government, effectively having had no policy on data centres whatsoever, panicked. It is no surprise New South Wales are ahead, because they had a plan five years ago and had implemented it systematically. What the government did in response was simply go pick up the phone and approve data centres randomly across the state in any location simply to catch up, and then they spent the first six months of this year bragging about how they were catching up to New South Wales and how successful Victoria was in bringing in this capital. It was pretty important we got that capital, because that capital is the only reason Victoria is not in a net capital outflow right now. It is the only thing keeping Victoria out of recession right now. As a result, we now have data centres in completely inappropriate places.

It was Labor that approved data centres in and adjacent to residential areas. It was Labor that approved data centres in green wedge areas. It was Labor that completely abused the development facilitation plan process to ride roughshod over local communities. It was Labor that had absolutely no infrastructure plan for energy or water. It is Labor’s fault that there is now a serious social licence problem for an essential piece of our economic future. You have taken a golden opportunity for this state and destroyed it. And now with your cack-handed new policy you are doing everything to ensure that we have the worst of both worlds, because there are no protections for our communities and there is no new systematic planning, but you are doing everything you can to drive billions and billions of dollars of investment out of our state. There is between $150 billion and $180 billion of private capital investment to be placed in Australia for the jurisdictions that can put a sustainable, systematic data centre program in place, and the state that achieves that will have the economic infrastructure that will see it through the next part of this century. It is essential, but only Labor can screw up a golden opportunity in this way.

The question I ask to the Minister for Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Economy is: can you please name one of the existing data centre approvals that is going to be changed as a result of these new policies? Name one community you are protecting. Name one community that will have relief from your cack-handed management of AI and digital economy policy.