Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I thank my colleague Ms Badger for bringing this MPI on, because it is a critical issue to discuss. I think the level of politics being played by the minister when he was on his feet identifies and highlights how naked the government is when it comes to a policy framework to underpin the development of data centres here in Tasmania. He’s playing the party and not the issue.
We’re not opposed to data centres ‑ we just want to understand exactly what they’re going to mean for Tasmanians. We want to understand what the energy implications are, the water implications, and the social implications. We’re not opposed to renewable energy. We support renewable energy, but it cannot come at any cost. It can’t come at a cost to the environment or Aboriginal heritage, and developments like Robbins Island are an absolute blight on this parliament and this assessment process. The fact that you can approve a development like Robbins Island, despite its threat to critical species like the orange‑bellied parrot, migratory bird species and the devil, is one thing. To assess it on an Aboriginal cultural landscape, when the very act has been accepted by your government as not providing effective protection for Aboriginal heritage five years ago in this place, is an indictment on your approach to Aboriginal heritage protection and credible assessment of these developments.
People are legitimately concerned about data centres, because they do, and will, have impacts. They’ll have impacts on our community, our water, our energy, and there’s issues to do with AI more broadly. Now, we’re not debating the concerns about AI more broadly, the impact on jobs, the theft of property in the arts sector ‑ that’s a side issue when it comes to this debate. We’re talking about the footprint of the data centres and AI factories ‑ that are processing this information for some of the biggest ‘tech bro’ companies ‑ on the world. It is a deep concern, and if you’re not hearing the community’s concern, then you are absolutely deaf, and will, I think, pay the price in the longer-term.
When it comes to energy, which I want to talk about, the policy is all over the shop, and we’ve been asking questions repeatedly about this. It’s really welcome that there are now inquiries into data centre development. There’s two, effectively, in place at the moment: there’s the data centre inquiry that Ms Badger stood up, and the energy inquiry that is also going to look at the implications of these big data centres on energy, implications for the state and the major industrials ‑ and it’s entirely legitimate. At the moment we’ve got Hydro saying we are in balance ‑ we produce energy, we use energy and we’re broadly in balance. It ignores the fact that the audit of the Office of the Tasmanian Economic Regulator showed last year that we actually weren’t in balance ‑ we’re importing more power than we generate. Nonetheless, Hydro makes that point. This is a really critical point, because what we are seeking here is guardrails to ensure that the commitments that are being made can actually be delivered. Let’s remember that Firmus is saying they’re going to build two megawatts of energy for every one that they consume. The question is: exactly how do they do that?
While we’ve been asking those questions, the government has finally been forced to publish its draft set of expectations around that ‑ and when it comes to energy, it begs more questions than it actually answers. I’ll read from this expectations policy, under the heading ‘Supporting new renewable projects’:
Proponents are required to bring on new additional energy
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Proponents must partner with new energy generation projects
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The Tasmanian government requires new data centre and AI infrastructure proponents in Tasmania to enter into commercial agreements
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The Tasmanian Government requires data centre and AI infrastructure projects to be transparent.
Now, how are they going to do this without legislated, fixed guardrails that actually force these companies to do what the government wants them to do? The answers from the minister today were utterly pathetic in regard to pointing to the federal government and a set of guardrails that are going to be legislated there. This is our energy. It’s our energy generation. These are our energy systems, this is our transmission system, it’s our land, and we need to make sure that Tasmania itself has strong guardrails that put this in place.
Now, Ms Badger went through the information that was put on the record tabled last night, but I just want to point to the fact that we’re again being offered redacted documents, and a briefing with ReCFIT and the Office of the Coordinator‑General. I want to raise the point, that creates problems because we can’t ask questions about redacted information.
