COUZENS BUNDLE, Ms Yaraan, Private capacity MILLER, Mr Jacob, Senior Campaigner, GetUp POTTER, Mr William, Director, Tomorrow Movement/Stop the Slop SIMONS, Mr Patrick (Pat), Yes2Renewables Coordinator and National Liaison Officer, Friends of the Earth Australia [15:10] CHAIR: Welcome. I understand that information on parliamentary privilege and the protection of witnesses giving evidence to Senate committees has been provided to you. I now invite each of you to make an opening statement. Mr Simons : Firstly, thank you so much for organising this inquiry. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you. And thank you also for holding it in the west, as it has been really important to hear directly from the local communities. We are looking at this issue mostly through the lens of energy and climate demands. What we see is a headlong rush into AI data centres and adding a massive new source of energy demand that has a huge risk of pushing up power prices and climate pollution. If we look at the next decade, we're looking at going from about five terawatt hours to up to 35 terawatt hours of electricity demand from AI data centres. What does that actually mean? That's the equivalent of adding about two South Australias or three Tasmanias worth of electricity demand onto the grid in a decade. We believe that we, as a country, are simply not ready for this. We don't have the regulations in place—particularly on the energy side, but also on all the other issues that communities have raised today—to make sure that this is done in a responsible way. I think anybody listening to these inquiries and the responses would likely agree with that. We believe that this push is likely to push up power prices and is very likely to push up pollution. The Climate Council estimates that power prices are likely to increase by as much as 26 per cent if data centres are powered by gas. Even in a situation where they're powered by renewable energy, that's still likely to increase by about 15 per cent. Obviously, we'd prefer data centres to be powered by renewables, but we need to understand that this is still going to present massive challenges to the grid and emissions. We need to urgently look at cautionary tales from overseas to jurisdictions that have had this rapid rollout of AI data centres. In Ireland, where data centres now represent about 20 per cent of the country's electricity demand, people refer to a 'data centre tax' on household electricity bills that represents around 715 million euros over that decade where we saw the projects increase, or roughly 315 euros for a regular household bill over that time. CHAIR: An extra 315 euros? Mr Simons : That's right, yes. Coming back to Australia, in the NT there is the proposed two-gigawatt data centre that would take fracked gas from the Beetaloo Basin. As a whole, that basin could produce 1.4 million tonnes of climate pollution every year, which is far higher than the NT's entire greenhouse gas emissions production. So we can see that these risks are really clear. But what we can't see is the public and community benefit from the industry. It doesn't appear to be there. We support the community's call for an urgent moratorium on AI data centres. As a bare minimum, we need to be looking at requiring new renewable energy for these projects—that has to be additional—and having that debate around what additionality means is really key to whether we simply power data centres with renewables or those projects that are actually reducing emissions. We think that we need to be aiming for reducing emissions, not just simply powering new data centres because that's what the corporations want. Thank you. Mr Miller : Thank you for this inquiry, for shining the light on this important issue and for inviting me to speak today. I'm here on behalf of the 16,000 GetUp members who signed on to our submission. CHAIR: We did have a lot of submissions—thousands of submissions. Mr Miller : We're very passionate about data centres. GetUp is not opposed to data centres, but we're opposed to a boom that is led by industry and copies mistakes of past resource booms, where the benefits flow offshore while the costs are paid by everyday Australians. The costs of expanding data centres at the scale now being proposed are enormous and are reaching almost every part of daily life. Unlike past resource booms, this one will affect households directly through power bills and, if not managed correctly, will compete with us for drinking water, put pressure on power bills and push up emissions that we spent years bringing down—we've just finally seen the electricity grid actually reduce. Sydney Water projects data centres could draw up to a quarter of Sydney's water supply by 2035. Even under the government's current renewable energy offset plan, electricity prices and emissions could still grow, especially if operators are given years before they must source their power from generally renewable projects. The economic benefits of this boom are also less certain than they first appear. There are lots of jobs in the initial construction of data centres, but, once they're built, data centres are not a very large employer. In Ireland in 2025, data centres used about 23 per cent of electricity, but they only provided a few thousand direct jobs. It's important that we make sure they actually pay tax here as well. For example, Microsoft's local data centre business paid no tax in 2022-23 despite $1.1 billion of revenue. We've also seen this with other industries, with Adani paying zero corporate tax on billions of dollars of coal it has exported in the last four years. So we can see that this is a bit of a trend. The government has acknowledged these risks, and legislation is expected in early 2027, but the details will decide whether this boom works for us or against us. Every approval granted before then could potentially lock in power, land and water usage on an operator's terms, not our terms. Our members have signed on to a submission recommending five things: a pause in new approvals until enforceable national standards are in place; a requirement for 100 per cent renewable generation with no new gas generation built to serve data centres, even for firming; a cap on water usage and set binding efficiency standards; communities to be given a genuine say and an end to fast-track planning; and the introduction of a binding minimum tax so companies profiting from Australian land, energy and water pay their fair share. Unidentified speaker: That's a great summary. Mr Potter : Thank you, Chair and senators, for having us here. I'm 24 years old and I'm joining from Tomorrow Movement. We support young people to build stronger, more connected and caring communities around the country. As part of this work, I'm talking with young people all the time. They are really scared about AI and very opposed to data centres in their communities, particularly near schools and childcare centres. You heard from young people yesterday—Sophie, Christie and Nirvana—who live near proposed data centres in Western Sydney. They're worried about the climate impacts, the heat impacts and the role of AI in taking jobs and driving disinformation on the internet. These data centres need to basically be treated like power stations. They come with huge backup diesel generators or batteries, and you wouldn't put a power station over the road from a school, as we're seeing with the Mamre Road Data Centre in Western Sydney. Let's talk a little bit about AI; it's the elephant in the room. There are data centres—we've had them for decades—and then there are AI data centres; they're the size of suburbs and have the energy intake of cities. And this is what's being rushed through now. I don't think we can have this discussion without talking really critically about AI. Fundamentally, it's about extracting people's collective knowledge, art, music and labour without paying for them—that includes First Nations knowledge and knowledge not taken with consent—to enrich a few overseas billionaires and grow inequality. This relationship needs to change. Our communities need to get back more for our data and our land. These companies need to share their wealth with us instead of making more trillionaires overseas. Speaking of these billionaires, their power over our politics and what we see in our news makes Murdoch look like a toddler. As a result of their vested interests, they have shown they are willing to destabilise democracies, with AI misinformation having a big impact on social cohesion. There is already evidence that AI reinforces division and authoritarian far-right narratives that threaten our democracy. Young people are really concerned about this. We are internet natives. We're on social media and we're seeing this all the time. I see my mother sharing AI slop propaganda videos of Pauline Hanson with her friends; it's quite upsetting. She doesn't know that the sharks jumping out of the water are completely AI generated. I think we need to be really critical about what we are building these AI data centres for. People have talked about AI having this role in security and bank transfers, but what I see AI being used for the most in my daily life is basically nonsense. It's slop. That's why AI slop has become the dominant term. Gen Z is using it all over the place. Our social media algorithms and feeds are basically AI content generated and propagated to us. There's nothing real there, and what we're seeing is totally determined by AI and could be manipulated by these overseas tech oligarchs. In terms of financing, if AI is as successful as it needs to be to meet these companies evaluations, it will swallow entire industries and leave millions of Australians jobless. That is the optimistic scenario. This is something young people who I work with are incredibly worried about. They are choosing their careers based on their AI exposure risk. My best friend, who wanted to study coding and who was great at coding in high school, studied computer science for a year and a half, and he gave up and is now studying teaching. He's making this decision because this is an AI exposed industry. Let's say that this is farfetched and AI companies are not able to pull this off. The technology isn't there, for example. Then they can't justify their evaluations, and therefore they can't pay back the loans for their trillions of dollars in investment into data centres, which will leave them as stranded assets, ghost buildings in our suburbs and communities. Even if this happens, I'm not saying AI will go away, but there is merit in taking a pause via a moratorium and using this time to make sure we are investing responsibly, with it powered 100 per cent by renewables and not next to fucking schools. Allow for consultation. Answer community questions about who is using these data centres. Answer questions about their financing, and make sure to apply any moratorium retrospectively. We can't risk our young people, our climate, our economy and our communities, because even the existing proposals are far too much for us to handle at this stage and at this pace. Anything short of this and our communities will be coming for you. Labor and all the major parties, listen up. I hope you are listening. We will hold you and your billionaire tech oligarch donors to account. Young people are organising, communities are organising, and we are powerful. This is just the beginning. Ms Couzens Bundle : I'm here to represent First Nations voices because we seemingly have been mostly excluded from this important process,. and I'm here to speak for the country, because I haven't heard anybody else speak on that behalf and from that perspective in all of the councils and all of the representatives that have spoken before. We're talking about not just the effects to human life; we're talking about effects to all of the species that call Australia home. That includes the country and how that changes with the flora and fauna as we know it—ancestral kin. We're here to speak on that behalf. The first point I'd like to make is that we're here to protect the water. It's ridiculous that an average data centre uses 500,000 litres a day, especially across Victoria, where they're rolling out these superintelligent centres—that's what they really are, and I'll get to that point in a minute. If we're looking at mega data centres, we're looking at well beyond 178 megalitres a year for a mega data centre. The average ones are directly taking from local water supplies, and, in a climate emergency, coming into 2027 summer, we're going to need all the water that we can keep for Australia. That's a major point of contention. In Victoria, we have a treaty process going on. There's been no allocation of water rights to First Nations people. How dare the state and federal government allocate all of those natural resources to data centres for what seems to be warfare intelligence. No-one's really spoke about that either, but I'm here to say on record that we have right now—and this can be fact checked—the federal government rolling out Australian military bases and the amount of American personnel. It's the same rush hour for the data centres. We need to talk about what type of intelligence that is. The main reason that I want to speak for is the water and the future, which is our youth. I'm here to support my brother here in the Tomorrow Movement for the youth, because they're our future. They're the ones that have to inherit this mess that the state and federal governments have given us—being bought out by the mining industry and now the data centre industry. It's as clear as that, from all the other community testimonies, that it's being rolled out. There's a really good reason for that. It enables surveillance state control over the Australian population, like they're doing to America and they're rolling out across the world. The serious criminal conduct that's going on there needs to be spoken about. These industries are in cahoots with that, I believe. Then we get back to health and wellbeing of local communities. My family live in West Footscray, so I'm very concerned about my niece's and nephew's health with a massive data centre being built. We have proof and science already to back up the mass pollution that they're creating. As we just heard in an admission from the previous person that spoke about the data centres, it sounds to me that they're actually going to target the youth, like what they did to get the treaty vote, about a point of employment. They're going to try and use our young people, after gambling their health, for an employment deal to pass their approvals. When we come back to country and the environment, we're talking about not only the water but major screen addictions in the youth and major health and wellbeing—mental health is becoming a youth epidemic. Our young people are desensitised and controlled—as brother mentioned, AI slop—and the older generations don't actually understand how much water it's using and what it's actually doing every time they post an eighties AI image. It is really, really important to talk about the mental health as well as the physical and physiological health and wellbeing of all of the children, as well as what our children under five are exposed to in kids apps. This AI stuff is popping up all the time. There are no sensors for that. They're starting to recognise how dangerous that is, and they've introduced bans to parliament, but it's just not good enough. Our children deserve so much better. Our youth are advocating for a healthy country and climate, which mean healthy and sustainable industries. If these industries aren't ready to recognise that carbon credits are a load of shit and that they actually need proper solutions to how they're going to manage a climate emergency, they need to start really funding environmental assessment studies in full consultation with Aboriginal people—in this area, the Bunurong people—who have been left out of the consultation process as a main stakeholder. That's not good enough in, in a mainstream process, where things are meant to be fair and democratic. It's absolutely unjust, and we will not stand for it. We will not stand for one industry—we've already watched mining completely shutter our cultural heritage. If there are all of these laws, state and federal, around native title and around environmental protections that, frankly, aren't strong enough, why are the data centres being allowed to go around all of those legislations and acts that are already in place? When you're talking about development, we're talking about cultural heritage mitigation destruction. What that means is we don't have a choice to say no about the destruction of our cultural heritage. We have to try and mitigate the lesser the damage to it. When we're talking about all of these elements of country, that's separated by industry and separated by government. It's as a whole for us as First Nations people, and it extends to us. We are country. We demand our water rights, and we are not letting foreign industries come in and take away community health to roll out warfare intelligence. It's absolutely something that we will stand our ground against and will take all the way to Canberra and to these industries to protect our young people that deserve a better future. CHAIR: All your organisations are familiar with working with communities when there's an issue, there's a particular project or there's a particular industry. Mining is the obvious analogy, I think, to use here. Frankly, from my perspective, I see AI data centres and AI as the big new extraction industry. I don't think we should be calling it artificial intelligence. We should be calling it extracted intelligence. There are a lot of analogies here—a lot of similarities between the mining industry and, I think, what people are worried about in terms of these big AI data centres and the purpose for them. My question to you all as organisations is this. You're familiar with working with communities in relation to these types of projects. What I want to understand is whether there are any differences with how you are seeing these types of projects being proposed, being debated and being talked about across the communities as opposed to others, whether that's mining or something else. So many of the people we've heard from today have never been involved in any type of campaign. They seem very self-organised. I'm trying to understand. Are these projects being imposed in a different way? Is it the lack of understanding, or do people actually have more understanding? Mr Simons : I might take that one. Day to day, I'm a renewable energy campaigner. So I work with a lot of communities in regional areas that either are wanting to see renewable energy built or might support renewable energy but have concerns. I've also attended a number of different community meetings, particularly in Melbourne's western suburbs—about four different ones—all of which have had 100-plus people attending. Some have had up to 250. I think a key difference is that with, say, renewable energy, people are looking at this as 'we need electricity; this is an essential service; I might not love this project, but I want to talk about what it means to do it well and whether there are benefits that could be delivered for my community; I'm willing to be part of that conversation even if I'm not a flag-waving renewable energy supporter'. CHAIR: As in, everybody wants to be able to turn the lights on and off. Mr Simons : Exactly—because there's a clear public benefit there. Even though people might understand there is some level of cost, you can clearly see there's a public benefit, so you might be more willing to participate. That's not everybody, but there is that conversation in the community. In terms of how the industry engages as well, it is more open to hearing those perspectives, in my experience, whereas I think what we're seeing with AI data centres is almost a complete ignoring of the community. The community is almost not a relevant stakeholder, it seems, to— CHAIR: Or not a stakeholder at all. Mr Simons : Not yet. They're not actually being engaged. People are getting really inadequate information about what these proposals are, and the level of public benefit is not clear. The industry hasn't explained to people why we need to do this. I understand why I need to be able to turn the light on, but I don't know why we need to have AI slop machines built in our neighbourhoods. There's a natural resistance to that technology—but to the way that it's been rolled out as well. Both the scale and the actual approach are clearly pissing people off a lot. You've heard that, too. CHAIR: It's struck me, in a number of the cases we've heard over the last couple of days about local areas where one of these AI mining factories is being put, that, if there's any community consultation, it's 'who is across the road and who is directly next door'. It's like you're putting up a shed in your backyard, and you've got to knock on the neighbour's door and say: 'Just FYI, it's going to be a bit loud this weekend. We've got approval from the council, but there are going to be some tradies coming and going. Hope it doesn't bother you.' It feels like they've taken that approach, if anything. Ms Couzens Bundle : When it comes back to native title laws and legislation, that is different, because the mining industry has to go through that type of process to have mining approved. But data centres—there are Aboriginal corporations and organisations that should have been invited to this inquiry that have direct say, but, because of the difference in the rollout, we don't have a voice in any of it. That's why I'm here today: to support the youth and our young people but represent country. It's so important. CHAIR: To that point, just in case there's anybody following, we as a committee have been contacted by a number of the traditional owners in the Northern Territory who are dealing with a very big proposal up there, and we're hoping we can get up there to talk to them directly. Mr Miller? Mr Miller : A lot of our members—we did an online webinar, and we've done a survey of our members and asked them to sign on. They're obviously very familiar with being opposed to coalmining projects and other things, but I think with this it's both the scale and the speed and confusion about what it's for. The questions that come up constantly are: Why are we doing this? What is it for? What does it actually do? And people's experiences of AI don't lend them to wanting more of it, to put it succinctly. I think the mining industry, for better or for worse, has had decades to build that social licence, whereas this industry has just appeared, is happening incredibly quickly with very little social licence and is now scrambling, I think, to have some narratives about why it's really important and why it's going to matter for us. But it's still unclear what the actual benefit is for us, I think. Mr Potter : On that topic—to make this analogy blunt—when you look at a mine, you can see the stuff coming out of it and follow it until it is created into a product that at least might be useful to someone. But I think here we're focusing heavily on the wrong side of the process—well, not the wrong side of the process. But we need to focus on both the data centres and what they're being used for—the demand side and the product side, if you take the mining analogy. What are they actually being used for? I would say a significant amount of AI use is for things that are superfluous. We do not need AI to answer the questions when we type in Google; we just want a decent result. We do not need 90 per cent of our social media feeds filled up with slop that is not real, that is trying to rig elections and that is trying to convince communities of things against their own interests. We don't need it to take jobs away from young people when young people could do those jobs, learn and grow those industries and actually improve the economy in a way that AI could never do because it's only repeating things that have been input into it. It doesn't have creative ideas. If we want to be a country of creative ideas, we still need to employ and bring up young people and support them. To a large degree, I think we could halve the amount of data centres being built—or, even more, reduce them—by just reducing the amount of superfluous shit that they produce. I think there is an angle for regulation that is not just stopping AI data centres and letting them grow elsewhere or be powered by renewable energy. All of these things are good, but we also should make sure that what they're being built for is worthwhile. When everyone is coming with these questions like, 'What is it actually doing? What is it for? I don't see the impact it's having on my life,' we need to take those questions seriously, because what is it actually doing? It's not actually improving people's lives. I think there's space for us to be really creative about how these AI data centres give back to our communities, give back to our young people. If they're going to exist at all, they can't just be making inequality worse, making more trillionaires, making billionaires increase their wealth. Up to 95 per cent of investment in AI data centres is going overseas. A huge amount of that is sitting in individual people's pockets, who have so much power over our democracy. I just want to add that we need to be creative about how they give back, how we tax this data, because it is our information and our labour and our knowledge that they are stealing, effectively, to put into these things. This is the stuff that we use, but we've also heard that this is being used for AI-guided weapons. I think communities have a right to know what these data centres in their communities are being used for. Are there any weapons that are being guided from West Melbourne? How much of a risk is it for us that these data centres could be targets in a future military conflict? Of young people that I've talked to, at least 10 to 20 in the last two weeks have talked about the impact of AI in warfare and what that means for the future of warfare and surveillance, and policing. These are real risks that are not being talked about or addressed. This underlies this question of what is it being used for? Ms Couzens Bundle : Another really important point is that there are whistleblowers in the AI industry all over the world reaching out with dire warnings about the AI intelligence. You don't see the mining industry people warning about their industry. But you see these whistleblowers blowing the whistle about the danger of culturally appropriated and stolen knowledge. It is data theft and research theft. It's all stolen. CHAIR: Obviously, you all support the idea of a moratorium. Do you feel as though, if there were strong guardrails, strong laws and strong regulations, that it would be enough for Australia to host these big mega hyperscale data centres from mostly US companies? Mr Miller : I don't know if this has already been raised in the committee, but the Singapore model, how they approach it, is a really good model. They effectively put a pause between, I think, 2019 and 2022 on data centre development until they had the things in place. What else is really good about the Singapore model is they didn't go, 'Oh, we've got to build a bunch of data centres. How do we enable that? How do we make sure they have enough water and enough electricity?' They said, 'What would be beneficial to us? How much electricity? We don't want more than seven per cent of our country's electricity to go to data centres. Let's have a goal. Let's do that. Let's actually go: there's this much energy put aside and you've all got to bid for it. You've got to show that you're the most efficient, that you're going to make the most of this energy.' I don't think the data centre industry behaves very differently to every other industry in Australia but, because it's so new and so fresh, the dynamics at play are really obvious. Even today during this hearing, we've heard again and again: 'It's our challenge,' or 'How are we going to address that? How are we going to deal with that?' CHAIR: But why are we dealing with their problems? Mr Miller : It's not really our challenge if data centres get built at scale or not. Yes, we should have a moratorium. We should have actual limits on water, not just standards. We should have actual limits on energy. But I think we need to flip the script and start with: how many data centres would actually benefit us? How would this boom actually benefit us? We don't need to go, 'Oh, this boom is happening. How do we make sure that data centre operators get everything they need?' I think that is actually incredibly important. Mr Simons : And what they're used for needs to be in those questions. CHAIR: Yes, I think that's it. You're not the first person to put that to us today, and I think that that's right. It feels like we're having the conversation the wrong way around. There's a reason that these big data companies and AI companies want to come to Australia. There's a lot of space. There is a lot of cheap power available if it's done properly. We're a relatively stable democracy, so we're safe in terms of that. We also have very weak regulation. Even if we strengthened up the regulation, those other three points are really vital, actually. We've got a strong hand to play if we wanted to set the terms and push back. Mr Miller : Once again, we have a resource just like gas or coal and all those things you've just listed and are geographically stable. We don't have earthquakes. We don't have those sorts of things. It's a resource, and we're just falling over ourselves to give that resource away. Once again, you have to ask yourself: why? Why are we like this? Why do we want to do this again? I think that people really see that and they don't like it. CHAIR: Again, it comes back to the similar analogy to the gas industry, for example. We want to tax the gas exports now. Everyone wants to do that, but no-one in the gas industry thinks that's fair, because they haven't been taxed so far, so why should they pay it now? Ms Couzens Bundle : Can I please go on record too saying that my family and our nations that I belong to are against them. I would say over 50 per cent of First Nations nations, which make up I think 354 nations across Australia of First Nations countries—you ask the families in Beetaloo. They do not want fracked gas to support these data centres. We're deadset against them because of the use of water. We don't want them at all. CHAIR: I can hear that. Thank you all for your evidence today. I appreciate the time and effort and honesty that you've come to the table with..