angry cabler

Australia Must Say No to More Data Centres. Before we Sign Away the Water and Power. ianbrighthope.substack.com/p… Australia Must Say No to More Data Centres I want further large-scale data-centre development in Australia halted. I take that position because a decision to commit a district’s water and electricity for decades deserves the express consent of the people who will depend on both long after the minister who signed the approval has left office. I have yet to hear a persuasive explanation for why the ambitions of the global computing industry should take precedence over that obligation. I came to medicine through agricultural science. On a farm, the consequences of a bad decision about water turn up in the paddock. In medicine, the consequences of a breach of confidence turn up in the consulting room, when a patient decides there is something it would be wiser to keep from the doctor. Both experiences have shaped my view of the data-centre boom. A planning application deals with a particular building on a particular block of land. The consequences can travel well beyond the boundary fence. Consider what approval could mean in practice. The situations that follow are prospective. I set them out because the proper time to argue about them is while Australians still have the power to prevent them. The summer the water agreement is tested Picture a Victorian town entering its third dry summer. The council asks residents to conserve water. A market gardener leaves part of his crop unplanted because he cannot risk bringing it halfway to harvest and losing it. On the edge of town, a data centre continues drawing water for cooling under an agreement negotiated years earlier. At a public meeting, the gardener asks a perfectly reasonable question. At what point is the operator required to cut back? Imagine his anger if the councillors cannot answer because the relevant schedule is commercially confidential. Imagine discovering, after he has sacrificed a season’s income, that the company secured more favourable drought terms than the people who grow the district’s food. The scandal in that scenario would have occurred years before the drought, on the day officials signed away the town’s bargaining power. A government that expects a grower to bear the cost of scarcity owes him an honest account of every concession it has granted to a more powerful neighbour. I condemn the idea that the public may be trusted to endure a shortage while being denied the terms on which its water was promised away. The power line the public pays for twice Now picture a distribution network upgraded for a proposed computing campus. The forecast assumes that several buildings will be fitted out and operating for years. Halfway through construction, the developer’s largest prospective customer withdraws. The second stage is mothballed. The substation is already built. Who carries the cost? If the developer has provided an enforceable financial guarantee, the answer should be straightforward. If the agreement allows part of the cost to flow through network charges, a pensioner who has never used the company’s services could help pay for its failed forecast every time she pays her electricity bill. Meanwhile, a local food processor that deferred its own expansion while waiting for a connection gets no compensation for the opportunity it lost. I have no patience with a financing arrangement under which investors collect the return when the forecast proves right and households inherit the liability when it proves wrong. Anyone proposing such a bargain should be required to explain it at a public meeting, in plain English, before a single contract is signed. The town that cannot change its mind Imagine being the apprentice who gets a good job building the centre. The wages are real. So is the pride in the work. Two years later the construction crews leave, and only a small permanent workforce is needed to run the site. Your younger sister finishes school in the same town. The industrial land is occupied, the available power has been committed, and the permanent employment she understood the announcement to promise has scarcely materialised. Then the facility changes hands. The new owner honours every written undertaking. The training programme mentioned at the launch, the preference for local contractors and the community fund turn out to have been aspirations recorded in a media release. Nobody has technically broken a promise that the town can enforce. Ownership can change on an extraordinary scale. In July 2026, a consortium including the AI Infrastructure Partnership, MGX and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners completed its acquisition of Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie-managed funds and their co-investors. Aligned’s enterprise value was approximately US$40 billion. That transaction illustrates how readily control of infrastructure can pass between investment groups. The host community has no comparable freedom to move its catchment, reclaim its land or recover a decade of foregone opportunities. aligneddc.com The patient who decides to keep quiet The possibility that disturbs me most as a doctor begins with an ordinary consultation. A woman tells her GP that she is depressed and drinking more heavily than she has admitted to her family. That disclosure gives the doctor a chance to help. It depends on her confidence that she knows why the information is being collected and who may use it. Imagine a future government proposing to link health, identity and administrative records to identify people it considers at risk. The initial purpose might be defensible. Years later, another administration seeks access to the resulting risk assessments when reviewing eligibility for a service. An inaccurate flag follows that woman from one system to another. At the counter, the officer can see the flag but cannot explain its origin. Her doctor can correct the clinical record but cannot reach every inference drawn from it. The next patient hears what happened. When the GP asks how much he drinks, he gives the answer he thinks is safe. A technical capability acquired for one purpose has begun to change what Australians are willing to say in the privacy of a medical consultation. A data centre alone cannot authorise any of those steps. People write the laws, sign the contracts and permit the linkages. That is precisely where responsibility lies. Ministers cannot celebrate the power of these systems when seeking investment and then dismiss questions about their future use as alarmism. If a proposed use would be intolerable in the hands of a government you distrust, write the prohibition while a government you trust is still in office. The community that asks to see the contract Finally, imagine residents requesting the water agreement, the public contribution to the grid connection and the conditions governing a sale. They receive pages of redactions. Commercial sensitivity is invoked over the price. Infrastructure security is invoked over the connection. Each agency releases the material it considers itself responsible for, and nobody provides a complete account of the bargain. There are sound reasons to protect the physical security of a facility. Nobody needs the access code to the server room to find out who pays for the substation. When governments blur that distinction, secrecy becomes a convenience for the negotiators and a permanent disability for the public. A resident who asks how much water has been promised away is doing the work an elected representative should already have done. For those reasons, I call for a halt to new large-scale data-centre approvals and major expansions in Australia. Existing operators should disclose their actual water and electricity use, the public concessions they received and their obligations during shortages. Communities deserve to compare those results with the claims made when approval was sought. Australian ownership matters to me, but I would oppose giving an Australian company the same blank cheque I would refuse an overseas consortium. I reserve my strongest condemnation for the elected official who knows these questions remain unanswered and signs anyway. The developer has a duty to its investors. The minister has a duty to the people who must live with the decision. Australians are entitled to leaders who understand the difference. When the next proposal comes before a Victorian town, give the market gardener a copy of the drought clause. Tell the apprentice how many jobs will remain. Tell the pensioner who pays if the project fails. Give each of them enough time and authority to challenge the answers. And if, having heard it all, the community decides that its water, power and land are better kept for other purposes, respect its right to refuse. When the computer says you cannot go On 12 October 2021, a Victorian minister stood in Parliament and described what people would soon show at the door of a café or a hairdresser. There would be two ticks on a phone. One meant the person had checked in. The other meant the person was fully vaccinated. Regional Victorians were already testing the system. For anyone wondering what a vaccine passport might look like in everyday Australian life, there is the answer, recorded in our own Hansard. It looked like a customer standing on the footpath, waiting for someone to look at a screen. 12 October That memory shapes my opposition to further large-scale data-centre development. A planning application can tell a council how high a building will stand and where the cooling equipment will go. It tells the public far less about the decisions that might one day be made about them inside it. I see no evidence that every proposed facility has been commissioned to track Australians. My objection is that we are being asked to approve the capacity first and trust future governments to settle the limits later. Victoria’s experience gives me ample reason to reject that order of priorities. Consider a woman in Brighton who drives across Melbourne twice a week to care for her elderly father. Now imagine a future administration introducing a traffic-management trial under the banner of a 15-minute city. Having a grocer, a GP and a park within walking distance would improve her neighbourhood. The danger begins with a separate political decision to use numberplate cameras to count journeys across a designated boundary, charge for additional trips and require exemptions for carers. Her father falls in the bathroom one evening. She drives straight over. A fortnight later, a charge arrives because the registration system shows she has exceeded her allowance. To challenge it, she must prove where her father lives, explain why she went there and obtain evidence of his condition. Consider what has happened between the fall and the fine. A daughter who once needed only her car keys to help her father now owes a public authority an account of a private family emergency. No map of a 15-minute neighbourhood requires that outcome. It takes a government decision to put an enforceable boundary on the map. That is the decision I would fight. Digital ID raises a similar question about what voluntary means in the life of an ordinary person. Australia’s Department of Finance describes the national system as voluntary, and section 74 of the Digital ID Act 2024 expressly addresses voluntary creation and use. Now imagine an older Australian who declines a digital credential. The online applicant gets an answer this afternoon. He must take two buses to an office, produce original documents and return when the authorised officer is there on Thursday. A minister can truthfully tell Parliament that he had a choice. I would like that minister to accompany him on the second bus and explain the value of that choice to his face. legislation.gov.au Then consider digital currency. In 2024 the Reserve Bank and Treasury concluded that Australia had no strong public-interest case at that time for issuing a retail central bank digital currency. That finding matters because it leaves Australians entitled to ask what problem a future proposal would solve and for whom. Imagine that after a bushfire a government offers emergency relief through a digital wallet. The family accepts because they need petrol and a bed that night. Their nearest independent motel has been entered under the wrong merchant category. The payment fails. The public servant who designed the eligibility rule is home for the evening. The mother and her children are still at the counter. Such restrictions can already be designed into payment programmes without a central bank digital currency. The danger would be allowing that power to follow people from a limited relief scheme into the money they use for ordinary life. Treasury.gov.au The gravest possibility is the punishment of lawful dissent. Picture a nurse attending a peaceful Saturday rally against a health directive. She has broken no law. Imagine that a future agency obtains footage, matches a face to her identity and passes an alert to a public-sector employer under a broadly worded security policy. On Monday her hospital access pass fails. Her manager has received three words on a screen: pending security review. Nobody in the corridor knows who issued the alert or has authority to clear it. Six weeks later someone closes the file. By then she has lost shifts, answered questions about her professional judgement and watched colleagues become careful about being seen beside her. At the next rally, several of them stay home. In that scenario, no parliament passed a law prohibiting protest. No court found the nurse guilty of misconduct. The punishment was the six weeks. A right of appeal that eventually clears her name cannot give her those weeks back, and it cannot tell us how many Australians quietly decided that speaking in public was too expensive. This is why I want hard limits before another large development receives approval. I want governments to say whether identity, location, health and payment records may be linked, who can authorise a search and how an Australian can discover that a mistake has been made. I want a person refused travel, access or payment to be able to reach someone with the authority to put it right while the journey, appointment or purchase still matters. And I want a genuinely usable alternative for the Australian who chooses to leave the phone at home. A Victorian minister once explained to Parliament what two ticks on a screen would allow a citizen to do. Before we approve more of the infrastructure on which future systems could run, I would like to hear a minister stand in the same chamber and answer the harder question. Which decisions about an Australian’s life will the government undertake never to put behind those two ticks? My Position I personally object to Digital ID, to the introduction of central bank digital currencies, and to the steady erosion of personal freedom that could follow when identity, money, health information and movement become interconnected within systems beyond the individual’s control. I object to the expectation that Australians should surrender more information, accept more monitoring and place more trust in institutions while those institutions assume fewer obligations to explain themselves. Human institutions cannot be trusted and never will be trusted since the Covid-19 catastrophe. My identity belongs to me. My medical history deserves confidentiality. My lawful movements require no justification. My right to express an unpopular opinion must survive the displeasure of a minister, an employer or a technology company. These are principles I expect a democratic government to defend, including when doing so makes its administrative work less convenient. I want Australians to remain free to buy their groceries with cash, visit their families, attend a public meeting and consult a doctor without being compelled to assemble a digital record of their lives as the price of participation. I want an older person who has never owned a smartphone to receive respectful, timely service. I want a young person to be able to question authority without wondering whether today’s words will become tomorrow’s permanent risk assessment. My opposition to Digital ID rests on the concentration of power that could arise if a credential becomes essential across more and more aspects of life. A system described as voluntary must preserve a practical, accessible alternative. A choice becomes hollow when refusing it means hours of delay, additional expense or exclusion from services. Consent deserves better than a button pressed because every other door has been closed. I also oppose the introduction of a central bank digital currency into everyday Australian life. I am particularly concerned about any design that would permit authorities to impose conditions on where, when or for what purpose a person could spend their money. Such restrictions would depend on deliberate technical and political choices. Those choices must be confronted before the infrastructure makes their implementation easy. I would never accept the proposition that access to one’s own money should depend on political conformity, medical compliance or an assessment of acceptable behaviour. Data centres give these concerns a physical dimension. Their computing capacity can serve many purposes, and the decisions governing its use will determine the consequences. My objection is to expanding that capacity while leaving Australians to discover the limits of their rights after systems have been connected and public services have become dependent upon them. By that stage, the citizen asking to withdraw may be told that withdrawal is no longer practical. Throughout my working life, I have valued the freedom to ask difficult questions. Medicine needs it. Science needs it. Every citizen who has ever challenged an unjust decision needs it. A society in which people hesitate to speak because they fear consequences for their employment, financial access or freedom of movement has already suffered a profound injury, even if its elections continue and its institutions retain familiar names. I refuse to accept convenience as sufficient compensation for that loss. Nor will I accept assurances about the good intentions of today’s leaders as adequate protection against the actions of their successors. Powers persist. Governments change. A safeguard must be strong enough to restrain the administration we fear most. For these reasons, I oppose further large-scale data-centre expansion that proceeds without enforceable protections for privacy, meaningful public scrutiny and effective limits on the linking and exploitation of personal information. Australians must retain the ability to challenge decisions, obtain prompt human assistance and refuse participation without being punished through exclusion. I want my grandchildren to inherit a country in which they can speak candidly, travel freely, manage their own affairs and make personal decisions without seeking digital permission. They should be able to disagree with their government and get on with their lives. I will not willingly surrender those freedoms. I will not endorse the construction of systems that could place them at the discretion of authorities we cannot adequately question or restrain. And I will continue to insist that every Australian’s dignity, privacy and independence take precedence over the ambitions of those who wish to collect, connect and control more of our lives. Professor Ian Brighthope