CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr FARLEY (Farrer) (09:30): Australia faces a test of governance that has received far too little attention. It's not a test of ambition. Our ambitions are aspirational.

It's a test of whether anyone is actually doing the planning. The nation has set itself a series of goals, like stronger GDP growth. We're committed to population growth and all the demands of housing and food production that come with it.

We have embraced with considerable enthusiasm the rise of artificial intelligence and the data centres that sustain it—defensible goals. Yet each draws on the same two finite resources: water and electricity. That is the policy problem that has not been confronted.

AEMO forecasts that data centres will rise from about three per cent of grid demand today to 13 per cent by 2036, totalling 34 terawatt hours a year. That is roughly the consumption of every household in New South Wales and Victoria combined. Meeting it will clearly require eight to 10 gigawatts of new generation and storage at a cost of $20 billion to $30 billion before the substantial investment in transmission lines estimated at circa $150 billion of total capital requirement.

Sydney Water warns that under evaporative cooling data centres' demands could reach 90 billion litres a year by 2035, between 15 and 20 per cent of Sydney's drinking supply. These figures raise three questions that go to the heart of national policy. First, who is forecasting, designing and costing this demand and who will finance the supply?

Second, who are the customers that will service that capital? Investment of this scale is always repaid by someone. Third and more importantly, who will be displaced?

Food producing irrigators, manufacturers and households all face the prospect of higher costs or exclusion as new demand bids for the same resources. Markets are efficient at price discovery. They are not designed to weigh fairness, regional consequence or national cohesion.

That is the proper role of government. Either government asserts a planning framework with the foresight, investment and pricing policy to preserve a level playing field for food production, food processing, homes and business, or it allows the market to allocate our water and power by price alone and accepts the casualties that follow. A nation is more than a balance sheet; it's a compact between its people, its elected government and its enterprise.

So I ask the question: who is the architect of Australia's supply and demand? It's obviously not the government continually caught on the back step, chasing the future instead of making it.