Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has challenged Queensland to sign up to a national plan on data centres before Wednesday’s national cabinet meeting as he reminds premiers about their promise to fund a trimmed-down NDIS.
After urging pessimistic business chiefs to talk up Australia’s economy at Tuesday’s Business Council of Australia dinner, Albanese will head a meeting of state leaders seeking buy-in on regulation of artificial intelligence, a faltering gun buyback and fresh moves to reduce domestic violence.
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli has been a holdout on a federal plan to force data centre operators to create renewable energy to make sure electricity prices do not spike. The LNP and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor both want the data centre boom to be powered by any type of energy, including fossil fuels, threatening to jolt a bipartisan pact on the AI boom.
Before Wednesday’s meeting of state and territory leaders, Albanese said: “I’m confident we can get consensus.”
“We want social licence… Which is why you need to have that additional investment to make sure [data centres are not] displacing energy and therefore increasing costs,” he said.
Albanese is likely to be confronted by angry east coast premiers after he committed to a GST top-up deal with Western Australia that the Productivity Commission said was a poor deal for the nation.
Since he renewed his pledge to protect the WA deal on Monday, Albanese has been telling premiers that the Commonwealth, not states, funds the multibillion-dollar GST top-ups linked to the WA deal.
He said it was incumbent on state leaders to hold up their end of the bargain on school, hospital and NDIS funding deals as federal debt grows past $1 trillion and NSW and Queensland’s credit ratings threaten to sink to Victorian levels of AA.
Premiers made a deal with Albanese in 2023 to accept an extra $25 billion in hospital funding and about $10 billion in extra GST in exchange for states stepping up to fund alternative services for children with autism and other developmental problems. The 2028 start date for the Thriving Kids program is under threat, however, as states baulk at some of the changes following Labor’s passage of its NDIS reform bill.
Asked if he would raise the NDIS with state counterparts on Wednesday, Albanese said: “We remind them all the time.”
Federal cabinet discussed the proposed national standards on AI in Perth on Tuesday. Albanese will present the plan to premiers on Wednesday, and there is widespread agreement outside of Queensland.
Business leaders have also expressed support for Labor’s plan to mandate offsets for data centre energy and water usage to avoid a US-style backlash against the computer factories.
This masthead reported on Tuesday that business groups were plotting a union-style campaign on living standards and economic growth before the next election, following a corporate-led campaign against Labor’s budget measures.
Business Council of Australia chairman Geoff Culbert will tell the organisation’s annual dinner in Sydney that firms want to change the national debate on productivity and require Labor’s buy-in.
“Prime minister – I appreciate that your job is extremely difficult. You are trying to navigate the need for material structural reform in an environment where the time needed to effectively prosecute those ideas doesn’t align with political cycles. That is a problem faced by all modern democracies,” Culbert will say, according to speech notes.
“We are asking you to partner with us to take Australia forward.”
The prime minister said the business political establishment should be more upbeat about the country and its financial performance as cost of living pressures translate to support for One Nation. Albanese argued Australia’s unemployment rate was relatively healthy and Australia was growing at a better rate than most G7 economies, countering a widespread view among economists that Australia’s economy is in trouble.
“We’ve got to be optimistic,” Albanese said on Wednesday. “We’ve got to shape the future or the future will shape us. So how do we put all that together?”
“What are the opportunities that we have? The comparative advantages that we have? AI is a good example: we have enormous space, which is the envy of the world. An island to ourselves. We have clean energy. We have everything under the earth with critical minerals and rare earths.”
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