The petition from FOE (https://www.foe.org.au/ai_moratorium) goes to: Albanese, Tim Ayres, Minister for Industry and Innovation and Murray Watt, Minister for Environment
Moratorium on all data centre developments now
I write to you to urge you to intervene to control the development of new data centres across Australia.
The current rollout of data centres in Australia is largely unregulated, as state and territory governments seek to maximise the attraction to large developers. By rushing through massive new projects which fail to cover their own emissions through the development of new renewables, governments are facilitating a situation which is likely to derail Australia’s energy transition.
There are many obvious threats and risks associated with the development of data centres, including
- A massive drain of scarce water supplies
- Massive climate pollution impacts -Growing pressure on existing energy distribution networks, which already often struggle under peak load situations such as heat waves
- The likelihood that development without a similar expansion of renewables will extend the life of carbon polluting coal and fossil gas
- The creation of localised heat impacts on the host communities
- Potential for increases in energy prices which will flow on to local household consumers
- Industrialisation of residential areas
We call on you to implement an urgent moratorium on further data centre approvals until laws are in place that will regulate this industry to protect the country’s energy and water resources, the climate and communities.
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“Datacenters” can range from the size of a shipping container to many acres.
By demanding that there be a halt to “all datacenter construction” means that this petition will simply be dismissed out of hand because Australia needs compute capacity of all shapes and sizes for all sorts of business and consumer reasons, not just the giant AI datacenters that this petition is presumably aiming at.
Nevertheless, all data centres should be regulated, no matter their size.
Is there a reason people don’t use the parliamentary petition website for petitions?
Perhaps they don’t know about them. In any case, if the same message is coming from different sources it gets amplified plus it helps environment activist organisations to get cred and do stronger advocacy.
AI can generate content much faster than humans. If you randomly sample websites, up to a third show signs of AI content being present.
https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/
I’ve seen it claimed that over 50% of new content posted online is AI produced.
I’d say many people would be aware of that, but, what does AI-generated content have to do with this petition?
Link?
My apologies.
