Australia may face a rush of datacentre construction as AI ...

Ah, marvellous. Australia, a country that has spent a decade pretending its internet is merely 'a bit slow,' is now bracing for a stampede of AI firms rushing to pour concrete before any of those tedious 'regulatory levers' make an appearance. Prof Crystal Legacy, of the University of Melbourne, has spotted the manoeuvre from a mile off: developers want to get in 'before the new regulatory levers come into play,' which in plain English means 'hurry up and build the thing before anyone tells us we can't.' The state governments are reportedly happy to fast-track the applications, presumably on the grounds that a datacentre in the paddock looks more like progress than a regulatory framework in a drawer.

Professor Legacy's warning carries the weight of someone who has watched every planning committee in the Anglosphere rubber-stamp the future and then pretend to be surprised. 'They would probably want to get in before the new regulatory levers come into play,' she said, and she followed it with the kind of understatement that should hang over every state cabinet room: fast-tracking applications before the rules arrive would be done 'at your political peril.' The peril, presumably, is that the voters eventually notice the datacentres are humming away while the promised 'regulation' is still in the consultation-document stage, covered in dust and coffee rings.

And so the usual race to the bottom begins again. The AI firms are not fleeing tyranny; they are fleeing the mild inconvenience of being asked to account for themselves. The states are complicit, licking their lips at the construction jobs and the headline-grabbing 'investment,' and Professor Legacy will be left to say 'I told you so' while the rest of the world watches a landmass the size of Europe gamble its remaining regulatory credibility on the hope that nobody asks why the rules arrived after the shovels. Lovely. We'll be over here watching the concrete dry and the rulebook collect dust.