Clear rules for AI aren't radical. They're already normal.

Nobody thinks it is radical to need a permit before you build. Nobody thinks it is unreasonable to need a licence before you draw water from a river. We ask for these things because some jobs are big enough that the whole community has a stake in how they are done. Clear rules are not a way of standing in the way. They are just how we look after what we share.

That is worth remembering right now, because AI infrastructure is being built in Tasmania faster than the rules around it. When people ask for clearer rules on data centres, they are sometimes told this is anti-progress, or fringe, or too hard to actually do.

It is none of those things. Clear rules for AI infrastructure already exist. They are law in other places, they are working, and they were written by ordinary governments doing the ordinary work of governing. Here are three.

Ireland: build your own new power

Ireland now requires any new data centre to meet at least 80 per cent of its yearly electricity from new renewable generation, built in Ireland, on top of what already exists. Not by drawing down the power everyone else depends on, but by adding to it.

This is not a suggestion. It is a binding rule set by Ireland's energy regulator, brought in because data centres had grown to use nearly a quarter of the country's entire electricity supply. If you want to build, you help build the power too.

The European Union: show your working

Across the European Union, every large data centre must report its energy use, its water use, and its efficiency to a public database, every single year. Anyone can look.

This is law, in force since 2024. It treats the resources a data centre uses as everyone's business, not a private commercial secret. You do not get to quietly use a community's power and water and keep the numbers to yourself.

Germany: real limits, real consequences

Germany goes furthest. New data centres must hit hard efficiency targets, must run entirely on renewable electricity from 2027, and must reuse their waste heat. Break the rules and the fines run to a hundred thousand euros.

This one matters because it answers the tired line that you cannot set firm numbers, that it is all too complicated to regulate. A government plainly can. Germany did.

So how does Tasmania measure up?

Here is the fair question. If clear rules are this normal everywhere else, do the data centres proposed for Tasmania line up with any of it?

Consider the largest of them. A proposed AI factory at Bell Bay would draw around 288 megawatts, making it the biggest new power user in the state. It is being assessed by the local council, classified in planning terms as a "Utilities" use. That is the same broad category as a substation. It is not going through the full environmental assessment that the pulp mill once proposed for that very same site had to face.

New South Wales already does this. Why don't we?

Here is the part that should stop us in our tracks. It is not happening on the other side of the world. It is happening on the other side of Bass Strait.

In New South Wales, a data centre drawing more than 15 megawatts is lifted out of the local council's hands and assessed at state level, decided by an independent planning commission or the minister. The reasoning is simple. A project that big has consequences for the whole state, so the whole state should have a proper say in it.

The Bell Bay proposal is roughly nineteen times that 15 megawatt mark. In New South Wales, a project this size would not be a local council matter at all. In Tasmania, it is.

So the question almost asks itself. If our nearest mainland neighbour already decided that big data centres belong at state-level assessment, why are we not even considering the same for ours?

The point here is not that anyone has broken the rules. The company followed the process our law provides. The point is the process itself. The rules were written for the industries of the last century, and something this new and this big is being waved through a gate built for something else.

The fair question is not whether the company followed the rules. It is whether the rules have kept pace with what is being built.

This is the sensible middle

None of this is anti-AI. I teach people to use these tools well every week. Even TasICT, Tasmania's own peak technology body, has said the same thing: that AI has a trust problem, and earning trust means being clear about how the infrastructure itself is built.

Wanting clear rules is not the fringe of this conversation. It is the honest centre of it. Asking that Tasmania's power, water and land be looked after properly is not standing in the way of the future. It is making sure the future is one we would actually choose.

There is a lot worth talking about here, and it is better talked about together.