Sovereignty 1 rack in 2
The NSW Compute Reservation
Every new large-scale data centre approved in New South Wales must reserve at least 50% of its compute capacity — one rack in every two — for Australian customers: our researchers, hospitals, universities, startups and public services, at independently regulated, fair rates. Within that reservation, 10% of the facility's total capacity is provided free of charge to NSW Government services and public education — schools, TAFE and universities — so the state that hosts the machines never has to rent back their benefit. It is carried by a condition of the Compact licence created by the NSW AI Compact Bill, and by a condition of development consent under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.
Why it matters — Without a reservation, New South Wales supplies the land, water and power while every processing cycle serves offshore customers. Half the capacity working for Australians is the difference between hosting the intelligence age and merely paying its bills.
Community Local jobs + an annual dividend
The Community Benefit Licence
No large data centre operates in New South Wales without a Community Benefit Licence under the NSW AI Compact Bill: enforceable local-hire targets for construction and operations, at least one in ten build roles filled by apprentices and trainees from the host region — and an annual Community Dividend with real machinery behind it. The dividend is set per megawatt by the independent regulator, indexed, published in full and paid for the entire life of the facility into a Community Benefit Fund governed by a local board on which residents and the council hold the majority. Half of it goes straight back out as an annual payment to every household in the host area — no forms, no means test, paid by the Fund itself so it never depends on somebody else's billing system. The rest the board grants to the things towns actually ask for: sports clubs, halls, childcare, libraries, pool upgrades, shade trees. The licence also locks in a guaranteed ongoing workforce — permanent local operations jobs for the life of the facility, not just the construction phase — and mandatory community engagement: funded outreach programs into local schools and TAFE campuses, open days, and STEM partnerships, written into the licence and reported on. Every payment, grant and program is published, down to the dollar.
Why it matters — The neighbours who live with the build, the noise and the grid load should be the first to feel the benefit — in their own accounts and in their own streets, every single year, for as long as the servers hum.
Energy The quarter above peak
More power in than it takes out
Every data centre must bring enough new-build renewable generation and storage to cover 125% of its maximum possible draw — not its average, its absolute peak, plus a quarter again — before it switches on, so it never leans on the grid households rely on. That generation feeds the grid, as all generation does. What the Compact licence fixes is where the value of the extra quarter goes: the operator funds a long-term supply agreement for the host area, and the regulator sets a volume for every household, school and community facility inside it that arrives at no cost to them. Paid for by the operator, for the life of the facility, and audited at the meter like every other number in the Compact.
Why it matters — A data centre should make its neighbourhood's power cheaper and more reliable, never scarcer. Building a quarter more than the servers can ever draw is the easy half. Making sure that quarter lands in the streets around it rather than on the operator's balance sheet is the half that has to be written into a licence.
Environment Lie about water, lose your licence
The Water Truth rule — world's-best cooling, honestly reported
Approval requires best-available cooling — closed-loop, immersion or better — with independently metered water and electricity use published every quarter, no potable water for cooling where recycled water is available, and a serious heat-reuse assessment so waste heat warms pools, greenhouses and homes instead of the atmosphere. Not one drop of toxic or contaminated water goes back into our rivers, aquifers or sewers: anything discharged is treated to independently tested standards, with zero tolerance. Any facility that needs water beyond its approved budget must first fund new water infrastructure — recycling plants, stormwater harvesting, storage — that adds more capacity than it takes, so households and farmers are never left short; in any shortage, data centres cut back first and drink last. Every figure is audited against the meters. The conditions ride on the Compact licence and on the site's environment protection licence under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997. Misreporting water or power use is an offence that reaches directors personally, and an operator caught lying loses its licence to operate in New South Wales — immediately.
Why it matters — Cooling tech is improving fast and we'll back the operators who prove it — but NSW's water and electricity are a must-protect, not a bargaining chip. Trust is earned at the meter, not in the press release.
Quiet You complain. They prove it.
The Quiet Line — a night limit that is actually policed
Large data centres become a scheduled activity under Schedule 1 of the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997, so every one of them holds an environment protection licence and the EPA is the regulator — not a planning department checking a consent condition once a year, from Parramatta, against a report the operator wrote itself. That licence sets a night noise limit at the most affected home. It can be no higher than 35 dB(A) — the lowest night project noise trigger level the EPA's own Noise Policy for Industry can produce at a residence, being the minimum night project intrusiveness level set out in that policy's own table. New South Wales already adds 2 to 5 dB to the assessment when a source is heavy in the low frequencies; we would go further and set a standalone C-weighted limit in the licence, so the hum is a limit in its own right rather than an adjustment to somebody's model. Where facilities cluster, one noise budget is shared across the precinct rather than granted afresh to each new arrival. Monitors run continuously at the boundary and at agreed homes, for the life of the facility, to the regulator's standard and at the operator's cost, and each night's readings are published the next morning. Generator testing stays in daylight hours, and the licence must state in advance how loud the site is when the diesels run. Any resident can lodge a date and a time and get a written answer from that record within ten working days, free. If the record is missing, the complaint stands. The Water Truth penalty ladder sits behind all of it.
Why it matters — New South Wales already publishes the numbers. What it does not do is make them stick. The EPA's amenity levels are not regulatory limits, and the trigger level is a benchmark, not a requirement: on a 250-megawatt proposal at Horsley Park the EPA's advice recommended night limits of 37 and 38 dB(A) at three of the four nearest homes. The EPA is at that site because of the diesel — fuel volume and generator hours bring the regulator, and noise never does. The consent that followed does require a continuous monitor, at one point on the boundary, until twelve months after the building is fully running. After that the operator reports on itself, once a year. Nothing obliges anyone to publish last night's reading, and a resident woken at 2am has nothing to point at.
Capability Built here, benefiting here
Sovereign skills and public compute
The reserved compute — including the free 10% share for government, schools, TAFE and universities — feeds a public-interest allocation for NSW research, public services and startups. Under the NSW Procurement Policy Framework, government procurement weights Australian-owned AI firms and keeps sensitive NSW public data onshore, and TAFE NSW-led programs train the electricians, technicians and engineers the build-out actually employs.
Why it matters — Owning capability beats renting it. A state that can build, train and run its own systems negotiates from strength — and keeps the high-wage jobs at home.
Integrity Every system, on the record
The public AI register
Every AI system used by the NSW Government goes on a public register with its purpose, its accountable owner and its audit history — turning the NSW AI Assessment Framework paperwork agencies already complete under Circular DCS-2024-04 into something the public can actually check. The NSW AI Compact Bill puts the register, the audits and the reporting on a statutory footing, rather than leaving them to a circular a future government can quietly rewrite. Independent audits, mandatory incident reporting, and full whistleblower protection for the workers who speak up when systems fail people.
Why it matters — We were founded to keep the powerful honest. That job doesn't stop when the powerful start using algorithms.
People A human, accountable, always
The Humans First Guarantee
No NSW Government decision that affects a person's rights, payments or liberty may be made by AI alone — not at Service NSW, not in our schools, not on our roads. Every automated system that touches the public gets a named accountable human, a plain-English explanation, and a fast, free right to human review. The duty is written into the NSW AI Compact Bill so it binds agencies directly, and social scoring is banned outright by a rule in the NSW Procurement Policy Framework, so it cannot arrive quietly as a feature of something else.
Why it matters — Automation should take the drudgery out of government — never the responsibility. When the computer says no, anyone in New South Wales can always ask a person why.
Control Free. Twenty working days.
The Personal Data Statement
You can already ask a New South Wales agency what it holds about you. What you cannot ask is where it came from, who it was given to, which company stores it, which country it sits in, or whether it has helped train a model. The Personal Data Statement answers all of that — once a year, free, in plain English, within twenty working days. It is created as a new right in the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998, alongside the access right already there. If something in it is wrong you can have it corrected, and any automated assessment that relied on the wrong version is run again on the right one. Where there is no lawful reason to hold the information it is deleted; where the State Records Act 1998 requires it to be kept, the statement says so and says why. The exemptions that already protect a police investigation, a child-protection notification, or another person's safety carry across unchanged: a statement request must never become a way to find someone. Refusals are written, reasoned and reviewable.
Why it matters — Consent means very little if you cannot see what was collected. Most dealings with the state are now mediated by systems nobody shows you, run by companies nobody chose, on records nobody has read. The right to see your file is old. What is new is that the file is no longer one file, and no longer in the building. This is the cheapest accountability measure in the Compact, and the one most likely to catch an error before a machine acts on it.
Privacy A notice you have to obey
A privacy law with a regulator behind it
New South Wales has privacy principles for its own agencies and very little to enforce them with. The Privacy Commissioner can investigate, recommend and report. What nobody in this state can do is order an agency to fix something, or fine it when it doesn't. We would amend the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 to give the Commissioner the two powers she lacks: a compliance notice an agency must obey, and a penalty for systemic failure. Victoria's regulator has held the compliance notice for years, and ignoring one there is an offence carrying up to 600 penalty units for an individual and 3,000 for a body corporate. Queensland's Information Commissioner can issue one too, backed by a maximum penalty of 100 penalty units. On this, New South Wales is behind. We would rather say that than dress catching up as leadership. The mandatory data-breach scheme extends to the contractors, cloud providers and AI vendors that actually hold the information, not only the agency whose name is on the letterhead. Personal information held by a NSW agency may not be used to train a commercial model without an express, published and lawful basis. And the blanket exemption for law-enforcement and investigative agencies goes: today the NSW Crime Commission and the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission each state on their own websites that the privacy principles reach them only in connection with their administrative and educative functions. That is an exemption written for a body, not for a job. In its place, purpose-based exemptions — so the shield covers the investigation, not the agency.
Why it matters — When a New South Wales agency loses your information, no regulator in this state can fine it. The Commissioner can investigate and recommend; what is left to you is an internal review by the agency that lost the data, and then a tribunal. Meanwhile agencies hold less and less themselves — the record sits with a contractor, in a vendor's cloud, and increasingly inside somebody's model. A duty that stops at the agency's front door stops a long way short of your file.
Truth Label it, or don't publish it
If it's synthetic, say so
Since April 2026 two things have been offences in New South Wales. Publishing AI-generated campaign material that shows a real person doing something they never did. And running campaign material depicting an AI-created person, event or place that a reasonable viewer would take as real, without saying on the material that it is AI-generated. Both bite only during the regulated period: from the issue of the writ to 6 pm on polling day. We would amend the Electoral Act 2017 to run them from 1 October in the year before a state election. That date is already inside the same section — from 1 October the Minister may no longer carve material out of the offence by regulation — and it is the day the capped expenditure period began for the 2027 election. Parliament has already decided when a campaign starts; the offence should start with it. The Act carries no satire, parody or journalism defence: cartoons and animated drawings are lifted out of the definition, and nothing else is. The only defences are the subject's written consent, and having taken no part in the content and having had no reason to know what it was. The Opposition moved a defence of substantial truth or fair comment during the debate and the Government did not support it. We would add one, because extending the offence period without extending the defences would be indefensible. We would also let the Electoral Commissioner apply to the Supreme Court for an urgent order to correct or remove the material. A court decides, not an official. A power to pull down political material on one person's say-so is a power we would oppose in anybody else's hands, and we are not going to ask for it in ours. And government goes first: no NSW Government advertisement may use an AI-generated depiction of a person, place or event without disclosing it on the material — a rewrite of the advertising guidelines, needing no legislation at all.
Why it matters — A fabricated video of a candidate published a month before the writ falls outside these offences entirely, and a prosecution that finishes after the count fixes nothing. What is left is a defamation action, which costs more than most candidates and far more than most voters have. We are not promising to detect deepfakes. CSIRO and Sungkyunkwan University benchmarked sixteen leading detectors in 2025 and found that none of them could reliably identify real-world deepfakes. So the duty goes where it can actually be enforced: on the person who publishes, not on a machine that guesses.
Identity Your likeness, your consent
Your face and your voice are yours
If someone clones your face or your voice, New South Wales law helps only where the result is sexual, fraudulent or defamatory. A defamation action costs more than most people have. We would create a fast, low-cost application in the Local Court of New South Wales. Show that the material is a realistic synthetic depiction of you, made or spread without your consent, and you get an order: delete it, correct the record, pay modest damages. No need to prove reputation, commercial loss or serious harm. Satire, parody, news reporting and art are defences written into the section — the same protection we would add to the electoral offence, and for the same reason. A likeness right that a minister could use to delete an unflattering cartoon is not a likeness right, it is a censorship tool. We would also close a gap Parliament's own researchers have named: creating or distributing a sexually explicit deepfake is an offence under the Crimes Act 1900, but publishing a sexualised image of a real person that stops short of explicit is not.
Why it matters — Australia has no personality right. A voice is not copyright subject matter, passing off needs a commercial reputation, and the Commonwealth's new privacy tort comes with a whole part of exemptions — journalists, state authorities, law enforcement, intelligence agencies. So an ordinary person whose likeness is cloned has, in practice, nothing. A Local Court order binds the person who made it. It will not bind an offshore platform. Only Canberra can do that, through an eSafety takedown power that reaches intimate images, cyberbullying of children, serious cyber-abuse of adults and illegal content — and stops there. A cloned face used to sell a product, or to put words in your mouth, is nobody's jurisdiction. We will press that case at National Cabinet, and we won't pretend a state law can do it for them.
Security No surveillance. No atrocities. Ever.
Hard red lines on what runs here
A condition of the Compact licence prohibits data centres in New South Wales from knowingly hosting or powering workloads that drive illegal mass surveillance, or that a Commonwealth agency has notified as a risk to Australia's national security or as enabling atrocities or human-rights abuses abroad. The licence does what a state can actually write: operators must vet high-risk customers, attest to what runs on their racks, name an accountable director, and cut a prohibited workload the moment they are put on notice — with the same penalty ladder as the Water Truth rule: directors personally liable, licence gone. Judging national security and foreign atrocity risk is Commonwealth work, and we say so rather than pretend otherwise; a state licence that purported to make those calls for itself would be picking a constitutional fight it does not need. So the licence acts on a Commonwealth notification, and we would use NSW's seat at National Cabinet to ask for a standing referral channel — so the notice arrives before the workload does.
Why it matters — Our land, our water and our power will never underwrite someone else's police state or war crimes. Canberra decides what counts as a threat. New South Wales decides whether it gets housed here — and that is a real decision, not a symbolic one.
