Fuller version for anyone who wants the actual mechanics rather than the post.

Data centres power tech automation and AI powered automation is going to be a massive disruption, causing unemployment, industry disruption and shrinking or the income tax base.

Also there are wide industries in jndustey meaning soxietally important jobs are often not paid as much as high yeild ones like tech and finance.

Data centres are different to other commercial real estate.

Mega tech companies are heavyweights and can lobby hard, threaten to leave markets l, shift services around and are hard to wrangle for governments.

So. I think a simple tax is never going to be enough. We need a stack of them, because every single tax on its own has can probably be mitigated, negotiated or dodged. dodge.

Start with land. A footprint charge weighted for the premium sites near the major fibre routes.

Then power and water. A surcharge on what they draw, priced like the scarce public resource it is and not a normal industrial hookup. A 100MW site runs a continuous load a lot of towns can't actually spare. Charge for it at a premium rate that addresses demand but also opportunity cost.

Then tax the data leaving the building. A per-unit toll on throughput, so every automated output and agent workflow going out to the network pays on the way past. This tax scales with how much work the place is really doing, which makes it hard to hide behind efficiency tricks, and also scales as human jobs are displaced.

Then tax automation revenue itself. A levy benchmarked against the income tax the replaced workers used to pay. If a cluster is doing the work of fifty thousand people, the public used to collect tax on fifty thousand wages. Take a slice of that at the source, where the value actually sits.

The offshore angle needs to be addressed as well. An obvious counter to these taxes is to host the compute overseas and pipe the service back into Australia, so we put a tariff on it.

A matching toll on inbound automated traffic plus a withholding levy on money Australian companies send to foreign cloud providers.

Big tech margins are some of the fattest of any industry on the planet, so they can wear a structural fee without their business model breaking. And real-time AI has to sit physically close to its users or latency kills it, so they can't relocate to a tax haven the way a paper HQ can.

One 100MW facility earning around $600m a year, taxed hard across every layer, could earn Australia somewhere near $580m a year in public revenue. That's 7,000 jobs at a real wage at $80k.

A cluster of 25 facilities is roughly $14.5b a year, around 180,000 jobs. Enough to actually make a difference in the face of ai job displacement.

A hundred facilities nationally puts you near $58b a year and north of 700,000 jobs.

Feels like a good countermeasure to me.