Australia Voted to Slow AI Down — and Make Data Centres Pay
Australia Voted to Slow AI Down — and Make Data Centres Pay By Daniel Rao Photo: Parliament House, Canberra. Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0. File photo. Australia has just told Canberra, in numbers too blunt to spin, that the AI boom needs slowing down — and that the buildings powering it should pay their own way. A Resolve Political Monitor poll of 2,200 people, reported by The Sydney Morning Herald and WAtoday on Sunday night, finds 81 per cent of Australians now back regulation of AI. That alone would be a headline. The sharper finding is what voters want done about it: a third say development should slow, one in ten would pause it temporarily, and nearly one in five would stop it completely. Only one in five respondents wants AI development to continue at its current pace. Read that again, slowly, because it inverts the story Canberra has been telling itself all year. The official line has been that Australia must race to catch up — more compute, more data ...