Gov sets up data centre showdown + ‘It’s a clusterf***’: How we're failing DV victims

**Chris Spyrou** (0:08)
Hey, Chris Spyrou with you, welcome to The Briefing. This year in Australia, 47 women and 19 children have been killed in violent circumstances, the most recent a 29-year-old Melbourne mum allegedly at the hands of her partner.
Governments are spending millions, but campaigners say it's nowhere near enough, with services stretched, refuges full and women waiting years for somewhere safe to live.

**Sherele Moody** (0:31)
This is a rich country. We have the resources and the land and the accommodation, the housing there. We can house every Australian, but we don't. And women should not be dying because they can't get accommodation.

**Chris Spyrou** (0:44)
How Australia is failing DV victims and what we could be doing better is coming up in the second half of this episode. First, though, let's get into the headlines with Justine Landis Hanley. It's Thursday, the 6th of August.

**Justine Landis Hanley** (0:56)
Good morning, Chris. New data shows that Labor's 5% house deposit scheme, designed to help first home buyers into the property market, has been used to purchase nearly 1,500 investment properties. For those catching up, the scheme allows first home buyers to borrow up to 95% of a property's value and have the government guarantee the loan. The scheme was first introduced in 2020, but was expanded by the Albanese government in October last year.

**Chris Spyrou** (1:21)
Now you might be wondering where this data comes from. It was provided by Housing Australia, and that's the government agency that runs this program. And they provided it in response to Senate estimates questions from June this year. And interestingly, the data also showed that the scheme has helped hundreds of Australians earning more than $300,000 a year purchase homes after Labor stopped excluding high income earners from accessing the program.

**Justine Landis Hanley** (1:47)
Now, to be clear, this 1,500 figure is homes that have been purchased under the scheme and then converted into investment properties. And it's just a small portion of the more than 200,000 loan guarantees that the government has issued since 2020
And look Chris, to be clear, it's not like these homes can automatically become investment properties. If the buyer moves out of the property, they are no longer covered by the government's guarantee. They aren't forced to do things like sell or refinance the property, but they do have to renegotiate with their bank to do things like pay for lenders mortgage insurance.

**Chris Spyrou** (2:21)
Yeah, and in saying that, critics aren't happy. The Greens' housing spokesperson Barbara Pocock told The Guardian that the scheme shouldn't benefit the wealthy and property investors. It's interesting because at the time when this 5% deposit was announced, a lot of the critics came out to say that people are going to be taking advantage of this, like high income earners will be taking advantage of this. And we see similar things happening with first home buyers initiatives where people move in for a certain amount of time to clear that, you know, that little time period and then move out and they go, well, now it's an investment, thank you, I got all those incentives.

**Justine Landis Hanley** (2:54)
Yeah, notably interesting to see how the government responds to these new figures.

**Chris Spyrou** (2:58)
Energy Minister Chris Bowen says the federal government will force state and territory governments to make AI data centres run on renewable energy. The announcement is a bit of a warning shot for the Queensland and Northern Territory government who came out swinging last week against Labour's new plans for data centres.

**Justine Landis Hanley** (3:14)
The Albanese government announced last week that it would introduce new laws to regulate AI industry next year, including requirements for data centres to pay for additional water use and be powered by renewable energy. Chris, I didn't know this, but there are currently 285 data centres operating in Australia, most of them in New South Wales and Victoria.

**Chris Spyrou** (3:33)
Yeah. As to what we know about their energy usage, we know that it's a looming problem and that's really only going to get worse as more are built to support the AI boom. Experts and energy market projections have warned that the power used by data centres could surge over the coming years, possibly making up a chunk of the grid's demand and threatening to spike household energy bills. Bowen appeared at the National Press Club yesterday where he described data centres as huge consumers of electricity and that the government would step in to stop states from compromising power bills in a bid to secure data centre investment.

**Chris Bowen** (4:07)
The Commonwealth will not be standing by and letting a race to the bottom of states falling over themselves to attract data centres at the cost of household bills, reliability or emissions.