Defence bill could let minister authorise workers in defence zones to carry equipment

The Defence Legislation Amendment (Accelerating Capability and Protecting Bases) Bill 2026 would allow Mr Marles to designate data centres as defence zones and name employees of corporate contractors operating out of those zones as defence officials with the same authority as Australian military personnel, including the right to disregard the ACT's criminal code.

Digital Rights Watch head of policy Tom Sulston said the bill's "very broad definitions" gave the minister discretionary power to hand out "permission slips for defence officials to break laws". "If the minister says you're a defence official, well, congratulations, you're a defence official. And if they say this is now a military installation, congratulations, it's a military installation," he said.

Mr Sulston noted that Mr Marles could also authorise private-sector workers at defence zones to carry unspecified “equipment”. “Equipment could mean anything from a gun through to an AI model,” he said, adding that “a defence official might have a gun”. Mr Sulston said AI hyperscalers such as Anthropic and OpenAI had begun to blur the lines between defence and military uses of their large language models, putting their employees in line to be named defence officials under the bill.

The bill has been framed by Assistant Minister for Defence Peter Khalil as vital for protecting Australian defence bases from modern threats, but both he and Mr Marles have avoided questions about the executive powers it would create. The Canberra Times understands the bill is expected to pass the Senate in the coming sitting week with Coalition support, but with vocal opposition from the Greens and some independents including Senator David Pocock.

Digital Rights Watch warned that the bill had “insufficient safeguards” against defence zones being abused to stop protests against new data centres, and risked creating “commercially-operated US-owned Pine Gaps in suburbs across Australia”. Civilian interference in defence zones would carry a penalty of up to seven years jail and more than $150,000 in fines.

“It would be a legitimate military target to strike data centres that power defence,” he said. Both Russia and Ukraine had multi-day outages of power supply, phone services, emergency alert systems, transport networks, banking, social media and AI access due to attacks on each other's data centres over the past year. “If those same data centres happen to do things like power the fridges in supermarkets and they all get switched off and the food goes rotten and civilians start having food shortages, that's a problem that we've walked into.”

Canberra is home to as many as 29 data centres, according to private tracking websites, though the ACT government puts the figure at 15. Top federal departments including Defence and Home Affairs have signed deals worth more than $180 million with ACT-born operator Canberra Data Centres stretching through 2028.

Greens leader and defence spokesperson David Shoebridge said the bill posed "a serious risk to the right to protest and civil liberties", and accused the Albanese government of sending it to the parliamentary joint committee into defence, which has only Labor and Coalition members, to avoid scrutiny.