‘Good policy, no strategy’: Adelaide risks missing multimillion-dollar tech opportunity
SA will miss out on many millions of dollars in investment from the world’s biggest tech companies if the state government does not move faster in readying land, says the Property Council.
Giving the state’s Coordinator General Andrew McKeegan the power to accelerate infrastructure development for prime sites in Adelaide’s north could unlock millions of dollars in investment from the world’s largest tech companies, the SA branch of the Property Council of Australia claims.
“But where’s the execution? Where’s the plan? Where’s the team attracting that asset class here?” council SA executive director Bruce Djite said.
In an interview with InDaily, Djite said the state government’s move in late 2025 to term data centres as essential infrastructure – giving companies a faster pathway to approval – was “good policy”.
“But where’s the strategy for it?” he asked.
“The government has clearly recognised that this is a huge sector that could have attracted huge amounts of capital – the Amazons and Microsofts of the world.”
But he said it was missing a clear plan and team to attract the business with ready and available land shrinking.
Last week, Microsoft announced it would spend $25 billion over the next three years in Australian data centres, while in June last year, Amazon said it would expand its Australian data centre infrastructure via a $20 billion investment.
You might like
Djite was concerned the government was not accelerating the infrastructure of industrial land to be “development-ready”, meaning it was connected to basic infrastructure like water and electricity, and thus would miss out on the enormous spend proposed by the tech giants.
A new report from the Property Council, shared exclusively with InDaily, shows that development-ready industrial land in Greater Adelaide has contracted from 146 hectares to 124 hectares since May 2025.
This equates to just two years of development-ready supply, the Property Council said. The report noted the figures were “underscoring a stark disconnect between strategic foresight and policy delivery”.
The report also warned that without accelerated infrastructure development on industrial land, the state’s position to support major projects like the AUKUS submarine build was in jeopardy.
“We think we’ve realistically got about 12 months’ supply, when you actually boil down to the supply that’s available,” said Sally Smith, the Property Council SA deputy executive director and the former deputy chief executive of the Department for Housing and Urban Development.
“It’s not a land shortage, it’s a shortage of development-ready land and serviced land for employment.
“Everyone’s pretty nervous at the moment with the potential for the fuel cost to increase the cost of doing development in our state. We’re all closely watching what that’s going to look like.”
Ahead of the state election last year, Labor promised to develop a plan to ensure the state has serviced industrial and employment land if re-elected.
Stay informed, daily
Labor said its ‘Employment Lands Roadmap’ will outline where land will be released, when infrastructure will be delivered and how the state will meet growing demand for industrial, logistics and advanced manufacturing precincts.
The party would also update and expand the Land Supply Dashboard to track employment land availability in real time, in a bid to give developers “the transparency they need to plan with confidence”.
A strategic review of employment land across Adelaide would also be undertaken by the Coordinator-General, Labor said.
In response to questions from InDaily, Housing and Urban Development Minister Nick Champion said: “Providing sufficient land supply for employment use is a significant focus of the Greater Adelaide Regional Plan and we have already released thousands of hectares of employment land across Adelaide”.
“We took to the election a plan to deliver an Employment Lands Roadmap, which will ensure South Australia has the serviced industrial and employment land it needs to power the state’s economic future,” he said.
“This will be delivered before the end of this year, giving businesses and investors the certainty they need to invest in South Australia.
“On top of this, The Coordinator-General will lead a strategic review of employment land across Greater Adelaide, working with industry, councils and infrastructure providers to deliver a clear pipeline of development-ready land for the businesses and jobs South Australia needs.”
But Smith said she hoped the plan would not roll out “with the normal, traditional means of dealing with this”.
“Traditionally, this would be done as a rezoning process, which could take a couple of years to do, then you do development application by development application,” said Smith, one of the architects of the Greater Adelaide Regional Plan and the creation of the electronic planning system.
“Have it done under the Coordinator General where he is able to declare state development areas and he has strong powers that can actually deliver it as a precinct, rather than a site-by-site DA process.
“We don’t think a traditional way of getting this to market is going to work with the amount of time that we’ve got to play with.”
Want to see more stories from InDaily SA in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily SA as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily SA". That's it.
