Monash City Council has knocked back plans for a $137 million and 38-megawatt data centre in Clayton over concerns about its energy demands and impact on nearby residents.

Located at 1816-1832 Dandenong Road, the site currently houses 10 buildings of up to three storeys, including Telstra’s two data centres – which pull about 12.7 megawatts from the grid.

Centuria Industrial applied to demolish two existing buildings and develop a four-storey data centre building – with a capacity of 38 megawatts – at a total cost of $137 million. Running at full capacity, the building would use about as much electricity in a year as 70,000 Victorian homes.

Monash Council staff had recommended councillors approve the permit application with a number of conditions during the council meeting on Tuesday September 29.

However, this motion did not pass, with the majority of councillors voting to knock back the application, citing concerns about noise, heat, power supply, distance from homes and looming state rules that could deem the project non-compliant.

The developer can now appeal the refusal in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

Councillor James told the meeting that the refusal may not hold, because the site is zoned for data centre use.

“There’s no change to the use of land,” he said. “I don’t know how successful this will be moving forward.”

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Monash City Council is not giving up on its push to secure housing opportunities for a vacant site in Chadstone, despite a housing agency pulling out of a deal two years ago.

Councillors voted not to progress with plans to deliver affordable housing at 65A Power Avenue, in Chadstone, during September’s council meeting.

The decision came after the project was first agreed to in 2021, and has many councillors wondering what is going on.

During the meeting, councillors agreed to contact the Eastern Homelessness Network to seek proposals on how to use the site.

The drama surrounding the potential housing site began in March 2021, when Monash Council decided to lease the vacant council-owned land for development as social housing by a registered housing agency.

In October 2023, the council selected HousingFirst to deliver the project, with an initial design including 48 units of one to three bedrooms over three storeys.

About seven months later, HousingFirst pulled out due to funding issues.

In September 2025, the council asked for a report into the potential options to deliver affordable housing on the site. The report ultimately found that delivering 100 percent social housing at the site is “unlikely to be feasible” under the current government funding settings.

Monash Council mayor Stuart James said he was also “bewildered” and “absolutely flabbergasted” that the council was in this position.

“It is beyond disappointing that we have a vacant piece of land that’s been sitting dormant … that we just can’t get anyone to build housing on when we’re in the midst of a housing crisis,” he said.

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Redbridge polling analyst Kos Samaras said he believes preference distributions from One Nation’s growing supporter base is set to cause a shake up across a string of key seats.

Samaras said polls are showing eastern electorates like Box Hill, Ashwood, Glen Waverley, Ringwood and Bayswater, all of which Labor won in 2022, are “picking up increases in Liberal Party support”.

He said voters who had left Labor for One Nation and then cooled on it were moving to the Liberals, not back to Labor.

“A lot of people that we speak to view the Liberal Party as a moderate alternative to One Nation,” Samaras said.

The Coalition needs 16 more seats to govern in its own right, and Samaras said One Nation's rise changed how it could get there: “They don’t require a large primary to get there because it's all about who is winning the three-way contests.”

In Ringwood, where Independent Will Fowles is not recontesting, Samaras expects One Nation to finish third and its preferences to elect the Liberal ahead of Labor. One Nation has named candidates in Box Hill, Glen Waverley and Bayswater but, as of October 2, not in Ringwood or Ashwood.

The seat of Kew will also be under the microscope on Saturday November 28, with Victorian Liberals leader Jess Wilson hoping to hold off independent candidate Sophie Torney, after she secured 21.1 percent of the first-preference votes in the 2022 race.

Hawthorn is another inner-city seat that the Liberals must retain, with former party leader John Pesutto hoping to hold on after losing the seat in 2018 and regaining it in 2022 with a margin of 1.74 percent.

Croydon is also set to be a close race, with Liberal MP David Hodgett retiring and only holding on with a 1.4 percent margin.

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Question 1: Which famous actor, with popular characters like Dame Edna Everage, born in Kew and raised in Camberwell?

Question 2: Which renowned Australian painter spent the last years of his life on a five-acre property in Olinda named “Longacres”?

Question 3: What is the name of Belgrave’s cinema, opened in November 1935?

Question 4: What local suburb houses the Australian Jazz Museum?

Question 5: Channel 10’s Millionaire Hot Seat recently started shooting in iconic TV studios in which suburb?