Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question and acknowledge her life of service in this place and also as a police officer. Over the last six years, as a result of vandalism and theft, Defence has spent $1 million on the Penrith Training Depot, a site which has been vacant since 2016. And, at the Maribyrnong Defence site, which has been vacant for decades, in 2022 there was a grassfire which required the expenditure of $10 million in remediation. Defence simply has to stop spending money on properties that it does not need, and this is what is at the heart of the most significant reform to our Defence estate in our nation's history.

But this reform is difficult because, in relation to every Defence site, you'll find people with an attachment to it, and the difficulty was very much observed by Jan Mason and Jim Miller in their Defence estate audit, when they said:

Defence is holding more property than it needs and is carrying the burden of past indecision…

They said:

Attempts to consolidate and rationalise property holdings in the past have been stymied by a lack of political and organisational will to overcome challenges.

Those words are particularly appropriate to those opposite, because in the 9½ years, when whatever we call that was the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, they did absolutely nothing. And what is also clear in their response to yesterday's announcement is that they have not changed.

The shadow minister has said that these properties play 'a vital role in Australia's defence capability'. But which ones? Exactly which ones? The former shadow minister, the member for Canning, has said that our reforms are both shortsighted and foolish. What is absolutely clear is that, if those opposite were the government today, they'd still be squibbing it.

Our government has the political will. The Defence estate review has also made clear that, if we do not act, governments will spend $2 billion over the next 25 years on these properties without making any contribution to our capability, and that is completely unacceptable. We win on the battlefield by virtue of capability, and that means we must stop wasting money on properties that we don't need. More to the point, we need a Defence estate which is finely tuned to the requirements of the Australian Defence Force so that it can be the foundation that our force needs to do its job to defend Australia.

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