MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (17:17): Isn't it extraordinary? Labor comes in here and says communities have a right to have a say. Do you know what really drives communities absolutely to despair?
It's when the government has already made a decision and then invites you in for a cup of tea and some biscuits and says, 'Now we're consulting with you about it.' That's what's happening with this Defence estate. They decided to flog off 67 sites and, having made the decision, they consulted nobody outside Defence. I'll get to who they didn't consult in Defence as well.
They had two of these so-called auditors come in—neither of whom are auditors, which we found out in the opening salvo of this inquiry—and deliver a Defence audit that is not an audit; it's just a report done by two chosen consultants for Defence. And it looks like they got the list from inside Defence. We're still trying to find out how they got the list of 67.
We've been trying for months. We keep getting dodges and weaves from Defence. Defence are dodging and weaving repeatedly, giving us word salad answers.
We find out today that, apparently, there are some costings for the maintenance—some $2 billion figure that's popped out. We've been trying to get that from Defence officials: 'Show us the costings. Show us the numbers.' They can give it, it appears, to their Labor senators quietly, behind the scenes; when we ask these questions in parliamentary inquiries with the officials in front of us, we get word salad.
Get this: Defence officials, who are having the community watch these nonanswers and word salads, then say, 'Oh, no, we might be being paid two or three times what the senators are, but we don't want our evidence to be shared, because that's awkward and hard.' When their nonanswers and their refusal to answer direct questions and their word salads are exposed and when the community sees it and they hate it, they don't like that.
Well, if you're getting paid double what a senator gets paid—if you're put forward to be a public servant in the public interest, paid for by the public—and the public don't like what you're doing, maybe think about what you're doing and what the government's making you do. Maybe think about your answers. Maybe be frank and direct and honest.
I'll tell you what: all of this messaging coming out of Labor about what is a massive privatisation of public lands is spin. That's what this is. I want to give credit to those communities who have said that this is public land and should be used for public purposes.
Some people can understand that maybe it's time it wasn't for a defence purpose. Maybe it should be a public park. Maybe it should be public housing.
Maybe it should be a community centre. I'll give you one example: the Australian National Veterans Arts Museum—a bloody good bunch of people down there in Melbourne. They want the former repatriation clinic, right next to Victoria Barracks Melbourne on St Kilda Road, to be for a public purpose not flogged off to a private developer for whatever the hell the private developer wants.
They want to put a museum and an art space installation in there for veterans to come and display their art and work through what is sometimes the trauma, sometimes the injury and sometimes their experience of being veterans. They've been trying for that for decades; they didn't even get a look in. No-one spoke to them.
No-one talked to them. And now Labor, without doing anything, wants to flog it off to the next developer. Get this too: we found out just last week that they never asked the Army, the Navy or the Air Force: 'Actually, do you want to keep this property?
Do you have a purpose for it?' They never asked. They just said to the services, 'We're going to flog it off, and can you suck it up.' That is not leadership. I say the community is in revolt because what's happening is bloody— (Time expired)