Senator CHRIS EVANS (3:05 PM) —I move:

The minister was unable to provide any detailed response to those questions and unable to provide any defence to the accusations levelled at Defence that a fire sale of defence properties has been occurring, driven by their need to find the $500 million required of them to be put into consolidated revenue this financial year. In the case used today of the Australian Defence College at Weston Creek we have another appalling example where the government has sold off a Commonwealth asset at a low price and entered into a lease-back arrangement where we will pay millions of dollars to lease back the property we owned until recently.

As I said, we have spent $28 million of taxpayers' money in the last three or four years on capital improvements to the Weston Creek site, a very valuable five-hectare property in Canberra. Under the government's sale of property principles, we then sold that property for $28 million—only recovering what we have spent on it in the last three or four years—but we are going to spend $60 million renting back that property. This is the Australian Defence College, where we train our senior officers. It is a central part of Defence Force training, but we have sold the property at a low rate and we are going to spend twice as much to rent back that property over the next 20 years. We are still responsible for keeping the premises up to standard—the maintenance et cetera—but we have this ludicrous proposition where the Commonwealth is spending millions of dollars to rent back properties it owned until recently.

In total, of the six or seven properties that Defence have sold in the last year or so, they have reaped $440 million in revenue from those sales, but we are going to spend $960 million renting them back over the next 20 years. This is the economic logic that Minister Hill tried to defend in question time. This is madness. As the Auditor-General's office have pointed out, this is a crazy decision. It is driven by the budgetary position of this government. They have insisted that Defence, in return for money put into Defence for increased defence expenditure, return a dividend to the Commonwealth through forced property sales. This year they have been required to provide $560-odd million in property sales as revenue back to the Commonwealth. They were even going to sell Russell headquarters, the Defence Headquarters of Australia. Finally, after a bit of public pressure, the government dropped that ludicrous proposition. Even they realised that selling the equivalent of the Pentagon made no sense at all.

But everything else is up for sale. As a result, the government is forcing Defence to sell these properties. They have to sell them by the end of the financial year to meet the government's budget bottom line. In the last little while, we have seen over $400 million worth of property being rushed to sale in the last couple of months of the financial year. Up until March this year, Defence had received only $180,000 worth of revenue from their property sales so far. But they still say they are on track to reach the $560 million target by the end of the year. The vast majority of the properties are going to be sold in the last days of the year at bargain basement prices because it is a fire sale to meet the budget bottom line that Defence has to return to Finance.

As a result, Australian taxpayers are going to be paying coming and going. They are not getting value for the sale and they are going to have to pay more, year after year, to rent the buildings back. These are not surplus buildings or properties in most instances. These are properties that Defence are going to use for the next 20 years. This is our Defence College; this is where we train our senior officers. But we have a situation where Defence have been forced to sell at low prices and then rent back. It is economic madness, it is at a huge cost to the Australian taxpayer and it is another sign of the terrible financial management that is occurring inside Defence. There is a qualification on their accounts from last year, but they have been driven by this government to fund the budget bottom line by selling Defence properties for whatever they can get in order to get the revenue in by the end of the financial year. This fire sale is costing Australian taxpayers millions of dollars. It also means we will be paying rent for the next 20 years. (Time expired)

An incident having occurred in the gallery—

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —You are out of order, Sir!