Senator Jess Collins

I just want to thank you all for the invitation here tonight and acknowledge my colleague Senator Shoebridge, who has been putting up such a big fight against this wholesale fire sale. But the most important person I want to recognise here tonight is this young man [Billy a Year 5 School student who delivered a short speech about the loss of public land if HMAS Penguin is sold]. What a powerful speech.

That was just remarkable. Really, really moving and reminding us why we're doing this. You have all reminded us why we're doing this. You know, it can be quite a lonely time. Senator Shoebridge and I are just up against the bureaucracy fighting this big fight. It is a very, very big fight. They've come out and told us if anybody was at the Mosman meeting, a couple of weeks ago, the government came out and told us this decision has already been made.

They told us that they were out having consultations and yet the decision had already been made. And yet here you all are telling us that that's not okay and we've got to keep up this fight. Now we've been holding some hearings. We had a hearing in Canberra a couple of weeks ago. We had a hearing in Sydney as well and then just in Melbourne just a few days ago.

And it has been a very, very eye opening time. You know, it's not just this beautiful HMAS Penguin that's getting sold off. There are 67 sites in question. So many of these places mean so much to so many people, not just veterans, but the broader community as well. The cadets, the reserves. If you go to somewhere like Lancer Barracks and Parramatta, there is a memorial wall which they're not actually allowed to call a memorial wall, Wall of Remembrance that has plaques on there remembering the veterans who asked to have their ashes scattered on the.

And there's a little line on there that says, this veteran returns to his parade ground. And there was a comment before about, you can't unpour concrete. It's very profound. You can't unpour the concrete that goes over those prayer grounds. And we know it's happened at HMAS Penguin before. And there's a lot of people out there that are grieving, there's a lot of people out there that are angry, that are anxious.

I think most of you here tonight would be feeling that too. And I want you to know that we are doing everything we can through the Senate inquiry to stop this nonsense. Now, they have said that they are looking for surplus land and they've found 67 bits of it. The thing that I don't understand the most about HMAS Penguin is that they have already decided to partially divest.

So they've said that some of it is critical and some of it is surplus, and yet they haven't decided yet which bit is surplus. Figure that one out. They haven't decided which bit is not fit for purpose. I'll tell you what these grandmother trees have. They have purpose not just in that defence base, but in this community, in our environment.

We know that. So they're not really looking for surplus land. They're looking for things to sell off. And as we heard, they're looking for things to put luxury apartments on so they can make a quid, but so the Defence Minister can get money for his budget because the Prime Minister won't give it to him, and so that they can look like they're solving the housing crisis.

And you may have already heard tonight, I'm sorry I was a little bit late, but you know these strategic implications of selling off these defence bases that, you know, all the rifle ranges being sold, our places of mobilisation, Victoria Barracks, the birthplace of the army in Sydney. Lancer Barracks, the oldest continuously used operational base, Australia.

We were just down at Point Cook on Monday. The longest used military airfield in the world. And what they didn't show us that day on the very heavily guarded tour that we had was the crash site where service members had died. And where we found out later, is likely the pace where they're going to pour concrete and build some houses.

It's phenomenal and disgraceful, and we are doing everything that we can. We've also learned that they want to change the names of the bases. So you might well find out that HMAS Penguin will no longer be HMAS Penguin once they sell it off. And put some luxury apartments on there. It's probably going to be defence based, Mosman, defence based middlehead.

Absolutely. Removing the history and the significance from these places, the military history, and for what? And I tell you, I've been speaking to a lot of the veterans and especially around Anzac Day, and they all see this as a punch in the guts to them. I know that a lot of you here feel like that too.

So thank you for turning up here. My colleague, Senator James Patterson, has just started a petition. I know that you're all signing the petition for here too. He's got a petition that he's just launched as well. So if you're interested, please go to his website, it's up there as well. We've got to put up the file on this and we've got to do everything that we can.

Thank you very much for having me. And sorry, one final little bit. I did pick up on one more thing that you said that often these are decisions that are made quietly. They are, and they're trying to do that, but we will not let them and we will not stay quiet. We will not do that.