00:02David, it's 10 years now since the deal was made to lease the port to Lambbridge for 99 years.
00:08What was going through your mind and the Cabinet's mind in making this decision at the time?
00:15Oh, look, we were very concerned about the emerging territory debt,
00:18so we were doing everything we could to save money.
00:21There was no hope of getting any help from the Commonwealth.
00:25Meanwhile, we had this port that was literally sinking into the harbour.
00:30Lambbridge paid a bit over $500 million for the 100-year lease,
00:34bearing in mind they had to spend an enormous amount of money just to bring it back into shape and
00:39fix it up.
00:40Knowing now what you know, would you make the same decision again?
00:44Absolutely. We didn't have a choice.
00:45Look, the whole world was a different place then, you know.
00:48The Chinese are quite a bit more of a threat than we realised they were back then.
00:52You've got to remember we had a good trading relationship with the Chinese.
00:57We got all of the strategic information out of defence and about security issues and that sort of stuff.
01:03They signed off on it. It was only at the lead up of the last election that that changed.
01:07An elected coalition government will move immediately to secure the Darwin port.
01:13I got to admit, I think it was a silly thing that Peter Dutton came out with.
01:17And similarly, I think it was a bit silly that Anthony Albanese has taken the bait and followed.
01:22I can just see a monumental stuff up occurring.
01:26You know, no matter what people think of the Chinese, we've done a commercial deal with Landbridge.
01:33Landbridge have done a cracker job.
01:35It's not a spy nest.
01:37And if Landbridge don't want to sell, obviously it's headed for the courts.
01:42That's an appalling waste of money.
01:44It will literally cost billions.
01:46And it's billions that could be put into something much, much better.
01:50I mean, it's a tiny little port.
01:52It serves the needs of Darwin.
01:55The idea of sort of being able to use it for large scale military operations seems absolutely ludicrous.
02:02We've got so much bigger an opportunity not far from Darwin.
02:07I think the Glide Point plan is far more feasible now than it's ever been in the past.
02:14It has two great significant benefits.
02:16It's very deep water.
02:18You could build a wharf there that could easily birth two large aircraft carriers.
02:24The second thing about Glide Point is the land availability.
02:28Like, there's hundreds of square kilometres of land out there, adjacent land.
02:34Everything's there.
02:35The road corridors, rail corridors, pipeline corridors, it's all been planned.
02:40I think as a military installation, as a shared facility,
02:46it would be available for the US, Australia and all of our allies to sort of piggyback on.
02:52the Australian is new when we are all about the Scottish.
02:53It's very hard to tell people.
02:54The colours of the Mass.
02:55The American Festival does have to be taken to the British Columbia.
02:55The British Columbia.
02:55And they have to have to pay attention on the left,
02:56In my opinion, I was able to actually turn this up.
02:56And I think the British Columbia is a huge marketer.
02:57The British Columbia is probably the US.
02:57The British Columbia, and the US.
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