The McGowan government rejected several ideas to use the facility to help ease the housing crisis for the homeless, students and migrants, given its 35-kilometre distance from Perth’s CBD.
“I see the letters to the editor and so forth, ‘put all the homeless there’, as though we should get every homeless person in Western Australia and put them on a bus, transport them out into the middle of the bush an hour out of Perth and put them into a facility that is not designed for that purpose,” former premier Mark McGowan said in question time last month.
“It would be a disaster.”
Defence would not confirm what discussions it had with finance or the WA government.
Handing over the facility to Defence, which already owned the 32-hectare patch of land it was built on, was in step with a similar decision by the Department of Finance over the future of the Brisbane facility in Pinkenba.
Curtin University defence expert Associate Professor Alexey Muraviev said the facility could be of some use to the RAAF’s Pearce Air Base as a transit point – particularly as more foreign forces enter the state as the AUKUS relationship grows.
“It may be a way to bring in other ADF elements from elsewhere in Australia or foreign militaries because Perth will have a more intensive rotation of foreign military forces through this area because of the AUKUS agreement,” he said.
Muraviev said Defence may also consider locating the army reserves in Bullsbrook if it does offload Leeuwin Barracks.
He said regardless of which arm of the defence force used the facility it would require major security and communications upgrades as well as infrastructure upgrades if it were to store any military equipment.
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