Details remain scarce on Port Darwin leaseback

The Port Darwin leaseback remains shrouded in mystery a week after government announced the facility would be removed from Chinese hands. Read the latest.

The Darwin Port lease buyback remains shrouded in mystery a week after the government and opposition announced the facility would be returned to Australian hands.

Darwin Port was leased to Chinese company Landbridge for 99 years in 2015 by the Northern Territory’s CLP Government when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was then federal infrastructure minister.

Two years earlier a delegation led by NT Infrastructure Minister Peter Styles travelled to Canberra to meet Mr Albanese to seek commonwealth funding to upgrade the port, but the appeal was rejected.

It was after this meeting the NT Government stepped-up its efforts to lease the port to the private sector to end the facility’s drag on the Northern Territory’s budget.

Asked to clarify during his Darwin visit on Friday, Mr Albanese said he had no recollection of Mr Styles nor their meeting, but he rejected outright the proposition commonwealth fiscal neglect forced the NT Government to offload the port to Chinese interests.

Anthony Albanese in Darwin.

Instead he blamed the former Tony Abbott-led Coalition Government’s asset recycling program which rewarded jurisdictional governments for selling state-owned assets.

“The key date wasn’t any meetings in 2013, the key date for the privatisation of that asset was the Joe Hockey budget in 2014 that put in place an asset recycling program that provided an incentive to state and territory governments to flog off their assets,” Mr Albanese said.

“The CLP made a decision to flog off the port. We (federal Labor) opposed the asset recycling program. That was one of the key elements that led to the flogging off of the Port of Darwin.”

Mr Hockey’s 2014 budget was one of the reasons Prime Minister Abbott eventually lost his leadership to Malcolm Turnbull the following year.

Mr Albanese would not be drawn on a timeline for the sale, a potential cost to secure the lease buyback or the extent of any federal government contribution.

“When you negotiate commercially, what you don’t do is respond publicly in that way because that is not in taxpayers’ interests,” he said.

“If you say you want to buy a house by April 13, guess what? You lose your power in the negotiations.

“We certainly are looking for a private buyer and there is interest. We won’t go through the commercial negotiations and the interested parties, but there are interested parties for the Port of Darwin.

“If we can secure an arrangement and a transfer of ownership back to Australian control in an orderly way without commonwealth intervention and compulsory acquisition we will do so. “But we are prepared also to use compulsory acquisition.”

Originally published as Details remain scarce on Port Darwin leaseback