Up to 200 pallets of PCs, notebooks, monitors, printers, servers, televisions, and networking equipment is being offered for sale on an "as is, where is" basis.
All the equipment has been classed as "sanitized", meaning all data storage devices, including hard disk drives, have been removed from devices like PCs and notebooks. The equipment will not be broken into individual or sub lots and all bids will be for the total of all pallets.
While the department has marked this batch for sale, it is open to donating old IT equipment to charity at no charge. However, charity groups are urged to apply for such donations through the Defence Minister's office as there are already separate programs in place.
The batch is not part of Defence's regular IT refresh cycle, which is offered to charity first, according to a Defence spokesperson. Computerworld understands the department has donated some old IT equipment to schools.
Defence does not know how much the equipment will sell for, but a spokesperson said there is "no bottom line" and will fetch whatever the buyer "believes it's worth".
Not-for-profit IT charity group Reverse Garbage's operations manager Tony Domanski said the organization is happy to accept any type of computer system, whatever the condition, because it has a sufficient amount of spare parts to return equipment to a functioning state.
"We work with families that don't receive any charity and offer them low-cost computers," Domanski said, adding most systems sell for less than A$50 (US$38).
Reverse Garbage is a not-for-profit organization that works with charities to resell equipment, so whatever money is made from computer sales is split between the two parties.
"I like to see a kid walk away from here with a bundle," Domanski said. "We're also using open source products like Ubuntu Linux and Sun's Solaris that don't infringe any copyright issues."