Australia plans mass sale of defence sites despite concerns over training needs, morale

SYDNEY – Near the centre of Sydney, a congested city where large plots of undeveloped land are rare, a long sandstone wall in bustling Oxford Street hides a 13ha site that most residents never enter.

This is the Australian Defence Force’s Victoria Barracks, an 1840s site that was built by convicts and is a relic of colonial times, when military barracks were established by the British in newly founded cities.

Across Australia, the military – the country’s largest landholder – holds millions of hectares, including islands, rifle ranges, golf courses, beachfront properties and massive tracts of rural land used for training.

But the federal government now wants to sell up to 67 sites, saying many are no longer suited to the military’s needs, and that the land could instead be sold or developed to generate funds and provide much-needed housing.

This follows an audit conducted after years of debate over whether to raise funds and reduce maintenance costs by selling off some of the sites.

The independent audit, commissioned by the government, found that the sites could be worth about A$3 billion (S$2.7 billion), though Canberra has already reportedly rejected an offer by a private equity company to buy all the properties for A$5 billion.

Defence Minister Richard Marles told Sky News on Feb 8 that the aim was to sell properties that the military no longer requires and to consolidate sites so that commanders and forces would no longer work at different locations.

He said maintenance of the sites was costly, noting that Victoria Barracks in Sydney was largely used for administrative work but would cost A$200 million to maintain over the next 10 years.

“The Defence Force’s primary job is defending Australia – it’s not a heritage organisation,” he added.

“(Victoria Barracks) is an incredible place. It is the longest sandstone building in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a site that hardly any Sydneysider has ever seen.”

But the plan has prompted a backlash, particularly from defence experts, who say the sales could damage morale and leave the military without adequate training facilities.

Mr Michael Shoebridge, a former senior defence official and now director of think-tank Strategic Analysis Australia, told The Straits Times that the sales would take up to two decades to complete and the funds would do little to address the military’s budget pressures.

He said Australia’s current annual defence spending of A$59 billion – about 2 per cent of gross domestic product – was already inadequate, especially as the government plans to acquire expensive separate fleets of nuclear-powered submarines and anti-submarine frigates.

“The funds raised from these sales will be irrelevant to defence’s budget troubles and pressures,” he said.

“The budget has enormous internal pressures because of the growing bills for those mega projects. And those bills have only just begun.”

Mr Neil James, executive director of the Australia Defence Association, also told ST that selling the sites could affect Australia’s ability to meet its long-term defence needs.

He said the military needs facilities in city areas, especially for the training of reservists, who would not want to travel long distances for an evening or one-day training.

“Defence landholdings are a capability, not just a cost,” he said. “If you suddenly have to expand the defence forces, as we did in the two world wars, you already have the facilities in place.”

Australia, a vast continent whose population is largely centred in coastal cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, has enormous swathes of territory that are held by the military, covering 3.8 million ha – about the size of Switzerland.

These include Queensland’s Shoalwater Bay Training Area, which covers an area more than three times the size of Singapore, and is used by the Singapore Armed Forces to conduct training for up to nine weeks a year.

The government has no plans to sell the Shoalwater site but it is selling a 1,966ha plot of former farmland in the state. It was bought in 2018 for potential use for Singaporean and Australian military training, though it was later assessed to be unsuitable.

A government audit of defence lands concluded that the military “does not need and cannot afford all of the current estate”. The audit was completed in December 2023 but not released until February 2026, reportedly due to government concerns about potential objections from military veterans and from communities affected by future development.

The audit proposed the sale of a range of sites in cities and regional areas, including rifle ranges, training facilities and depots, and a holiday apartment complex that has not been used since 2016.

The redevelopment of prime inner-city land could help to boost the supply of housing in major cities, where rents and property prices have been surging in recent years. The average weekly rental cost for an apartment in Sydney is A$760, up from about A$520 in 2016.

The proposed sale of Sydney’s Victoria Barracks has prompted a mixed response.

Ms Clover Moore, the City of Sydney’s longstanding Lord Mayor, said the land could potentially deliver benefits to the city, noting that it was rare for such a significant parcel of inner-city land to become available.

Speculating on the site’s future in October 2025, she told The Sydney Morning Herald that it could be used for “increased access to parkland, new cultural infrastructure and affordable housing”.

But the federal MP for the area, Ms Allegra Spender, an independent, said long-term value and defence needs should “come before short-term revenue”.

“I believe a significant portion of the land should be kept in public hands,” she said in a statement.

Some business groups welcomed the plan. Mr David Borger, head of Business Western Sydney, said plans to sell a 205-year-old barracks in Parramatta, a commercial hub west of Sydney’s city centre, offered a chance to add accessible greenery and shade to a “Central Business District dominated by towers and hard surfaces”.

The government has not said when major sites will be sold. Some sales are likely to take years as they will involve heritage assessments or may need waste and toxins to be first removed from munitions and other hardware.

Mr Shoebridge said historic sites such as the Victoria Barracks properties in Sydney and those in Melbourne – where there are barracks built in the 1850s – gave troops a “sense of service” and should be retained.

“These are irreplaceable pieces of Australian history,” he said.

“They are a physical symbol that defence is a part of the city. To sell off the tiny number of irreplaceable historical sites we have in our major cities is a gross error.”