You know a family is in trouble when they start flogging off the furniture to fund their lifestyle.  First, it’s bits of the family silver and grandad’s stamp collection, then the holiday house. But as the trouble deepens, it’s mum’s jewels and then the family home.  It’s often because someone has a nasty gambling or drug habit.  But it’s usually a sign they’re heading down a path of bankruptcy and tears. 

So it’s a bit of a shock to find out that Australia’s military is being forced to sell many its of most historic properties – iconic places like Point Cook, the birthplace of our Air Force, and Victoria Barracks in Sydney (built in the 1840s and a core part of the Army’s history) because Defence is in a nasty budget crunch under the Albanese Government. 

These and 65 other properties across the country are targeted for sale in a review that Richard Marles sat on for two years and has just released with his usual hyperbolic nonsense about historic, once in a generation, urgent reforms only his heroic leadership could contemplate..

This time, we’re also meant to believe flogging off places of enormous historical value to the men and women in our Army, Navy and Air Force in a one-off fire sale is actually about celebrating our military’s traditions and history – perhaps because the sandstone in the iconic buildings will be tastefully reused in penthouse apartment balconies.

Also on the chopping block are cadet and reservist training facilities scattered across Australia in cities and regional areas.

Apparently, it’s just silly to have places for cadets to train at because they only do so once a week (those misguided cadets seem to think going to school for the remainder of the week makes sense). And who wants young people having experience of military life through cadets, anyway?  Good lord, some of them might join up.

The reviewers says, Defence has kept these sites ‘for reasons of sentimentality, tradition and connections to ex-Defence personnel.’ They go on to say ‘such sentiments are both costly and counterproductive.’  And Richard Marles has parroted this idea, saying Defence is not a heritage organisation, it’s a warfighting organisation. 

Whether he knows it or not, these neat sound grabs completely ignore the central role that history, tradition, service culture and connections to the community play in making any military effective – and making people want to join and stay in the Army, Navy or Air Force.  History is a core thing to be valued and protected within each of our three military Services, not some unaffordable indulgence.

But back to the review and some hard headed numbers.  134 pages of work, proposing that 67 properties around the country be sold, 26 in major cities.  Selling all of them, the reviewers tell us, should get the Government $3 billion.  

Great. Unfortunately, they also tell us $1.2 billion of this will get eaten by relocation costs, remediation and decontamination work, and heritage protection.  So, selling off irreplaceable properties that are key to our military history and keep Defence connected to the Australian population (as the cadet training facilities do) will free up $1.8 billion. Over time. Perhaps.  Probably much less – the reviewers tell us that the costs of disposal may well be underdone and the sale values are a bit woolly too. 

To get beyond the spin and fluff and give a sense of proportion, $1.8 billion is enough to fill one and bit of the suitcases stuffed with taxpayer cash that Richard Marles keeps handing over to the US as part of a no refunds, no obligations cash contribution to the US submarine industry.

So, the amounts involved won’t even begin to fix our country’s Defence budget woes.  The nasty background to this auctioning off of long term government assets is that things like the AUKUS nuclear submarines and the Navy’s outrageously expensive, underarmed Hunter class frigates are eating more and more of the Defence budget.

At just over 2% of GDP, the Government knows its underinvesting in our nation’s security. These are the bigger drivers of the cash flow crunch.  They are the reason savings measures that are plain dumb are being forced on the organisation.

And, despite all the words about the urgency of cash to fund military capability as a reason for the sales, hidden in the review is a recommendation (Rec 7 page 20) that makes sure this won’t happen.  The government accepted the idea that the sales cash will be used to fund – you guessed it – more property sales (not military hardware). Over time, that will shift Defence from being a landholder to being a renter.  That’s a plan no family with financial sense would embrace.

Just like a family or a business, getting out of the financial death spiral behind this flogging off our military’s assets and history requires hard choices and changed behaviour. 

Ending scandalous projects like the troubled $27 billion Hunter frigate program would be a start. So would having Richard Marles fight for and finally win a bigger budget to fund the military our country needs.  Instead, as Marcus Hellyer has revealed, Mr Marles has agreed to cut to the Defence budget in the mid-year budget update he’s just tabled in Parliament, cutting some $2.6 billion out of the next four years compared to the budget Treasurer Chalmers announced back in March last year.

Shrinking the Defence estate and cutting the budget sounds more like the Treasurer is running Defence, not Deputy Prime Minister Marles.

Getting serious about our nation’s security would require some honesty with the Australian public about the state of our military and the vulnerabilities it has under the government’s current plans, along with some political courage.  In his almost four years as the Minister for Defence, Richard Marles has yet to show he even knows that’s his real job.

A version of this article was first published by Sky News.