The price of Victoria Barracks is much higher than $200 million
The government owes veterans, and every taxpayer, an honest account of what this sale will really cost.
I’m an Australian Army veteran, a clinical psychologist and a Sydneysider. Over the past few months I’ve heard the same thing, on repeat, from veterans I know through my networks. They are angry about the sale of Victoria Barracks. But underneath the anger, a lot of them are grieving.
What I keep hearing is a sense of being abandoned. Many people feel nobody asked them, nobody is listening, and there’s nothing they can do to change it. For a group that has already spent decades trying to get the system to hear them, that powerlessness lands hard.
The government’s case is about money. The defence minister says keeping Victoria Barracks as a defence site would cost about $200 million over the next decade, and the wider sale of 67 properties is expected to raise billions. Meanwhile, about 500 people there are packing boxes to be out by Christmas. I’d ask the government to look at its own spending and count the full cost of this decision, not just the dollars.
The cost I’m most qualified to talk about is the human one. When you join the military, it becomes far more than an employer. It shapes who you are, who your people are and what you’d be willing to give. Places like Victoria Barracks are where that identity is built. Generations of soldiers trained and worked there and left from there for wars, and some of them never came home. Attachment to place is real, and losing a place bound up with who you are can be grieved much like losing a person. Psychologists call this disenfranchised grief: a loss others don’t see as worth mourning, so people carry it alone.
