By Darian Macey, February 5 2026
The estate was treated as free. The bill has arrived.
The most confronting finding in the Defence Estate Audit is not about land, buildings or money. It is about behaviour.
For decades, Defence treated its estate as a free, uncapped resource. If a unit wanted space, it asked for it. If a building aged, it stayed. If sustainment fell behind, the risk was managed rather than fixed. If capability money was tight, estate funding was the first thing raided.
The audit names this pattern directly. It describes “entrenched behaviours that treat the estate as a free and uncapped resource” and links them to a steady decline in asset condition, rising non-compliance and growing safety risk.
This matters because behaviour, not policy, is what broke the estate.
On paper, Defence has had decades of sensible recommendations: consolidate bases, reduce duplication, prioritise the north, fund sustainment properly, standardise designs. In practice, none of these stuck, because the incentives inside the system pointed the other way.
Capability sponsors were rewarded for acquiring platforms, not for paying to maintain buildings. User groups were able to hold space without seeing the cost. Heritage was often self-assessed and over-protected because the risk of removal was higher than the cost of retention. No one was accountable for whole-of-life estate outcomes.
The result is exactly what the audit documents.
Buildings beyond their design life, still occupied. Offices with utilisation below 40 per cent, alongside requests for more space. Reserve depots used one night a week, maintained year-round. New facilities delivered without funded sustainment, accelerating decay elsewhere. Non-compliance rates rising from historic levels of around six per cent to 20 per cent in critical assets.
This is not a funding problem alone. It is a governance failure.
The audit is explicit that simply adding money to sustainment will not fix this. Reducing the number of sites, enforcing sharing, and removing surplus assets is the only way to stabilise the system.
That is why divestment sits alongside cultural reform in the recommendations. Selling sites is not about balance sheets. It is about forcing the organisation to confront trade-offs it has avoided for years.
Once space is scarce, behaviour changes.
Once sustainment is visible and unavoidable, design choices shift.
Once retention of buildings requires justification against capability outcomes, sentiment becomes expensive.
The audit also explains why Security and Estate Group is being repositioned as the capability manager for the estate. Without a single authority able to say no, user-driven demand will continue to overwhelm rational planning. The audit is clear that service licence and local pressure have consistently overridden enterprise priorities.
For industry, this cultural reset matters more than the list of sites being sold.
Defence is signalling a shift away from infrastructure shaped by local preference and individual user demands. Projects built around bespoke layouts, one-off systems and service-specific “special requirements” will face increasing resistance. Anything that departs from standard, repeatable, minimum viable solutions should expect more challenge at the brief stage, more scrutiny through approvals, and tougher questions about long-term sustainment and cost.
Firms that make their margin by customising each project to suit a single unit or commander are now operating against the grain. Firms that can deliver fast, compliant, supportable solutions that work across multiple bases and users are aligned with where Defence is heading.
The uncomfortable truth is that Defence’s estate did not decay by accident. It decayed because the system allowed everyone to treat it as someone else’s problem.
The audit is the first serious attempt to change that.
Whether it works will depend on whether Defence actually enforces the behaviours it now says it wants: fewer sites, shared facilities, funded sustainment, and decisions made at enterprise level rather than by the loudest local voice.
The bill for decades of avoidance is now visible. What happens next will tell us whether Defence has really accepted it.
Author: Darian Macey
Darian is a former Engineering Officer with the RAE with tertiary qualifications in Engineering and Project Management. He is a leading practitioner within Australia's NSI sector with previous employment in Government, project management and building contractor organisations.
