This is why the announcement $500 million is to be spent upgrading it in a staged redevelopment to be rolled out over the next nine years has already sparked a fierce, and occasionally bitter debate, marked by allegations of war mongering, extravagance and the misapplication of scarce public funds.

While frank and open discussion is a hallmark of the freedoms more than 102,000 Australians have died to defend, this background noise should not be allowed to drown out the message the AWM, one of the best institutions of its type in the world, is about to get even better.

There is a very special reason why Australia has, by the standards of some countries, over invested in this memorial and the thousands of others in every hamlet, village, town and city across the land.

Most of the servicemen and women who died up until the Vietnam era were buried near where they fell.

The tens of thousands of families who lost loved ones in World War I never knew the comfort of being able to visit a grave. The AWM created a national place of mourning and commemoration that is also a museum and interpretive centre.

It has touched a chord in the national psyche with almost 1.2 million visitors to the AWM, the Treloar Centre at Mitchell and its travelling exhibitions in 2016/2017.

It is the greatest visitor drawcard in the ACT and the cornerstone on which our tourism industry depends.

Originally commissioned to commemorate Australia's sacrifice during World War One, the AWM opened while another war, which was to threaten our national existence, was raging in 1941.

It's original brief has expanded to cover Australian involvement in conflicts extending from the Crimea in the 1850s to ongoing operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Given World War I, the "war to end all wars", failed to achieve that result, it is not surprising that even as early as the 1970s and the 1980s the AWM was already running out of space.

The first serious attempt to address this deficiency was made in the late 1990s when upwards of $14 million dollars was spent on Anzac Hall, a 4,000 square metre building at the rear of the original structure that housed 3,000 square metres of display space and the AWM workshop.

Now, just 17 years and four conflicts and many peacekeeping operations after the opening in 2001, the AWM is running out of space again. It is only possible to display five percent of the items in the collection at any one time.

Any suggestion the AWM should abridge the stories of those who served at Gallipoli, on the Western Front, at Tobruk or along the Kokoda track, in order to make room for the exploits of their descendants is both distasteful and demeaning.

While there is plenty of scope to discuss how the memorial should be redeveloped and whether or not it may be possible to achieve as much with less, it is imperative the AWM has the resources it needs to commemorate our darkest hours and to honour those who held that darkness at bay.