Kohana 3 and CRON always accessing index.php (not following the URI argument)

Question

OK, I hope this is my last question about CRON jobs and Kohana 3. Note: others are not duplicates, just other problems.

Here is my CRON job (setup in cPanel)

php /home/user/public_html/index.php --uri=properties/update

As per this answer.

I have set it up so it emails me the output. It is running every 5 mins.

Unfortunately, it always emails me the source of the home page of my site (index.php or /).

I can access that URL fine in my browser, i.e. http://www.example.com/properties/update and it works and does it's job correctly. I can tell the Cron is never hitting the script because I have a file logger in place.

Would this have anything to do with .htaccess?

Has this happened to anyone before, and how did they fix it?

Many thanks.

Update

Here is my home route in bootstrap.php if anyone is interested.

Route::set('home', '')
    ->defaults(array(
    'controller' => 'home',
    'action' => 'index'
    ));

It is the first route defined.

Another Update

What's weird too, is that a var_dump(Kohana::$is_cli); produces false when emailed from the CRON.