Defence force to recruit foreigners to curb shortage
More now of the government's decision to allow foreign citizens to serve in Australia’s armed forces. Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh says the scheme would target people who are already permanent residents and loyal to Australia, but the Shadow Defence Minister is not clear on the program's parameters.
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00:00 The announcement today has been very ham-fisted.
00:03 There was a drop to the Herald Sun, then there was a flurry of radio interviews this morning.
00:07 We're all very confused.
00:09 From July 1 apparently it's New Zealanders, then from January 1 it's Five Eyes Nations
00:13 and the rest of the world.
00:15 This is what the government has to clarify.
00:17 Richard Miles on a doorstop refused to rule out Chinese permanent residents.
00:21 And then in question time he talked about New Zealand and then when we pushed him, he
00:25 came back to the question of January 1 and other countries and he said Five Eyes there.
00:29 So we want clarity, I don't think they've cleaned this up.
00:32 And for something as important and something as huge as this, in their own words they said
00:36 this is the Albanese government crossing the Rubicon on defence recruiting.
00:40 For something so important and central to our life as Australians, they need to have
00:43 clarity about their policy and they shouldn't have a debate and a discussion.
00:46 They shouldn't treat this as poorly as they have today.
00:49 The key is that from 1 July, New Zealand, from 1 January we go expand that out to the
00:55 rest of the Five Eyes.
00:56 We then look to our Pacific neighbours and crucially what we're saying here though is
01:00 the way we're doing that is looking at permanent residents, they've already made a commitment
01:04 to Australia, they would still need to meet all the normal security requirements, they
01:09 would go through normal ADF obligations in terms of return of service, all of those things
01:14 and they're required to become Australian citizens.
01:16 That's also crucial.
01:17 We inherited a situation where the Defence Force was going backwards under the previous
01:22 government.
01:23 We've done a lot of work arresting that decline, making sure that we increase the retention
01:27 rate.
01:28 We're now back to the long term historical average, which is a great step.
01:32 This helps us on that growth strategy for the Defence Force and it joins a number of
01:36 other initiatives to help doing that.
01:38 Not just with this bringing in permanent residents, but growing the pie of Australian citizens
01:43 already.
01:44 [BLANK_AUDIO]