Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Ryan for raising this motion, and I'd like to thank all former and current ADF members for their service to our country. We enjoy the freedoms we have today because of you, and I'd like to acknowledge the member for Stirling, who's sitting right next to me, for your service.

The ADF cadet program is, and has been for a long time, an integral part of not only the Defence Force but the wider fabric of the Australian community since its inception. At its core the cadet program exists to enrich the lives of young people and to provide them with opportunities that they might not otherwise have received. At the age they join, that sets the foundation for the rest of their life, for their adulthood. We need to recognise that opportunity is given to them, but we also need to recognise how they embrace that and how well they embrace that. The program is built on a military-style support and structure. And don't let anybody ever tell you that boys—and girls, but I speak of boys because I have two boys—don't want structure. They desire that structure. They need that structure. The program also provides the ADF customs, traditions and values, and those tenets are the building blocks of a successful future in business, in team building, and to instil a sense of belonging and that critical self-confidence that our youth need to become well-balanced young men and women—to have that self-belief that, quite often, we don't see in young people these days.

The regions have been significant in producing young men and women who go through the ADF program, across a whole range of socioeconomic and cultural demographics, attracting increasing numbers of young women and young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women, and also engaging with young people with physical and learning disabilities. This continues to grow year on year, and I see that in my electorate of Cowper. At TS Vendetta in Coffs Harbour the number of cadets has increased by four per cent every year over the past five or six years. It's quite incredible, as the last speaker said, that even during COVID we've seen this exponential growth of cadets. I think that is because of what other young men and women see in their friends who join the cadets.

Just before COVID, I remember going to a memorial service. There was a very impressive young man there with his mother. She told me the story of how, only a few years before, the family had become fractured. Her son had become very angry. He was having learning difficulties. He was in and out of suspensions. That lady took that young man to the Air Force Cadets and, almost overnight, with the mentoring and supervision, and that structure that he desperately needed, he changed. He now has his light aircraft pilot's licence. This young man now has a future because of the ADF program. And that's what we see, time and time again, where young men and women go through the ADF cadet program. I have a list of names, which I won't have time to read out today, just from TS Vendetta in Coffs Harbour, but this is replicated all around Australia. Programs such as these are critical in the moulding and guidance of our local communities' future leaders, expanding horizons and providing possibilities for us as a society to function at our best.

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