Phillip Thompson (Herbert, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

The year 2025—that's the year identified by a US Air Force general who said: 'My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.' That's not something any of us want. It is something all of us want to do everything we can to avoid. Whether or not this general is correct, only time will tell. But one thing is for sure: we are definitely well within the 10-year window of warning.

All of us here will agree, and I have said before, that we are facing the most geopolitically uncertain times since World War II. And that, of course, means we must be doing absolutely everything we can to be battle-ready. We don't seek war, but we must be prepared for it. We don't want to fight, but we must have the ability to do so.

In talking about recruitment and retention, I think it needs to be flipped on its head. Why do our brave young men and women want to join the Australian Defence Force? Why did they enlist? And what will keep them employed?

I think it's good that our Defence Force has helped out through natural disasters—through fires, through floods, through cyclones—and through COVID Assist. But it's not the primary role of our ADF. The primary role of our ADF is to fight and win our wars, to protect this country. We've seen all governments use our ADF as first responders. We are too small and too busy to have the Australian Defence Force as any government's first responders. And it's not why they signed up. It's not why they joined their profession. So, to keep people and to recruit people, you need to allow our soldiers, our sailors and our aviators to do their job, whether it's on deployment, whether it's in a training team, whether it's overseas in a training capacity, in a non-kinetic or non-warlike kind of place, whether it's in the States or in the UK.

We have a lot of US soldiers and marines come to Australia and up into the Top End, into Darwin. But we don't have a lot of our soldiers going over there.

I don't think we need, as was highlighted, to get more officers into more degrees; I think we need to get soldiers doing their jobs. That is, if there's a long peacetime—so they're not deploying to Afghanistan and they're not deploying on combat operations—then let's get our people overseas into the UK. If you take a section or a platoon over to the UK, to Japan or to the States, those soldiers will stay forever and they will teach and train younger soldiers. We have a recruitment and retention issue with the enlisted soldier. We know what appeals to people—well, my generation—to get them to enlist. It was to protect and serve our nation, and it was, at some stage, which happened, to deploy and fight. But we don't do that at the moment. That's not happening. So we need to have other tools to help our soldiers want to enlist and then to keep them. There are some things like that that we can do, but there are also things that we shouldn't do. We can't just focus on the recruitment; we must also focus on the retention.

You must be able to have the kit to fight in. You must be able to have the stuff that you can train in and that you can deploy in, and you must be upfront with the soldiers, aviators and sailors. In Townsville, the announcement to remove the MRH-90 helicopter out of our region without talking, without telling and without bringing the community along will cost jobs and will see families leave a place where they wanted to grow their family. It will see people leaving the beautiful place of Townsville. That's not what you do. If you want to refocus an asset, you talk with the community about why. We must protect our soldiers, aviators and sailors with secure jobs.

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