David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Astoundingly, in just the first three months of this year the Australian Defence Force shrunk by 1,100 members. Indeed, if you sat through the budget estimates of last week and heard the evidence of General Fox and the CDF, you'd think everything was going well. We got a whole lot of evidence about how they're on target for their production of brochures, they're on target for their new policy rollout, they've got new policy initiatives of a $50,000 retention bonus and the current recruitment targeting rate is on track—all sorts of nonsense. And then at the end of it we said, 'How many people are in the ADF now and how many were there when you started?' And the answer is that year on year, under the current CDF and the current Secretary Moriarty, the ADF has gone backwards. Every year Secretary Moriarty is given a recruitment target and an expansion target, and, since he started in 2016, he's failed in every single year. And what did the Albanese government do? They gave him a five-year contract extension when they started.

The CDF has failed every year, under his tenure, on recruitment targets. What does he get? He gets a significantly bigger pay rise than the poor old diggers doing the actual grunt work down beneath him. When Senator Lambie had the temerity to ask him about his pay rise, he didn't rise up and get angry about war crimes, he didn't rise up and get angry about the failure to deliver any of their key projects and he didn't rise up and get angry about the abusive culture. The thing that got him angry was his pay and his entitlements. He behaved appallingly to Senator Lambie. I'll tell you what I saw then and what a number of other people saw then. We saw the culture in that place, where the generals think they can talk down to anybody beneath them. In that moment he wasn't seeing Senator Lambie as Senator Lambie. He was seeing a private, somebody he could talk down to and demean with an appallingly toxic workplace culture. We saw it there in the budget estimates. And shame on him for not apologising for his behaviour.

But we also saw it with the Air Chief Marshal, when we caught him out for having appallingly misrepresented the behaviour of a senior Air Force chaplain who had been bullied, humiliated and intimidated in her workplace. In the last budget estimates session before that, the Air Chief Marshal, when I asked him about it, had made a false accusation and slur against her. She'd had enough, right? She had been treated appallingly by defence. And when I asked the Air Chief Marshal about it he had made an unfounded, incorrect slur about her. And then in the next budget estimates, when I called him out on it after the Air Force had said to her that they would apologise, he refused to apologise, refused to retract his slur on that Air Force chaplain and compounded the error.

Twice in just one budget estimates session we saw the attitude of the leadership towards the people actually on the ground doing the work, and twice they failed the test of leadership. We've seen it time and time again, and they wonder why there's a recruitment crisis. It's because of the toxic leadership in the ADF—twice on display. And no wonder they went backwards by more than 1,100 in just the first three months of this year—backwards, not forwards, despite the brochures. It turns out that people in the ADF are willing to pay $50,000 not to be in the ADF, because there's a recruitment bonus going on that nobody wants. 'Look unto yourself,' we say about the leadership—Secretary Moriarty, the CDF, the senior leadership.

The Albanese government is spending billions and billions of dollars getting their new toys, their new nuclear submarines and their Hunter class frigates, and, if they ever turn up, they're going to need thousands and thousands of people to staff them. Instead they're going backwards, spending billions on toys that nobody will be able to operate. That's the Albanese government and, before that, the coalition government in defence. And why? It's because of what we saw in that estimates: toxic leadership, refusing to take responsibility, talking down to the people in their command and not showing them respect. That's what's wrong. If you don't fix that, you'll never fix the recruitment targets. It starts with the toxic leadership.