Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A letter has been received from Senator Lambie:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

The recruitment and retention crisis for the Australian Defence Force is a national security issue.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will now set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whip.

Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the last round of estimates, Australia found out just how bad recruitment and retention rates in the Australian Defence Force are. Defence's personal target overall was 62,000—what it calls its 'growth path'—but it went backwards to 59,000. They are losing more than they are recruiting. Lieutenant General Fox told estimates that, in the last two years, nearly 8,000 veterans have left the Australian Defence Force. The general also admitted that the Australian Defence Force had 'reduced in strength'. Senator Shoebridge put it best when he described Defence's 'growth path' as a 'shrink path'. Dr Marcus Hellyer, a former senior public servant in the department, said that Defence's performance in trying to expand the size of the Australian Defence Force had been 'a clown show'.

The ADF has averaged a separation rate—that means veterans who are leaving—at eight to 10 per cent. That is 5,000 to 6,000 a year. Many of these veterans are highly trained and highly skilled. This is at a time when we have a war in Ukraine, a war in Israel and tensions at an all-time high in the South China Sea. Our Defence Force has never been more important, and it has also never been so depleted. This is not just an issue for veterans; it's a national security issue. It's an issue for every Australian.

For many older veterans, the news of the 'shrink path' is no surprise. It started back in the nineties. Remember the recession that we apparently had to have—high unemployment, families losing businesses and 17 per cent interest rates? In response, Defence started offering experienced veterans redundancies—how ridiculous!—and the Howard government introduced the Defence Reform Program in 1997. This program was supposed to save millions of dollars, increase efficiencies and focus Defence on its core business. In other words, they wanted more civilians in the system, and they wanted to outsource. When I did my training at Kapooka, all of my mates—from the cooks to the cleaners to the admin people—were all in cam uniform. That meant they did basic training. That meant they could progress through the ranks. That meant we had units where all members were war ready. But the Defence Reform Program was brought in, and that put an end to that—thank you, Mr Howard! The outsourcing didn't stop there. It was the biggest mistake they ever made. They outsourced recruiting, and they're still doing it. They gave it to Manpower.

In 2001, 22 years ago, a Senate inquiry was commissioned to look at the recruitment and retention of ADF personnel. It found that these efficiencies and rationalisation measures had reduced the ADF's strength by 27 per cent. It's a good report. I would encourage the Minister for Defence and the Minister for Veterans' Affairs to pick it up and read it and to have a look at why we're in the situation that we're in. Put it in your equation; you might actually learn something!

That's the problem: Defence and the ministers in charge don't listen and they do not learn. Submissions should also be read which were written 20 years ago; they could have been sent yesterday. They mirror each other, I'm telling you. They're all very instructive, and many say the same things, and that is that they left the ADF because there were, 'No promotion prospects and no career alternatives'. Or there was, 'The lack of recognition of skills obtained by cadets can be attributed to the lack of recruits'. One of the key recommendations of the 2001 inquiry was to fix the recognition of skills. It still isn't fixed—of course not! Another wrote: 'I feel that morale starts with the troops really being content. There is no morale with a private contractor.'

These are key messages for you Minister. Here is how much this government and the Minister for Defence Personnel haven't learned: just two weeks ago, the government took the recruitment contract from Manpower Australia and awarded it to some sort of French-Swiss based multinational in a deal thought to be worth over $1 billion. That's $1 billion of your taxpayers' money when those in uniform are doing the job—themselves recruiting many years ago and doing a damn good job of it. You took it out of their hands. There is a lesson to be learned today by the ministers: wake up to yourselves!

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank Senator Lambie for highlighting this important issue for our defence community and for all Australians.

Of course there is a sizeable defence community here in Canberra, and we know that the demands on our defence community are increasing. We face uncertain times when it comes to geopolitics, and we face uncertain times when it comes to the impacts of climate change. This has meant that we've seen the ADF called up more and more frequently to assist with natural disasters. As a recent Defence Subcommittee report found, since 2019 the ADF has committed over 35,000 personnel from a workforce of approximately 62,000 in support of domestic disaster relief tasks. This is a huge effort, and we thank them for the work that they do in communities across the country. But in return, we need to look after Defence.

We know that Defence has an ambitious plan to grow its military and civilian permanent workforce to over 101,000 by 2040. How they will achieve this in the face of the current trend, where recruitment isn't keeping pace with separations, is a massive challenge, with no obvious answers. Army reported a separation rate of 13.2 per cent in 2021-22, with the rates for Navy and Air Force hovering under 10 per cent—as Senator Lambie has noted. So how do we keep them?

The bill that Senator Lambie and I introduced today seeks to reverse the onus of proof for first responders when it comes to PTSD. It is just one example; a similar presumption doesn't exist for veterans either. Wait times for veterans seeking support from DVA are, at times, frankly, ridiculous, given what we're asking veterans to do and then asking them to sit and wait. As at 30 September 2023, DVA was working on 53,601 claims, and had 21,915 active claims not yet allocated to an officer for processing. These have been lodged by some 14,369 veterans. This is unacceptable; we have to do better than this. You can't tell me that this is not a deterrent to people looking to enlist or to continue their service.

Things like retention bonuses, as most recently announced in the last federal budget, aren't enough to solve the retention and recruitment crisis that we're facing. We have to do better to both value and recognise and then truly look after Defence personnel. They put their lives on the line at times, but most of the time they're putting their bodies on the line, training and staying ready. When they have injuries, both physical and mental, our part of the bargain should be that we'll look after them and we won't make them argue, even though they've been at war, that their PTSD comes from that. We need to do better as a country.

If Defence want to be an employer of choice, there is significant cultural change that will have to occur, and our response as a nation to things like climate change will have to be so much better to lessen the burden and challenge on the ADF. We're relying on them more and more. In a time when we're seeing instability and the breaking down of the rules based order in some instances, we cannot allow them to be spending too much time away from core Defence business.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on this matter of public importance raised by Senator Lambie, and I thank her for submitting it to the Senate. This is not a new problem. Having served in the Australian Army as a regular Army officer for over 22 years and another three years in the active reserve and then having been in this place for around 15 years, involved in national security issues, I have seen a number of cycles around recruitment and retention issues. There are a couple of things, though, that make this substantially different, and I just want to comment on those.

First the strategic update of 2020 and then, more recently, the Defence strategicreview have highlighted that, now more than ever, Australia needs a strong Defence Force. No longer do we have the 10-year warning time for creating capability, which is not just equipment but also personnel in terms of recruitment and training—individual training on equipment but also collective training as units to operate that equipment and joint training in conjunction with other forces. So the retention of ADF members is critical because it takes time to train a competent force.

There is another thing that is different. The Parliamentary Library issued a summary of some of these issues earlier this year, and what it highlighted is that whilst, as others have pointed out, Army is leading in terms of loss rates, at around 13.2 per cent, it's also across ranks, and the middle ranks in particular experience it. In Army's case, sergeants and senior NCOs—who are the repositories of most of the corporate knowledge that we need to train new recruits and, importantly, to provide leadership to people who are in the Defence Force—are some of the people we're struggling to retain. In the past we have seen things like retention bonuses help for particular skills, whether that be engineers of particular types or aircrew or others where there's a high net worth and salaries outside are attractive. It may have worked, but, now that we're looking across a broad section, we need to understand what it is that's driving, as Mr Greg Sheridan wrote in the Australian recently, soldiers from the Army to leave in droves.

I think there are a couple of things, having been through these cycles. Morale in the Defence Force is actually linked to how they perceive they're being treated by government, and a lot of that comes down to funding decisions. For Army in particular, we look at the Defence strategic review, which has dislocated soldiers and their families. Over the next couple of years, people are going to leave my home state of South Australia, where Defence deliberately made an investment some years ago, partly because we didn't suffer some of the same training area burdens during the wet season but also, importantly, because of retention and recruitment. Families are more likely to want to allow their spouses to remain in defence if they're living in Adelaide rather than Darwin. That's not biased. It's a fact that actually drove a significant investment by Defence around a decade ago to move units from Darwin down to Adelaide. What's the DSR doing? It's reversing that, and—it's a funny old thing—we're seeing an uptick in people leaving.

We're also seeing budget cuts within Army. The decision to cut two-thirds of the infantry fighting vehicle program has led to the decimation of the 1st Armoured Regiment and taken us from three armoured brigades down to one. This goes against all military history in terms of the ability to deploy capability, and that affects morale. So, whilst retention and recruitment have been a problem for a long time in fits and starts, the decisions of this government around the DSR, in terms of cost shifting, dislocation and disrupting well-established—and for good reason—structures of three units to be able to deploy only one, are having an impact on the men and women of the Australian Defence Force.

The current recruiting, according to estimates, is achieving only 41.7 per cent of targets for people in the ADF. Significantly, that has a flow-on effect to the defence industry, who we look to as the people who actually provide the materiel side of our capabilities. As Mr Brent Clark, who is the CEO of the Australian Industry & Defence Network, which represents small and medium sized businesses, said, 'I have never seen so many angry people because delays and deferral of projects have seen our industry start to lose people and lose incentive to be involved in supporting defence.' So this government is making a difficult problem worse.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the many fine people of Queensland and Australia, I speak on, and strongly support, Senator Lambie's motion that the ADF recruitment and retention crisis is a national security issue. Senator Lambie, Senator Shoebridge and I spent a lot of time questioning Defence last week at Senate estimates. It was revealed at those h4earings that, despite all of Defence's glossy recruitment brochures—as Senator Shoebridge accurately described them—there's almost no mention of the fact that the headcount of defence personnel has gone backwards. There are more people leaving defence than joining, despite large recruitment and retention targets and huge expenditure.

The responsibility for this utter failure sits squarely with Defence's upper brass and with the politicians, for failing to keep them in line. The branch chiefs are all led—and I use that term loosely, when it comes to this man—by the Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell. He is paid more than $1 million a year at a time when defence personnel receive a real wage cut. It's difficult to find a KPI or a metric that General Campbell hasn't failed on in his time as head of the Defence Force: recruitment and retention goals—failed; Taipan helicopters—failed; the Hunter class future frigates—failed. There are questions over whether a medal that General Campbell wears on his chest today—the Distinguished Service Cross—was given to him legally.

Over 100 active special forces soldiers have discharged from the force after General Campbell threw them under the bus at a press conference in 2020, tarring them with accusations of war crimes before a single charge had been laid. One of the most elite fighting forces in the world—the Special Air Service Regiment, or SASR—is reportedly facing a complete capability crisis as operators leave Defence because their supposed leaders don't care about their welfare. The chair of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, Nick Kaldas, has been scathing of Defence and its leadership. He specifically called out the successive failure of governments, the Australian Defence Force and the Department of Veterans' Affairs to adequately protect the mental health and wellbeing of those who serve our country.

Our defence force is in crisis on many fronts. The ability to defend this country is at risk, and it's a national security issue, as Senator Lambie rightly points out. We cannot just close our eyes and cross our fingers and hope that the United States will turn up and help us out. We need a ready, able and capable defence force as much as ever. Given his track record so far, it's clear we won't get one until the Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, is removed from his post and until we start treating the diggers as the people they really are: the people who care about our country and who are putting their heart and soul into defending his country.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.

Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank everyone who has served in our Defence Force and is currently serving. A report published in May unfortunately showed that our military will reach only 73 per cent of its recruitment target. The security situation in our region is unfortunately tense right when our success in recruiting soldiers is at its lowest. Obviously, this is a recipe for disaster.

On top of that, a parliamentary committee was told earlier this year that about 6½ thousand personnel are leaving the ADF every single year. Can I make a small suggestion? It will always be difficult to recruit young men and women to defend their country when they are continually told that their country is built on stolen land. It will always be difficult to convince young men and women to sacrifice for their country when they are continually told that their country is racist. It will always be difficult to raise a generation of patriots when children are told that our culture is not worthy of saving. Some of the responsibility for this unwillingness of people to serve must be borne by us in this chamber—not me; I'm a patriot. But all your woke lefty activists in this place and your closet—if we want people to defend our country, senators must speak of what is worth defending. The words that we use have power. The images that we can paint have consequences. We must stop using this place as a pulpit to divide Australia and instead use it as a place to inspire pride in what is the greatest country in the world: this nation right here, this country, this green and gold. We must defend it. We must protect it. It's the best country in the world, and I'm sick of all of you.

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this matter of public importance. From the outset I want to thank Senator Lambie for raising this matter of public importance and acknowledge her genuine interest, her prior service and her ongoing commitment to these issues, no matter who is in government, and also for being a member of the Senate defence committee. It has been something that I have seen ongoing throughout the time that Senator Lambie has been a senator here; she will raise these issues no matter who is in government.

I am standing here today to talk about the government's commitment to deal with this issue. It is genuine and it does come from a place of recognising that, for many years, we did not have the commitment that was necessary or the strategies that were required to develop recruitment and retention in the ADF. The Albanese government is taking urgent action to address this issue because we want to ensure that Defence has the workforce to protect Australians in an increasingly challenging strategic environment.

While in government, the coalition oversaw a personnel crisis in the ADF. They knew about declining recruitment and retention and did nothing to solve the problem. The Deputy Prime Minister has been very clear that we inherited a recruitment and retention crisis, but we have begun to turn the situation around in a short 18 months. Under our government, separation rates are coming down from their peaks and recruitment is beginning to improve. Of course, we recognise that there is an awful lot of work to do, and I speak to this motion today not as someone who has served but as someone who is in admiration of any of those who do serve our country in our Defence Force. I speak to this motion as someone who lives in a part of Queensland, a part of our country, that is home to many people in the Defence Force, particularly a large army barracks in Townsville and our most northern Naval base, in Cairns: HMAS Cairns. We recognise that the Defence Force is part of our community there, and what happens in those bases and what happens in the Defence community matters to our communities. That's why this is such an important issue.

The recruitment and retention crisis that we face in the ADF is a direct result of the chaos and dysfunction that Defence was under during the former government. After almost a decade of that government, the ADF grew by just 2,000 personnel. That's it. The ADF permanent workforce grew from 56,159 as at 30 June 2013 to 58,206 as at 30 June 2022. This is a net increase of just 200 per annum in the ADF permanent workforce under the previous government. By the end of the time, only 75 per cent of recruitment targets had been achieved.

So the Albanese government is taking action to address this crisis. There's no silver bullet for this issue, but we are already starting to see an improvement. The government has announced a new retention bonus for ADF personnel. ADF personnel will receive a $50,000 retention bonus towards the end of their initial period of service if they commit to remain in the ADF for a further three years. This will be an initial two-year pilot before being extended based on its results.

On 25 May 2023, the government announced the appointment of the first chief of personnel, Major General Natasha Fox. This delivers on one of the recommendations of the Defence strategic review. We have also announced a review into Defence housing to consider how we can improve housing opportunities for ADF personnel, including ownership, because we know that, particularly in regional areas like Townsville and Cairns, Defence housing, Defence personnel and Defence retention go hand in hand. It was really pleasing to see the Assistant Minister for Defence, Matt Thistlethwaite, in Townsville and Cairns as recently as this week to talk about these very issues.

We are working to build Defence as an attractive and competitive employer, including by implementing a new recruiting services contract to improve and speed up the ADF recruitment process, and getting wages moving to ensure ADF and APS personnel in Defence secure competitive pay conditions. There is more work to be done. We are committed to ensuring Defence has the people it needs to keep Australians safe.

Finally, can I just say this: this week I was on the base at HMAS Cairns. I was invited there as part of the beginning of major infrastructure works in HMAS Cairns. I want to thank Commander Santos for his kind invitation to meet some of the naval recruits who are starting their work there. I'm really pleased to see this base and this Defence Force moving forward. (Time expired)