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SARAH FERGUSON: Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh said today that from 1 January 2025, permanent residents from Five Eyes countries and I quote, "any other countries", will be eligible to join the Australian Defence Force . Did he get that bit wrong?
SARAH FERGUSON: It's hard to imagine anything more significant in this announcement that you are making today that it is absolutely crystal clear who this will be targeted at.SARAH FERGUSON: Well, are you ruling out permanent residents from other countries, not Pacific countries? We need to turn that around and we are but it's not just turning it around, we are looking to grow the Defence Force through to 2040 and in order to do that we do need to be looking at a wider pool of people and this is something that other countries do.
So Andrew Hastie has gone to this place himself without much definition. This is a very clear step down this path in the way in which I have articulated it this evening and that has been repeated by Minister Keogh through the day and it is a very important step for the government. And I should add what we would be seeking is that those who join become Australian citizens within 90 days, within three months and so that's an important part of this proposal as well.
But in terms of what we have announced today, exactly that regime of return of service obligations would apply to these people because exactly the same training will apply to these people and so in that sense all the security checks going in are the same, on all the return of service obligations are the same but what we are doing is opening up the field of who we can seek to have join the Australian Defence Force and we know this is an important step down this path.
RICHARD MARLES: We need to be making the ADF more attractive to Australians as well and we are doing that and we've improved the housing offer for example, there is retention bonuses that we've announced and there are a suite of measures that we have taken which have actually had a significant impact on reducing the separation rate and we are starting to turn around the recruitment rate.
Richard Marles Australian Defence Force Adf Army Navy Airforce Foreign Nationals Permanent Residents Enlistment Australian Military Defence Force Recruiting Defence Minister
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