Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. To inform the member for Makin, we have 35 on-base advisory service officers across the country. They are there to provide assistance to men and women in uniform who are currently serving personnel on what we can do for them: what their entitlements are; what they need to do if they are proposing to leave the Defence Force. We are also acutely aware of those people who have been wounded or are ill as a result of action or their service. We are most particularly aware of those people in rehabilitation and what we need to do to make sure that we maintain the requirements for them post their service life. This is all happening on bases around the country.

It is vitally important to the future of the Australian Defence community—to men and women in uniform—that we look after them not only while they are serving our nation overseas, but also when they come home and when they decide to relocate out of the Defence Force. I did some work on this and it is something that I think the shadow minister would be interested in; it is something I have been talking about at RSL conferences around the country. One of the issues for us is to make sure that we are not only supporting serving men and women and their families—which we are bound to do—but also to make sure that we look after those people who retire out of the Defence Force or move on or transition out. But we need to understand who they are.

You get the impression on some occasions that these people join up when they are 19 and stay for life—and of course that is not the case. The median age of the vast bulk of those people who enlist in the Australian Defence Force is around 20; the median age of them leaving the Defence Force is 27. These are not people who have DFRDB or any entitlement to superannuation; these are people in uniform who, the bulk of them, are leaving the Australian Defence Force by the time they are 27. They are the people I am most concerned about.

I know if you are in the Defence Force until you are 45 or 50 or 55, you are being looked after and your family is being looked after. But if you are a member of the Defence Force and you retire out of the Defence Force after two or three tours in Afghanistan, at age 25 or 26 or 27 or 28, then there is a real chance that you might disappear from us. We need to try to inculcate in these serving members the need to stay connected through the Defence Force associations and ex-service organisations such as the RSL so that we can make sure, should something go awry somewhere down the track, that we are looking after them. That is our commitment. I know it is a commitment that is shared by the opposition. Despite the differences we have, and I say this while the shadow minister for veterans' affairs adviser is here—he's a good bloke; he's all right—over issues such as DFRDB and DFRDB superannuation, we are aligned in making sure that we are supporting our veterans and our veterans' community. In conclusion, what I am concerned about is whether or not you support us, whether or not you support the government's proposed savings in this budget. At some time I expect you to tell us.

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