David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Minister for Defence Personnel. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to grow the Australian Defence Force's capabilities in new domains, and why is this important?

Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bean for his important question. Many think about the ADF in terms of land, air and sea, but our capabilities across space and cyber are becoming increasingly important. I was proud today to launch two new direct recruitment roles into the Australian Defence Force—our space operator officer and our space operator specialist roles. These are new direct recruitment roles into our Defence Force, and it means those that are gravitating towards a career in Defence will now be able to consider a career in space. A job that would have been out of this world for us when we were in school now becomes something that is attainable to them.

This means we will be having people join our Defence Force being able to perform vitally important roles across satellite communication, missile detection, intelligence, reconnaissance, weather and environmental observation, and being able to be aware of and observe what's going on in the important domain of space. We always talk about being aware of those other domains and what may be confronting our country during these most difficult of geostrategic circumstances, and it's important that we are able to do that in the space domain as well. And we are doing this in a context where we are growing our Defence Force, with more than 300 different roles available for direct recruitment into our Defence Force now.

This is an incredibly important thing as we seek to grow our Defence Force more broadly, because when we came into government the Defence Force was not growing. It was shrinking. We have gone around delivering by increasing our recruitment to the Defence force, and last financial year we saw the largest recruitment number in 15 years. Importantly, now, we also see that our separation rate is at historic lows. That means, unlike when those opposite were in government, under the Albanese government, we are growing our Defence Force. We're improving our capability across land, sea, air and, importantly, space and cyber as well. We are concentrating on delivery for our national security in government while those opposite are only focused on division and themselves.