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‘We need to extend the average time people stay in our defence force,’ says Matt Keough
The defence personnel minister, Matt Keough, has also been talking about that retention and renumeration package for defence.
We need to extend the average time people stay in our defence force.
That does mean it had a vulnerability. We’re looking at moving to more of a mesh-type arrangement of satellites, which provides greater resilience, with a more up-to-date technology, and we’ll be able to deliver the technology faster as well.
We are very much confident that we can meet these targets and that’s because we have properly funded them and we have a plan to get there, which is about really improving the terms of service for those who work in our defence forces.
We’re increasing and expanding the bonuses for continuing on in the defence force. We’re continuing the original retention bonus after your initial service obligation for three years and beyond that. There will be another bonus for people who stay in the defence force after that. And that’s really targeting those who are in their seventh, eighth, ninth years of service, which gets to the middle ranks where we’ve got an issue. And we’re also going to grow the active reserves so there are more opportunities for people in the reserve to do full-time or part-time work in the defence force.
This original plan goes back seven or eight years and it was about having two or three satellites above Australia to deliver that capability. Since then, we have seen technologies develop which can shoot satellites out of the sky but we have also seen technologies develop where you have thousands of micro satellites in a more distributed way providing the same effect and we are seeing that with Starlink above Ukraine.
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