Foreign citizens with permanent residency in Australia will soon be able to serve in Australia’s armed forces, as part of an effort to boost sluggish recruitment.<\/p>\n
But the government has been forced to clarify confusion around its plans after different ministers spelled out differing policies on exactly who was eligible.<\/p>\n
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) is facing a shortage of about 4400 workers.<\/p>\n
Defence Minister Richard Marles said expanding applications to include eligible permanent residents was “essential” to meeting Australia’s security challenges in the years ahead.<\/p>\n
From July, New Zealanders who are permanent residents and have been living in Australia for at least a year before applying will be able to join the ADF.<\/p>\n
Applicants must also not have served in a foreign military in the preceding two years, and be able to attain citizenship.<\/p>\n
From January 2025, citizens from the United States, United Kingdom and Canada who meet the same criteria will be eligible, so long as they meet required security checks.<\/p>\n
Those three countries, along with Australia and New Zealand, make up the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh laid out a different plan, suggesting recruitment would be opened to all countries from January.<\/p>\n
That left his senior minister, Richard Marles, to clear up the confusion in parliament, suggesting expansion to other countries was a possibility in future – but not an immediate prospect.<\/p>\n
“We are, in walking down this path, doing so in a careful, slow and calibrated way,” he said.<\/p>\n
“From the 1st of July, with those conditions in place … if you are from New Zealand you’ll be able to join the defence force.<\/p>\n
“From the 1st of January, that will be extended to other ‘Five Eyes’ countries. In the future, we are having an eye to the Pacific. That is what we are doing.”<\/p>\n
Keogh also earlier suggested that once people had served in the ADF for at least 90 days they would be eligible for Australian citizenship, and would be expected to apply to become Australian citizens<\/p>\n
Clarification has been sought from the defence minister’s office as to whether or not that is correct.<\/p>\n
Opposition leader Peter Dutton slammed the new policy and the confusion surrounding it, labelling it the “biggest change” to defence recruitment in Australian history.<\/p>\n
“We’ve got Minister Marles at odds with Minister Keogh, we don’t know the detail,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We know from the director-general of ASIO that we operate in an environment where there is an incredibly high level of foreign interference – that’s the case in Five Eyes countries more generally.<\/p>\n
“We don’t know the full detail of how many people … it’s a dog’s breakfast.”<\/p>\n
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Foreign citizens with permanent residency in Australia will soon be able to serve in Australia’s armed forces, as part of an effort to boost sluggish recruitment. But the government has been forced to clarify confusion around its plans after different ministers spelled out differing policies on exactly who was eligible. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10099,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10097\/revisions\/10099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}