Want Gen Z to sign up to the army? Give them $50,000 for a house deposit

When the federal government announced last week that foreigners will be able to serve under the Australian flag, Keirin Joyce wasn’t overly impressed.

The 46-year-old drone warfare expert has spent most of his life in the Australian Defence Force: 24 years in the army and four years in the air force. He has been deployed to Timor-Leste, Afghanistan and Iraq. While Joyce thinks the government’s plan to allow enlistment for permanent residents from Australia’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners – New Zealand, Canada, the United States and United Kingdom – is sensible, he says that ultimately it won’t make a big difference.

The Australian Defence Force is struggling to meet its recruitment targets.

The difference Joyce refers to, and which the ADF is seeking to address, is its ongoing personnel issues; the ADF is 4400 people short of its recruitment target and is battling to maintain its current staffing levels.

That’s a problem given the government wants to increase the number of uniformed personnel by 30 per cent – or 18,500 people – by 2040. Without more recruits, the ADF will struggle to muster enough pilots to fly its F-35 fighter jets or crew the nuclear-powered submarines Australia is acquiring under the AUKUS pact.

The government expects its new scheme to add an extra 350 people a year to the military, far from what’s needed. The inaugural national defence strategy released in April found, “Defence must fundamentally transform its recruitment and retention systems to achieve its workforce priorities.”

So what should the government be doing? According to Joyce, now a visiting senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, one way to land a knockout blow would be through housing.

Wing Commander Keirin Joyce says generous housing policies are the key to boosting defence recruitment numbers. 

After returning from East Timor, Joyce bought a three-bedroom miner’s cottage in Townsville for $77,000 in 2002 – an amount that sounds ludicrously low by today’s standards. At the time, the median house price in Australia was about $320,000; today it is close to $950,000.

Joyce bought the house with the help of the ADF’s Home Purchase Assistance Scheme, which provides military personnel with a one-off lump sum payment after one year of service to make buying property easier. That figure has been stuck at $16,949 before tax for at least a decade, even as property prices around the country have skyrocketed.

Based on conversations with his four children, aged 14 to 23, Joyce says that like many other young Australians they despair at surging home values and feel despondent about their prospects of success in an overheated property market. He argues that bold government action like increasing the scheme to a $50,000 lump sum after one year served would help entice young Australians into the military.

Illustration: Dionne Gain

The government is aware that housing could play a crucial role in solving its recruitment crisis. Soon after coming to office, Labor expanded access to the Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme, which provides home loan subsidies between $500 to $1000 a month to defence personnel. It announced a review into defence housing last April to identify new opportunities to enable home ownership for personnel.

“It is clear that current Defence home ownership benefits are struggling to keep pace with the Australian property market and meet the changing needs of our service personnel and their families,” the government said at the time.

No policy changes have yet been released as a result of the review, which has not been made public.

But Joyce maintains that for serious change, the government should go further. When living on a base or barracks, defence personnel typically have to pay subsidised rent. “They should get that for free,” he says. “Why should our soldiers be charged to live in a barracks or on a base?”

As academics Robert Hoffmann and Maria Teresa Beamond wrote in The Conversation this week, data shows that in 1981, 69 per cent of Australians aged in their 20s said they were willing to fight for their country. By 2018, that figure had dropped to 44 per cent. Similarly, 42 per cent of twentysomethings said they were “very proud” to be Australian in 2018 – the lowest proportion of any age group in any year since the survey began.

Such sentiments do not bode well for a rush of enrolments. Joyce says the ADF should lure young people into the military by offering them something most are desperate for: a grasp on the housing ladder. A sense of purpose can be instilled later. As Paul Keating famously advised, quoting his mentor Jack Lang, always bet on the horse named self-interest because at least you know it will be trying.

For the government to really fix the shortage issue long-term, tinkering at the edges won’t be enough. Policies on defence housing will need to be creative, strikingly generous and aggressively marketed to potential recruits through a major advertising campaign.

As well as allowing foreigners to enlist, the government has taken other steps to address the personnel crisis. The ADF’s one-size-fits-all fitness test – which required recruits to be able to complete dozens of sit-ups, push-ups and sprints in a set time – has been dropped, and it is now easier for people with medical conditions to serve in the military. Having orthodontic braces, bad acne or minor mental health issues will no longer necessarily rule you out of a military career.

The government also announced a $50,000 bonus will become available to personnel should they serve four years.

Ultimately, this focus on financial incentives jars with the view that a military career should represent a higher ideal of national service. But it’s clear that patriotism alone will not convince enough members of Gen Z to enlist.

Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent.

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