It will be easier for serving members and veterans of the Australian defence forces to enter the housing market after the federal government passed a multimillion-dollar expansion to the Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme.
Originally established in 2008 under former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a way to help retain serving defence personnel, the scheme’s $46.2 million (US$32.6 million) expansion will mean that from Jan. 1, 2023, serving members will be able to access the scheme two years earlier, and reserve members will be able to access it four years earlier.
Additionally, veterans who have served on or after July 1, 2008, will be able to access the scheme at any stage after they have left the service. Previously, veterans could only access the scheme if they had left the service in the previous five years.
Under the change, a currently serving defence member who has served for two years and has a mortgage of $500,000 is able to receive a monthly subsidy of $422 based on a median interest rate of 5.49 percent.
Meanwhile, a veteran who has a mortgage of $850,000 will now be eligible to access a monthly subsidy payment of $845 under the aforementioned interest rate.
Assistant Minister for Defence Matt Thistlethwaite said the government views the expansion as an investment that will help ADF members and veterans with cost-of-living pressures to achieve the great Australian dream of home ownership.
“We know that Australians are struggling with the cost of housing, and our ADF members and veterans are not immune from that,” he said.
“That is why we have expanded the Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme by making it much more accessible.
Looking to Recruit
The announcement comes after the Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy said on Nov. 15 that Defence is looking to recruit thousands of personnel by 2040, and that the department would be looking to ensure pay and conditions are competitive.“Recruitment is critical,” Conroy said. “We need to more than double the number of submariners we will have to staff our nuclear-propelled submarines. That’s going to be a significant challenge. So, recruitment for both the ADF, recruitment for the Department of Defence, and recruitment for defence industry is a real challenge.
Streamlining Recruitment
Meanwhile, Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie has called for more streamlined military recruitment.Hastie has called on the Albanese government to create a quicker recruitment process for the Australian defence forces.
“We must make onboarding faster,” Hastie said. “Last year as Assistant Minister for Defence, I discovered that it took 292 days from first contact to recruit training.
“Far too much time is wasted; we need to accelerate the process, or good people will be lost to other sectors of the economy.”
Hastie wants to see defence recruitment cut the red tape, which he sees as “bureaucratic barriers imposed by risk-averse gatekeepers.”
“I’ve met and heard from too many kids who get turned away because they’ve had a shoulder injury from footy, a food allergy, or were medicated for ADHD in their childhood. All talented kids, motivated and open to grow, yet turned away because of risk culture. Not every job of the future requires the fitness of a fighter pilot or the endurance of an infantry soldier,” Hastie said.
He called for the government to move beyond the one-size-fits-all model and select recruits “who might not tick all the boxes but who can get the job done.”
