Defence recruitment shortfalls, culture and patriotism are back in the spotlight, but the criticisms miss some key points

An Australian Army special operations soldier from the 1st Commando Regiment during Exercise Star Leopard in the Geelong region of Victoria from 19 to 21 November 2021. Source: Defence Image Library

Australia’s Defence recruitment is back in the spotlight, with former Army chief Lieutenant General (Ret’d) Peter Leahy AC slamming cultural shifts and waning patriotism for the shortfall. But is there more to it?

Australia’s Defence recruitment is back in the spotlight, with former Army chief Lieutenant General (Ret’d) Peter Leahy AC slamming cultural shifts and waning patriotism for the shortfall. But is there more to it?

If the rhetoric of successive Australian governments since at least 2013 is to be believed, we, as a nation, collectively face the “most dangerous period since the Second World War”, yet for some reason, young Australians aren’t buying it and signing up to defend the nation.

Indeed, just recently, Daily Telegraph journalist James Willis detailed the shortfall of Australians seeking to join the Australian Defence Force, with shortfalls across the three branches significantly impacting plans to reach more than 100,000 by 2040.

As part of this report, Willis highlighted that as it stands, the ADF is approximately 5,000 short of the “workforce requirement”, with 64,000 Australians having applied to join in 2024, a 19 per cent increase on 2023.

This figure would ultimately see an estimated ADF workforce of 58,600 against a stated requirement of just over 63,500, a significant shortfall despite the increase in numbers of Australians stepping forward to defend the nation and the continuing narratives around the deteriorating security environment Australia faces.

As a result, many commentators, policymakers and leading thinkers have been quick to articulate any number of theories about Australia’s lacklustre military recruitment figures in the hopes of encouraging more young Australians to pull on the uniform.

The latest of these is former Chief of Army, LTGEN (Ret’d) Peter Leahy AC in two pieces for The Australian, titled A strong military needs to recruit for purpose, values and loyalty and Entitlement, identity politics lack of pride blamed for slump in ADF recruitment, following the release of a report for the RSL Australia Defence and National Security Committee titled Who will fight for Australia?.

These concerns are further reinforced and unpacked by the co-lead of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, Professor Peter Dean, speaking to The Australian’s Sarah Ison and Rhiannon Down in a piece titled Young ADF recruits ‘miss their phones on submarines’, defence experts warn amid shortage.

LTGEN Leahy identified a number of issues both structural and some less tangible impacting the nation’s recruitment ambitions, ranging from the pay and conditions – both in-service and post-service – professional development opportunities and civilian recognition of qualifications and experience, but by far, LTGEN Leahy’s most “pointed” focus points was the collapse in social cohesion, a declining sense of patriotism, counterbalanced by a sense of entitlement and a fear of hard work and other “woke” ideologies that apparently dominate the minds of many young Australians.

“Military service is about purpose, values and loyalty. It is about service and sacrifice and contributing to something bigger than yourself ... Perhaps the biggest issue about who will fight for Australia is a decline in national pride and a dilution of an Australian identity and culture,” he said.

Meanwhile, Professor Dean highlighted a number of different concerns, saying, “The nature of the community has changed. So you’re asking young people now, for instance, to get on a submarine and go underwater for however long a period of time, completely cut off from their community ... And once upon a time, when there was any landline telephones and letters, that was a different world. Right now, young people are connected 24/7 to everything and everyone, so you’re asking them to step outside of that and do something very, very different.”

But what if there is, as LTGEN Leahy hinted at, “something else at play here” and why does it seem to be so hard to comprehend?

The world we were promised

The Welsh word hiraeth can be defined as longing for a home that no longer exists, or that never was. It is homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed and for many young Australians, this is how they feel about the world we are inheriting.

This feeling of dislocation and disconnection is only equalled by an overwhelming feeling of betrayal and contempt towards the preceding generations, particularly the Boomers, the most vocal proponents of the narrative of lazy, entitled, flabby, soft and weak younger Australians, beginning with Millennials and proceeding down to the very upper limits of Generation Alpha (2013–25).

LTGEN Leahy hinted at this, saying, “Surveys such as the Scanlon 2023 Social Cohesion Report identified a declining sense of pride and belonging in Australia. It also reports a declining trust in government and an increasing concern for equality ... there is a sense of entitlement and self-indulgence abroad suggesting that the nation owes individuals something.

“Identity is often defined by victimhood and has become associated with the wrong that has been done to you. Indeed, there are so many victims out there that we are in danger of running out of offenders.”

Now yes, as a Millennial (Ooohh boo! Hiss!), I am quite happy to concur with LTGEN Leahy, there is some valid criticism of my generation and those who follow us. But let me ask one important question: Who broke the timeless responsibility to pass down a better life to future generations?

Fighting words I know, but true on every measurable metric and conveniently overlooked by a generation who have done nothing to earn the wealth, the prosperity, security and late-life “entitlements” they now expect us to pay for with our own “blood and treasure”.

Simply put, despite your narrative, you fought no civilisational defending wars or presided over any revolutionary technological development, rather you stood on the shoulders of your parents, the Greatest Generation, and reaped the rewards.

Yet now you expect us to make those same sacrifices for you, all under the promise of some variation of “Go to school, get good grades, go to university, you’ll get a good job, work hard and you will be able to buy a house, have a family and enjoy the quality of life we have”, yet we know that is patently false and is, if anything, getting worse.

For many Millennials and those below us, this world we were promised doesn’t exist and you stole it from us. With this in mind, is it any wonder social cohesion, patriotism and a willingness to defend the nation are plummeting, while redistributive doctrines like socialism are on the rise?

Putting things into perspective

By now I know I have a large portion of our readers who fall into the Boomer generation well and truly irate at best, murderous at worst, as they cite 19 per cent interest rates, the “recession Australia had to have”, the 1970s oil shocks, the looming threat of nuclear war and a myriad of other “calamities” as to why they had it harder.

But let’s start with a few hard truths. On the nuclear war front, we currently sit at 89 seconds to midnight. For comparison, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the clock stood at seven minutes to midnight, at the passing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in 1972 during the height of the Cold War, we stood at 12 minutes to midnight, while at the beginning of the Reagan Administration in 1980, the clock stood at seven minutes to midnight, while at the end of the Cold War, the world stood at 17 minutes to midnight.

On the risk of global conflict, whether starting in Europe, the Middle East or Indo-Pacific, I think the proof is well and truly in the pudding and clearly evident for all to see, so you Boomers lose both those arguments, sorry.

Now let’s have a look at the housing, interest rates and the idea of “building a life” as we were promised if we did all the “right things”.

When it comes to buying an average home, young Australians overwhelmingly face an increasingly insurmountable climb, with data compiled by Canstar and Domain showing that in order to purchase an average home on the Central Coast, with a median price of $910,000, the income required for an individual is $157,000 and requires a 20 per cent deposit of $182,000.

For an average home in south-west Sydney, where the median house price is $1.1 million, the income required for an individual is $187,000 and a 20 per cent deposit of $220,000 – just for background, the 20 per cent deposit floor is required if one wanted to avoid mortgage stress or spend more than a third of their income on repayments.

Meanwhile, for the Outer South West of Sydney, where the average house is $945,000, the income required for an individual is $160,000 and a deposit of $189,000, for the Outer West and Blue Mountains, the average home is $930,000, requiring an individual income of $160,000 and a 20 per cent deposit of $186,000.

According to the Domain First-Home Buyer Report 2024, an average couple in Sydney between the ages of 25–34 (prime years for settling down, getting married and starting a family, I might add), in order to save for the 20 per cent on an average wage will take nearly seven years, in Melbourne nearly five and a half years, Adelaide is five years, Brisbane is five years, 2 months, while the national average is four years, nine months.

Just for additional context, in 2024, the median or average Australian salary according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in September 2024 hovered around the $65,000 mark, comparing this at a more granular level, according to Seek.com.au, in the case of the national average for a teacher, the salary ranges between $95,000–$105,000; for a lawyer, the average salary is between $90,000–$110,000; for nurses it is $75,000–$95,000; and for a construction site supervisor, the average salary is $100,000–$120,000.

By comparison, the average house price in 1985 according to Domain was $73,000 against an average household salary of $17,383 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, or about four times the annual average Australian salary, while data compiled by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) stated that house price to income ratio was 2.6 times in the early 1980s, rising to 3.5 times in the early 1990s and early 2000s before skyrocketing to seven times in the early 2010s.

So home ownership has become increasingly difficult and we see that correlating with a drop in Australia’s birthrates and an impact on the natural cycle of maturation, resulting in a seismic cultural shift within young Australians who have devolved into a “behavioural sink” of nihilism, hedonism and lethargy characterised by an arrested adolescence, akin to the “Rat Utopia” experiments conducted between 1958 to 1962 by American ethologist John B Calhoun.

Now what about the job market in Australia?

Well by now the deindustrialisation of Australia is a very well-known fact, with the complexity of the national economy rapidly declining since the 1980s, placing Australia as the most undeveloped, “developed” nation in the world, with Australia ranked 102 in 2022, down from 63rd in 2000 and placed between Yemen (yes, that Yemen) and Senegal, according to the Harvard University Growth Lab’s Atlas of Country & Product Complexity Rankings.

As a result of this hollowing out of the Australian economic base, we have seen a concentration of jobs across shrinking sectors in an economy that is becoming increasingly dependent upon government-adjacent sectors like health, child and aged care, through organs like the increasingly troubled National Disability Insurance Scheme and the public sector, more broadly, with government spending now making up approximately 30 per cent of the national economy.

This comes at a time when Australia’s unemployment rate sits at around 4 per cent and employers face an increasingly contested and competitive employment market, further exacerbated by record levels of migration since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in a doom loop that has also driven an explosion in housing prices while young Australians face ever-increasing hurdles to even entry level employment.

Highlighting this, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) stated in its Faces of Unemployment 2020 report, “Entry-level jobs are increasingly part time or casual jobs. While many people prefer shorter or flexible working hours, this makes it harder for people to transition from unemployment payments as they either have insufficient paid hours or are at risk of losing their casual job. Australia has the second-highest share of casual jobs in the OECD (25 per cent) and third-highest share of part-time jobs...

“In recent years there has been very strong growth in temporary migration, especially students and backpackers, of whom 688,402 had visas with employment rights in 2019 (5.6 per cent of the labour force). Many work in entry-level jobs while studying or travelling.”

Meanwhile, research conducted by Irma Reci of the University of Melbourne has shown that early underemployment, casual employment and joblessness can greatly impact an individual’s career prospects later in life, regardless of how quickly they transition to full-time work down the track.

Reci explained, “Our study ultimately revealed that young people who cycle through short-term jobs and underemployment suffer wage penalties for a significant portion of their careers. These penalties have implications for their lifetime earnings and cumulative wages.”

With all of this in mind, we have to ask, is all of this economic immiseration, social dislocation and collapsing birth rates really worth cheaper televisions, skyrocketing housing prices and national economic decline and how can we expect young Australians to put themselves forward to defend a nation they no longer see as home, and no matter how hard they work, or how well they play by the “rules” they can’t get ahead?

Maybe if we take some time to focus on ourselves first and to re-establish the social contract between generations, we can start to reverse the trend before it becomes too late.

Final thoughts

Worsening economic prospects, shifting global and regional power dynamics, and the increasing politicisation of everyday life have left many Australians feeling disconnected, apathetic and powerless. This growing sense of inevitability around negative outcomes weakens both the public and policymakers, making it harder to address major challenges that seem high in risk and low in reward.

In this environment, it is unsurprising that many Australians – both citizens and decision makers – have become resigned to mediocrity, preferring the comfort of the status quo over the pursuit of ambitious goals.

Reversing this trend requires a national effort, beginning with meaningful engagement and opportunities for young Australians. As the future stewards of the nation, their concerns must be heard and real solutions must be provided to the challenges they face.

Traditional national service models are no longer sufficient. Instead, Australia must implement a system that invests in its youth while enhancing the country’s capacity and global competitiveness.

A modernised, flexible approach to national service – incorporating both military and civilian pathways – could give young Australians a concrete sense of national purpose. Such a program would not only empower individuals but also bolster Australia’s economic and strategic standing in an era of intensifying global competition.

Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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