Mr. Mark Ecock:

As Mr. Richardson already pointed out, there are two phases of the medical, namely, the part one and the part two. The proposal from the Reserve Defence Force Representative Association, RDFRA, was to outsource the medical completely so that we would have the ability to send our applicants to complete the medical. We still have a solution there, but we have yet to see whether those 600 people who have been allocated for part two medicals will bear fruit. Also, we are still sending our members down to do part one. Again, we are not being given a complete solution by the Department of Defence. We are proposing that it will be completely outsourced and that both part one and part two will be outsourced. Then we can obviously speed things up and our applicants can be sent through this. It will be completely outsourced. We are awaiting the PDF personnel who are potentially doing medicals for overseas service, etc. They will constantly get priority for those medicals over us.

As the anecdotal evidence Mr. Richardson referenced indicates, we are en routeto take part in Part 1 medicals and, for whatever reason, they are cancelled, potentially in favour of priorities that happen on the day. We just want a system in place that will allow us to get our applicants through the system as quickly as possible. The applicants we see are high quality. We are putting them into a system that potentially takes 12 months, which does not look professional from our perspective. Those applicants will not wait around for 12 months.

As part of my role in the RDF, I am one of those personnel who is front and centre as a recruitment liaison officer. I see the applicants who are coming through. They are high-quality individuals. They have third-level qualifications and many of them have specialist skills that are of distinct relevance, including skills in cybersecurity, and medical and engineering skills. These people are high-quality individuals who are applying from different backgrounds. We are losing out on this resource of people who are not willing to wait 12 months for their applications to be processed. The people that get through are very resilient and stand with us in the sense that they are willing to wait around for 12 months to get through the whole system, which is not acceptable. We obviously want a proper solution in place for medicals.