Ms Jacqui McCrum:

I thank Senator Craughwell very much. To go back to 2021, this was an internal report, as the Chair has said. It is not a published report. It was produced as a result of the reduction in service in 2016. It was a joint report. It was done by both the civil and the military sides and was returned to the project sponsors somewhere around December 2021. In February 2022 we had the Report of the Commission on the Defence Forces, which I spoke of earlier. That, as the Senator knows, is a comprehensive report with 130 recommendations. We had that report two months later. Many of the actions that were in the internal report were subsumed into the Commission on the Defence Forces and we are working through those recommendations at this point in time.

The specific action was taken on the cadet entry scheme and the commissioning from the ranks but in an overall context, if you look at all the positives I mentioned earlier for Defence Forces personnel they would have affected the Air Corps as well. I mean the starting salaries, the increase in recruitment age, the mandatory retirement age-----