Mr. Neil Richardson:

On how to recruit up to the intended strength of the Reserve, which is 3,800 Army reservists, 400 Naval Service reservists and then 200 Air Corps or air force reservists - which is, say, 4,500 all in - there are two ways of doing it. One is to recruit new personnel. We start filling up the ranks of privates and sailors at that level, as well as expanding the number of instructors we have. If we do not have enough non-commissioned officers, NCOs, and officers who actually train these people, it becomes a problem. You could have 2,000 people ready to be trained and we would have no one qualified to train them. Internally, within military management, there is an awareness of that two-tier priority: to train instructors and get them ready through promotion courses and other upskilling courses within the Defence Forces, and then recruit new people. Both of them are coming along quite well. We had 300 recruits in last year and a series of promotion courses for currently serving personnel to qualify them to train these new people. As long as these two things keep going side by side, we will hopefully be working, or at least tracking broadly, towards our target of 4,500 personnel by the end of the decade. The problem is what has happened in the last couple of weeks. We are turning around, particularly to the instructor cohort and saying that a lot what they are doing is reverting to being unpaid. To the new recruit cohort, we are turning around and saying to them that when they qualify and train as a private soldier, there will be a lot of stuff they will have to do that is unpaid. That is a bit of a morale blow and a disincentive. On the actual mechanics of moving towards our strength, that is working okay internally.