Review into the treatment of women at the Australian Defence Force ...

Chapter 7: ADFA’s Structure and Staffing – Recommendations 11-15A dialogue has opened up between ADFA and the Career Management Agencies and the Auditwelcomes these changes. However, changes in the selection process need to be embedded in thesystems and cycles of the Career Management Agencies and not rest on the relationships betweenparticular career managers and the COMDT. The Audit strongly advocates that the COMDT should havethe right to veto in staff selections. However, if the authority for decision making regarding staff selectionis to remain unchanged, it is vital that consultation and selection interviews occur before postingdecisions are made.Careers and Promotions BoardsThe Review observed that:There was a wide recognition from junior staff, senior ADFA leadership, and Career ManagementAgency staff that ADFA is not a prized posting. In particular, time at ADFA is not seen tocontribute positively to career development. There is a perception that ADFA could lead to‘degradation’ in the technical skills required for career progression, particularly in the Navy andAir Force. 24The Review argued that this perception needs to change in order to attract staff with ‘skills in dealingwith young people, assessing risks to their safety and assisting in their development as the nextgeneration of ADF officers’. 25There is some evidence that there are changes in this area:In our promotion boards now, one of the areas looked at is have you had a training role posting.We’ve got to make sure that that’s reflected in the promotions and subsequent postings and thatit doesn’t count against you. 26provision of high quality staff to ADFA is a high priority for Army and we are providing high qualitystaff…we will forcibly post if we need to. It’s a positive career step. 27If you go to the Air Force Promotion Board Guidance the Chief actually puts an emphasis onpeople who’ve been in educational training environment. 28In addition to perceptions, each Service has different career models and structural issues with regardsto posting staff to ADFA:Most of our young [Navy] officers are on seagoing paths early on and the posting guys actuallycall it the gap year. 29 They look for people after you’ve got your primary qualification one or twoyears at sea and then a year out of the seagoing environment to be a Flag Lieutenant for anAdmiral or a DO at the college or these sort of positions. Then they flow on to the next level oftime at sea. In most of our cases, it’s the PWO (Principle Warfare Officer) course which comeswith a pay rise now. So we’re finding a lot of them go ‘Well, I don’t want that year out, I want togo straight on the PWO course because that gives me my pay rise and I’ll crack on’. 30We [Air Force] don’t see it as a place to put the best fighter pilot, the best shooter. We wouldrather put in a more mature educator, someone with background in a training environment. Thathas been our focus for a long time. We tend to load more admin logistics and leadership andmanagement experience folk into there rather than operators. 31The Army career models for officers and soldiers neatly fits time posted into a training institution.So for Divisional Officers at Captain level, they will spend six years as Captain…Either a three ora two year slot is normally reserved for an instructional posting, whether that be a corp school,the Royal Military College, a recruit training centre or indeed ADFA…The benefit we have is that52