It’s also upgrading assisted study (giving personnel finance assistance or time off for educational pursuits) and expanding its health program to cover extra services, and Marles was upfront in saying Australia will look to recruit non-citizens from neighbouring countries (the Pacific Islands appear the most likely to be targeted).

Meanwhile, the Coalition is talking about not moving defence personnel around the country (or the world) on postings as often as another way of enticing people to sign up and to stay.

Extra money, better healthcare, guaranteed work and opportunities for study all seem reasonable ways to bring in new recruits. But as military strategy expert William Leben recently noted, wooing young Australians into the armed services is not easy.

“If you ask a lot of people in their early 20s, they will, for good reason, tell you that the biggest security problems facing the country have to do with climate change,” he told a national security conference. “They’re not particularly interested in geopolitics.”

The recruitment targets Marles was talking about are what Defence needs to meet the government’s – and the opposition’s – goal of increasing the number of people in uniform by a third by 2040.

This includes specialists, such as those who will be required to deal with the nuclear-powered submarines at the heart of the AUKUS agreement.

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By one estimate, Australia will need 8000 people with nuclear training to build and service the new submarines that are scheduled to hit our waters some time in the 2040s. But at present, there’s only a tiny number of people with those skills and requisite background.

This at a time when the Coalition is proposing a network of nuclear power plants across the country. Putting to one side the construction costs (there’s not one being built in the developed world that’s on cost and on schedule), the biggest problem is that Australia simply doesn’t have the nuclear workforce to service the industry. Even if we were to begin training up people now, that is still a long, long way down the track. Not to mention the market competition that would develop between the power industry and the naval forces for these specialists.