My name is Warrant Officer Tony Charles, I’m a gunner from the Royal Regiment Australian Artillery, I currently work in Canberra as an employment management warrant officer. So I look after Arms Corps, Special Forces, and the Public Relations Corps.
I deal with 118 different trades across the five Corps that I deal with, Army-wise there’s absolute hundreds of different jobs you can do, I mean the more diverse ones that we are doing at the moment are Public Relations Corps, which is cameramen, reporters… On top of that, Special Forces, not just your Bayonets, as we call them, which are your warfighters, but we’ve got REME, Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers, we’re looking at water purification units, the people that deal with that, we’re looking at the vehicle mechanics, aircraft mechanics, electronics… aircraft electricians, we look after all of that/
There’s several different types of Aircraft Technician from the Private through to the Warrant Officer class one, the Major, whatever. But every single job that they do is important because it keep the aircraft in the air. We have aircraft technicians that actually sit on a helicopter, some helicopters, to ensure that it does fly correctly. The most important thing for us with their training is that their trained above the standards required, whether it be in a civilian street or within our own training regime, when it comes to safety, defence is 100 percent. And if you don’t get 100 percent then you will not pass your course and then we will have to find him another job, but it’s paramount, they have to know their job inside out, they have to be the professional and I know for a fact out there now that there’s people headhunting, scalping defence trained personnel in certain jobs, i.e. technicians, they’ll take them in because their skill level is seen to be another fifty to eighty percent higher to what’s trained outside. So it’s fairly in depth now, as a Defence Force we’ve aligned ourselves right up now with the civil accreditation schemes, the universities throughout Australia, we take their curriculum, we give it the Army spin, and another ten percent on top, and then we’ll train to that. So when you do leave after technical courses, you are actually doing a civilian university degree at the same time.
I’ve done two trips to East Timor, first in 1999 as a Platoon Sergeant with a INTERFET Rifle company over there, that was ‘99 through 2000, and I’ve just recently come back from East Timor again, as the Task Force Sergeant Major over there with JTF631 which was real interesting actually, very, very interesting, it was great to see the transition from ‘99 when we we’re first there to currently last year 2008 and how the country itself has evolved, how the people have moved forward… probably still a bit of a way to go with East Timor, but the government itself is getting onboard, is doing a very good job, our troops are doing an outstanding job in line with the New Zealanders over there with us which is… we work hand in hand and it’s brilliant. My main job, my primary job over there as the Task Force Sergeant Major was with the Commander, the Brigadier over there, we would oversee the battle group, oversee the Kiwis, visit the government daily, and integrate our plan that we had for the stabilization of the country and fit it in to what the government’s plan was for the future progression of their country. So, it was trying, but good fun.