Our country has never been more vulnerable, and the world has rarely been more volatile. China, our most likely adversary, has a ready defence force of about four million troops.

There are many reasons why so few young people have signed up to the defence force.

BOGANS

For a start, they are taught at school that their country is a genocidal colony full of bogans who are destroying the planet with their V8 cars and plastic straws.

If I was fighting age, I wouldn’t defend that kind of nation either.

And those are just the Australian-born citizens. More than 10 per cent of Australian residents are here on temporary visas, and have only an economic – not a cultural or emotional – affinity with the country.

They will be leaving their Ubers at the airport at the first whiff of grapeshot.

Regardless, the ADF must still find new recruits. So it has come up with two cunning plans.

First, it has released an app to help fat, unhealthy potential recruits get fit enough to squeeze into the force’s most accommodating XL uniform.

Being healthy used to be its own reward, but not anymore.

This generation of phone-obsessed participation-award winners needs an incentive to get off the couch – and Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh knows it.

UNIQUE

“Being paid to stay fit and healthy is one of the many benefits of joining the ADF, along with a range of other experiences, great pay and unique conditions,” he says.

The ADF will also now admits foreigners into its ranks.

Citizens from Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the United States can become Diggers on the condition that they also apply to become citizens of Australia, which will duly be granted after only 90 days’ service.

This is remarkably naive. As the elites in Britain are currently discovering to their enormous surprise, just because you have a British passport doesn’t mean you don’t also want to rape as many of its young women as you can, destroy its institutions and burn the country to the ground.

By historic standards, these are unfailingly reliable signs of being a military adversary.

And as the late New Orleans terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar demonstrated in the US, joining the military and hating one’s fellow citizens are not as mutually exclusive as they once were.

Despite everything, Australia is still one of the freest and richest nations on Earth. To give away citizenship this way is like St Peter opening the gates of Paradise to OJ Simpson because he had a spotless driving record.

This whole strategy is selling the country far too short. The fact that people need to be cajoled into moving to, then defending, a country like Australia should be yet another reminder to our politicians that something seismic has happened to Australia since the last time it found itself in a major conflict.