Our taxes at work at Summernats - the Australian "Armygeddon"

a lot of families have several generations in the military, and have good incomes.

and many country people are happy for their kids to join the military (or the kids are happy to get out of whoop whoop and get paid.)

Truth is, most of middle-high Australia wouldn’t enlist ourselves or our children (whether you have them or not) into the Army. Much like in America, the best people to recruit as pawns are people from lower-to-mid-socio-economic sections of society where employment prospects of the Army (tax free income etc.) seem like heaven.

side note… and Chic Henry doesn’t understand why his event isn’t making profit with his target audience?

Absolutely, it’s cheap advertising. Considering it ends up costing millions of dollars doing media campaigns, this is probably well worth the money spent as it’s actually attracted people to the job.

Mind you, I don’t think “unleashed its latest recruiting tool” is accurate, it’s been around for the last four Summernats.

Here is a link to a Crappy Times article. It has a quote from the CO of the Army Trade School that basically says, 19 or 20 percent of last years motor mechanic apprentices found out about the jobs by seeing Armygeddon at a motor sports event.

Considering it is getting harder to recruit and retain members of the ADF, I say if it works then keep doing it.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/murrumbateman-look-out-theres-incoming/1398438.aspx

Crap! I meant brought!

I’ve also seen in the US how they use online gaming to drive recruitment, so they’re ticking all the right boxes over there as far as getting young males on board. I think the geeks will be a bit pissed when they get to Afghanistan or Iraq, get shot to pieces and realise they can’t ‘respawn’.

http://www.goarmy.com/downloads/games.jsp

Better Summernats fans than me. Surely they would have been more impressed if the army guys bought some explosives and such and showed off their real equipment.

i think you will find this car has been around for a number of years, and has just been given a tart up.

This ‘vehicle’ has been modyfied and maintained by Army mechanical engineering apprentices over the past three or four years, so it probably gives them something interesting to do after sweating over all the other ‘boring’ vehicles they have to work on all day long.

poptop said :

So the idea is to
– recruit from the Summernats demographic,
– train some of them to use a range of weapons,
– thin the herd in foreign countries and
– re-release them into the wild?

Sounds like the prequel to First Blood.

BTW – lots of Summernats 22 net-videos appearing now. I particularly liked this brief snippet.

poptop, the word you should be looking for is cannon fodder. seasoned troops usually survive. new recruits have a limited shelf life.

So the idea is to
– recruit from the Summernats demographic,
– train some of them to use a range of weapons,
– thin the herd in foreign countries and
– re-release them into the wild?

Sounds like the prequel to First Blood.

BTW – lots of Summernats 22 net-videos appearing now. I particularly liked this brief snippet.

It’s a recruiting tool, probably a lot cheaper and I’d be willing to bet more successful than the prime time ads the ADF run. You get many thousand 17 – 35 year old men congregating at summernats, so you have a captive audience of your prime audience(true, they might be bogans but PBI has to come from somewhere).

The Police in QLD had a Commodore kitted out as a drag car for the same purpose, fairly common and widely accepted practice I believe.

Not just defence, isn’t there usually an AFP street machine at the Nats?

Holden Caulfield said :

farnarkler said :

It’s nothing new. The US army has been sposoring a top fuel dragster for decades.

How does that affect “our” taxes?

I think it’s meant to be a suggestion that this is an acceptable (and not particularly uncommon) marketing method deployed by other Defence organisations around the world.

Thus if one accepts that the Defence Forces should market themselves, this is an acceptable use of ‘our’ taxes.

farnarkler said :

It’s nothing new. The US army has been sposoring a top fuel dragster for decades.

How does that affect “our” taxes?

It’s nothing new. The US army has been sposoring a top fuel dragster for decades.

It’s very smilar to a US Marine recruitment strategy I observed. They brought along to the winter X-Games (in vermont, then) a huge Hummer, painted shiny red paint, with all the blingy add-ons, and the biggest car stereo I’d seen (this was in 2001) thumping away. They got people to do various physical tasks (chin ups, etc) to get Marine schwag (mostly lanyards and things) but any army-aged males and females were quickly bailed up by Marine recruiters, wanting to talk them into joining up. The Hummer was evidently soem kind of bait to the kinds of people who might join the Marines.

Does that little barrier look strong enough to anyone else to prevent this beast from crushing the people in blue standing behind it (not to mention the camera person!)? Did they not have an incident last year when a car hit some people due to inadequate barriers?