The Navy accepted me as a Cadet Midshipman at 16, five years short of my majority (21 in those days). In so doing, they accepted a degree of responsibility for my care - this is something of an alien concept in an era when minors are no longer recruited in that way, but in the RAN, boys were accepted for officer training up until around 1980, and for training as sailors until 1986, and it's still part of the culture. Strictly speaking they should have dealt with my dental care while I was still a boy, but it got missed.
I specialised in carrier operations, and that was intended to be my long term career path. In that capacity, my teeth wouldn't have mattered. But then they decommissioned our only carrier, and the newly elected Labor government cancelled the replacement. The Navy had to find something else for me to do, or waste a ten year investment in my training.
It was in that context that I found myself posted to London to liaise with the RN.
Incidentally, I would have paid for the dental work myself, but getting it done through the Navy got it done much faster - within a couple of days, rather than within a couple of weeks. And it was done by Naval dentists who would have just been sitting around doing nothing.
I happen to agree that the RAN should do a better job on psychological screening than it does, but it is an imperfect science at best - and once these people are in, is it better to write off tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers money spent training a sailor (hundreds of thousands for a senior sailor) or to spend a little extra to keep them in? For me, the arithmetic is pretty simple.
I've never heard of anybody getting a Porsche - but the RAN has paid cash bonuses of something like $50,000 to keep some people from leaving the Navy. You have to have the people to do the jobs, and that is getting harder and harder all the time. You don't want to lose people you can easily keep.