You can often smell the zeal emanating from Labor Party defence ministers who feel an added responsibility to show they understand the perils over the horizon.
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And with that olfactory sensation comes another nagging suspicion - that their target audience is not really us the voters, but rather a particularly male and instinctively hawkish cohort of defence industry types, from officers and analysts to the defence and editorial writers in the broadsheets and tabloids.
This, historically, is real men's business - preparing to fight, threatening to fight, and most of all, showing you will fight anywhere and anytime. The game is projecting power and it invariably leads to vast unprovable punts, huge delays, crippling cost blowouts, and fat profits.
Ever-mounting risk is its fuel, debt and disappointment, its sulphurous exhaust.
At the National Press Club on Wednesday, that sense was there again. In the audience were the past, present and future CDFs, top brass from the three services, defence bureaucrats including the secretary Greg Moriarty, big American and multinational arms suppliers, and a battalion of other serious folk.
Civilians with sensible haircuts and even more sensible shoes, and uniformed personnel with sharply creased but slightly too-short trousers.
In the 1980s it was Labor's Kim "Bomber" Beazley who loved his defence "kit" just a tad too much and never missing the chance to be pictured in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, or protruding incongruously from the top of a tank.
In 2024, we get Defence Minister Richard "Mauler" Marles spruiking a steep increase in defence spending of $50 billion over 10 years - a Shangri La by which our outlay will hit 2.4 per cent of GDP.
That's big. But is it big enough?
Not for the Coalition which hastily criticised the Mauler's enthusiasm for "impactfully projecting" Australian lethality in the region as both woolly and deceptive - in fact, according to defence spokesperson Andrew Hastie, it hides a cut of $80 billion.
Not balanced, not focused, but weaker, Hastie charged decrying the Mauler's language of "impactful projection" as meaningless to ordinary people compared to his preference for "asymmetric capabilities" enabling us to tear the arm off an aggressor (ahem, China) who came too close.
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Because Hastie does indeed have the community's ear, you'll know what he's talking about, but I don't.
Granted though, "ripping their bloody arms off" has a certain cultural cut-through - especially to the over 60s among us.
Cleared by Dutton's office to re-task a proven Howardism on interest rates, Andrew "Aunty Jack" Hastie even committed the Coalition to always spend more than Labor on defence. Scientific, no?
At last, something we can all understand - an actual arms race ...against ourselves.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
