A dog ate my defence policy.

Somebody stick a fork in this blunder-spud, he’s done. It seemed apparent in the campaign’s first week that Peter Dutton was off the pace. He punched himself in the dick so many times that astute observers (me, basically, being super astute) had to wonder whether he’d done the prep needed for a five week cage fight.

Spoiler, yeah, nah, not a bit of it, mate.

Partly, that was cowardice. He spent the last three years getting rub-fucked weekly by his favourites at Sky News and 2GB, with very little time gloves off in the parking lot out the back of Bunnings with whoever turned up, wanting to take a swing.

He’s not match fit, and it’s a bit late to catch up on that fitness when you’re already in the ring getting punched in the face.

The other prep he’s neglected is policy development. Is there a single headline policy he’s announced yet that hasn’t fallen apart on the first knock?

Most punters are always gonna be more interested in the stuff that directly interests them. That’s the Well, Duh Rule of politics. So everyone had a take on his disastrous work-from-home rollback, because everyone could so easily imagine it changing their lives, and not in a good way. (Unless you happened to be one of the handful of commercial property managers lobbying Dutton to force people back into the city again).

Defence and strategic policy isn’t something most punters think much about beyond the most basic and emotive level. A sort of national hive mind check-in. “Are we cool, are we safe, what’s that Chinese naval warfare group doing over there?”

It’s always struck me as odd, this disconnect between the primal nature of security policy and how little it figures in our daily lives. Survival is as fundamental a need as it gets. It’s right there in the reptilian hindbrain, alongside breathing and not licking the hot stovetop. Yet, because the consequences of failure outside of wartime are rarely immediate, rarely visible, and almost never local, defence policy is a perfect stage for political theatre. No one is stuck in a grinding three-hour commute from far western Sydney to some shitty minimum wage job in town because their Collins-class sub sprung a leak this morning. Nobody is cancelling a holiday to Bali because Beijing deployed the 625th Brigade to Yunnan Province with a hundred and fifty road-mobile, dual-capable DF26 ballistic missiles.

Security policy is all very serious, but safely, happily, completely abstract from most voters’ lived experience. This means that politicians can wrap themselves in all the flags and go wild with warfighter cosplay, without ever having to show their work.

And what we’ve learned these last few weeks about Peter Dutton is that he really hates to show his work, because… wait for it… he hasn’t done the fucking work in the first place.

So this week, he dropped a defence policy that may have been written by a GPT trained exclusively on Tom Clancy blurbs. Not whole Tom Clancy books, mind you. Just the back cover blurbs because Dutton is so fucking lazy and ill-prepared that even when the homework is ordering in some Chinese and watching The Hunt for Red October, he still couldn’t be arsed doing it.

The plan? Raise military spending to 2.5% of GDP in five years, with ‘a long-term goal’ of hitting 3%.

That’s not a plan, Spud.

It’s wishcasting.

But this is less about defending the country than it is about defending the Coalition’s reputation after ten years of strategic muppetry. These guys somehow catfished everyone into believing they were the natural custodians of national security, even though the legacy of their last decade in power was, to quote Allan Behm from the Australia Institute, “one of the most serious capability gaps Australia has ever faced.” That’s policy-nerd speak for “We spent all of your money on a Kickstarter Call of Duty mod with a cool glow-in-the-dark plastic helmet and a launch window optimistically set for Neveruary 2047.”

Dutts is now talking about dropping another $21 billion of panic spending on… some stuff, which he can’t tell you about right now, because it’s… secret war stuff. And he can’t say how he’ll pay for it, because that’s… secret spendy magic. And maybe he can score a squadron of F-35s going cheap, because everyone else is getting the hell out of the market for US defence equipment, because, well, let’s not talk about that.

Or, alternately, maybe that’s the only thing we should be talking about when we talk about defence policy. Because our senior alliance partner and preferred arms bazaar is busy having a psychotic break from liberal democracy and may decide that it quite likes being a lowbrow Mad Max reboot held together by sports betting apps, QAnon vibes, and the meth-addled rush of eating itself alive.

Nobody wants to touch that, understandably. Not Albo, not Dutts. And yeah-fine-okay, I’m sure the Greens would love to go there, but they’re not serious applicants for the job. And that is the job, innit? Going there. Defence policy is about imagining the bad things that could happen and planning for them, not just dreaming up new ways to spend hundreds of billions of dollars buying a couple of thousand votes in Adelaide.

Making the current situation worse, the Bad Thing isn’t just something that could happen. It’s already happened. The alliance system on which Australian security rested for eighty years is dead. ANZUS, like NATO, is a zombie alliance. And nobody in the political class, none of them, can claim to be taking the job seriously until they step up, admit that what we can all see with our own eyes is happening, and explain what what fuck they’re gonna do about it.

Have a nice Anzac Day.