It’s highly unlikely, of course, that Scott Morrison will bring on the contest before May. Polling consistently demonstrates that the government faces almost certain defeat the minute it heads to the polls. His preferred strategy – adopting a ‘goofy dad’ persona and highlighting his own personality – has backfired badly. Voters want a PM who will take us confidently and securely into the future, not someone who rephrases complex issues to offer up simplistic answers.

The revelation is slowly dawning that voters expect more from government than regurgitated sound-bites from focus groups and techniques lifted from Marketing 101.

If for no other reason than sheer desperation, the government will (finally) have to debate policy.

One of the coalition’s strengths is supposedly national security, so how this will play out in the campaign?

In terms of conventional armed forces there’s no comparison. During Labor’s last year of office (2012/13) our overall defence spending fell to a nadir of $24.4 billion; a near 70-year low, just 1.6 percent of GDP.

And yet so what? We weren’t invaded and there was a financial crisis to deal with at the time. The coalition will, nonetheless, spend a great deal of time harping on this issue, suggesting it reveals Labor’s natural proclivity to under-fund the forces. They’re probably right however that’s got more to do with Stephen Smith’s failure, as minister, to sell the idea that expenditure could be deferred. There was no genuine security requirement to boost the forces.

We’re in a much better financial position today, but the government will still expect credit for spending all that money. It’s $36.4 billion now and forecast to rise to 1.98 percent of GDP by 2020/21 – so close to the target of two percent that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Dr Marcus Hellyer correctly describes this as, “essentially a $400-million rounding error”.

Oh, to have so much money I don’t need to worry about a mere half billion or so!

Spending on defence is, naturally, just an attempt to buy an insurance policy. We hope it will provide security, by deterring anyone else from attacking us.

That’s no problem because we can easily afford the current premium. We spend nearly as much on the forces as Indonesia ($8.9 billion), Thailand ($6.1 billion), Vietnam ($4.3 billion), Malaysia ($4.1billion) and the Philippines ($2.7 billion) combined, but that’s changing. We used to spend way more than all of them and Singapore ($10.2 billion) as well. It’s not that our regional partners are spending more. The simple issue is that while our economy’s big, others are growing faster. We simply can’t keep up. That’s why defence spending is increasingly becoming an irrelevant marker.

At one time, for example, we spent more on military hardware than China. Today its military budget is $150 billion. That’s still dwarfed by the US (which pumps a massive $602 billion into its forces) but the key point is that total spending no longer cuts it as a marker of security.

The government’s announced, with appropriate fanfare, a plan to build nine future frigates in Adelaide. Yay! However by the time the last one is launched it will be searching for sea room in a sea crowded with hundreds of potential adversaries. But if Labor wants to win the expenditure debate it will need to vigorously prosecute it with a careful and nuanced argument. There’s no sign of this at the moment. Instead of asking if we’re getting value for the money being spent on equipment, Labor’s spokesman Richard Marles seems determined to smother the debate so that defence doesn’t become an issue during the campaign.

Defence expert Paul Dibb first introduced the concept of relating capability options to GDP back in the 1980’s, before ASPI analysts Mark Thompson and Andrew Davies re-injected the concept back into our domestic political debate. Being intelligent academics, they always put caveats and qualifications around the numbers. But nuance doesn’t play well in politics, and thoughtful warnings don’t cut it in the media, so the two percent figure has triumphed in the popular mind. The focus is now all on the bottom line.

Even though nobody has ever suggested that the amount we spend, alone, is enough to guarantee our security, the focus is all on the bottom line. This results, as we shall see in the coming months, in an impoverished political debate.

The irony is Parliament currently possesses real experts who are genuinely capable of having this debate, it’s just they’re being told to shut up while the party apparatchiks push the simplistic messages. The Liberal’s Senator Jim Molan has been dropped to an unwinnable fourth place on the NSW Liberal Senate ticket (despite a huge personal vote last time around). Labor’s Mike Kelly is gallantly converting once marginal Eden Monaro into Labor territory, but he’s got more to contribute and should be on the front-bench, rather than standing in the background.

It’s people like these I want to hear from instead of listening to the mindless, repetitive slogans of the party leaders. There are real policy issues that need to be addressed and reducing everything to dollars, cents and percentage of GDP isn’t a satisfactory answer.

This is unfortunate because it’s not the spend that counts, it’s the security it buys.

Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.