Peter Dutton addresses the National Press Club in Canberra (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

As if on cue for Defence Minister Peter Dutton, China sent 27 jets into Taiwan’s self-declared air defence zone yesterday, giving a little substance to Dutton’s apocalyptic warnings on Friday that we were in a 1930s-style environment and China was on a quest to take not just Taiwan but other territories — and control states like Australia.

All of that serves Dutton’s interests: not merely to hype an existential threat to Australia — Beijing’s nuclear missiles could destroy every Australian city, he made a point of reminding us — for the election but to paint himself as the hard man needed in these difficult times. Much harder than a prime minister best known these days for not being believable on any subject.

Normally it is incumbent on ministers to confirm what their prime minister says on an issue. But it was Morrison being asked to back Dutton after Friday’s address, with the PM declaring Dutton was “spot on”.

Morrison isn’t the only one with a credibility problem, however. Both he and Dutton were senior members of the Abbott and Turnbull governments when they signed a free trade deal with China and welcomed Xi Jinping to Australia, and then sought to enforce an extradition treaty between Australia and China in 2017.

Now, just a few years later, China is Hitler’s Germany or imperial Japan, and we’re getting ready to send submarines, not suspects. As if anyone was under the misapprehension when Xi was welcomed into federal Parliament that his regime wasn’t a brutal tyranny engaged in systematic interference abroad, territorial expansion and indifference to international laws.

Except — and here’s where the credibility problem continues — we’re not sending submarines because we’re not building any.

Dutton is sabre-rattling with just a couple of Collins-class subs to potter about the region for the next 30 to 40 years. By the 2050s they’ll be about as useful as an actual sabre, but we’ll still be waiting for whatever design that may or may not emerge in 2023. If we’re lucky we can send one to join in the fray if China decides to invade Taiwan on the 100th anniversary of Chiang Kai-shek’s flight there.

Dutton’s comments are all made in the context that Australia is joined at the hip with the United States — and that it would be “inconceivable” that Australia wouldn’t join the US in defending Taiwan. The inconceivability of that possibility makes perfect sense for the party that gave us the colossal failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts where it was “inconceivable” that Australia wouldn’t join the US in disastrous military interventions that produced only defeat, misery, the empowerment of even more radical and violent groups and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

China’s foreign military record of the past two decades looks relatively innocuous compared with that of the US and, for that matter, Australia. An unbiased observer might think we’re far more likely to engage in invasions and occupations abroad than Xi.

And the same security-military establishment that gave us 20 years of failed forever wars, predicated on the lies of weapons of mass destruction and “they hate us for our freedom”, is now pushing for conflict with China and the escalation of military spending, to the benefit of the defence firms that many of that establishment will join after their time in public life is over (unless they’re French).

The idea that resorting to arms, sending our troops abroad and putting Australians in harm’s way should be above the normal course of partisan politics has always been a myth — John Howard incessantly tried to portray Labor as unpatriotic and soft on terrorists for failing to support the Iraq disaster — but rarely has been deployed more bluntly as a tool for both reelection and one’s ambitions to become prime minister.