If we were to dignify Anthony Albanese with a governing ethos, it would be bread and circuses. As national debt crosses the trillion-dollar mark, we see the daily commitment to handouts. With his economy-wrecking budget safely through parliament, it was time for the circus. An invitation was duly issued to comedian Nikki Osborne to record a podcast in the Lodge. Osborne, aka Bush Barbie, is a petite blonde who dresses like Steve Irwin and aspires to be a ‘bogan Joe Rogan’. Presumably, Albanese imagined the show would be cut into video clips for social media, to appeal to the younger voters he imagines he is helping into the property market.

Unfortunately, for the PM, it didn’t go as planned. His smutty banter turned TikToxic once it was transcribed. Nobody wants to read that the PM schedules sex after the footy because a win for the Rabbitohs, is ‘a good aphrodisiac’, or that if his recent marriage to Jodie Haydon goes ‘tits up’, he’d ‘shag, marry or date’ Kylie Minogue. There were jokes about Aboriginal Australians populating the country in a place called HumpyBong, and whether Jodie talked about Iron Knob. The nadir was Albanese recounting how the Japanese Prime Minister gave him ‘a couple of melons’, using hand gestures to turn the diplomatic gift into a sleazy double entendre.

Albanese’s Benny Hill humour wasn’t the only show in town. Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy, who looks and behaves like an aging Billy Bunter, was flinging mud at Sir Robert Menzies, calling Australia’s longest-serving prime minister and the architect of our postwar prosperity a ‘Nazi appeaser’ and a ‘coward’.

Conroy calls these slurs ‘progressive patriotismTM’. They are meant to win over anti-Aukus delegates at the ALP National conference in a fortnight. Conroy’s proposition is that you are either ‘on the side of John Curtin or you are on the side of pig iron Bob Menzies’?

It’s ahistorical tosh; Menzies had already committed Australia to war when Conroy claims he was appeasing Hitler.

The deeper irony is that in the interwar years Labor—and Curtin himself—were far greater appeasers than Menzies, opposed to rearmament, pacifist, hostile to the British Empire, and preferring the toothless League of Nations.

Not to mention the minor detail that after the war, Labor pinned its hopes on multilateralism, whereas Menzies was the father of Anzus alliance.

The deeper irony is that once again it is Labor that is doing the appeasing, this time with China, or as Albanese likes to call it, stabilising the relationship. To that end, Albanese has downplayed Chinese vessels circling Australia and firing of live munitions in commercial airspace, dangerous interceptions of Airforce aircraft, espionage and cyber activity, threats to Chinese Australians, appalling human rights abuses of Falun Gong, Uighurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kong dissidents, the bullying of Taiwan, declined to join US military operations in the Red Sea against Houthis, and devoted its energy to relations with Beijing rather than its strategic partnership with Japan..

Like Curtain, Albanese has refused to increase defence spending, instead ‘boosting’ it by including defence pensions in the defence budget. Unless he is planning to defend Australia with Dad’s Army, this is shameless creative accounting. Worse, the increased expenditure on Aukus has decreased spending on all other elements of defence.

Yet Albanese isn’t the only one who likes theatre. While he and Conroy were clowning around, China was secretly preparing to fire a nuclear-capable ballistic missile into the South Pacific. The timing was ominous. It splashed down just hours after Australia and Fiji signed an Ocean of Peace alliance, which commits each country to coming to the other’s aid if either were attacked.

When China launched a ballistic missile into the Pacific Ocean in September 2024, the first since 1980, the Albanese government confined itself to saying it had ‘sought an explanation’ from Beijing and was ‘consulting regional partners’.

This time, Albanese admitted that the barely announced missile was ‘destabilising’ – so much for stabilising relations with China – and called it ‘a provocative act’. Foreign Minister Penny Wong accused Beijing of undermining regional stability, and acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said Australia was ‘very concerned about any actions which undermine the stability, the peace, and security of the Pacific’.

As for Conroy, he put down his mud pies and said, ‘It illustrates something that we’ve been talking about for a while, which is we’re seeing the biggest arms build-up in the Indo-Pacific since 1945.’

No one can deny that Labor has done a bit of talking; talk is cheap. It is further cheapened when it is used as a crude weapon to score partisan points.

Listening to the recording of Menzies announcing that Australia was at war with Nazi Germany illustrates the yawning gulf between Albanese and Conroy, on the one hand, and the brilliant lawyer and orator who Conroy sought to defame on the other.

Menzies eloquently gave a detailed first-hand account of Hitler’s policies ‘deliberately designed to produce either war or a subjugation of one non-German country after another by the threat of war’ and condemned the ‘ruthlessness and indifference to common humanity which the darkest centuries of European history can scarcely parallel.’

All Conroy could muster was to complain that the launch was ‘not consistent with the Hague convention on ballistic missile testing, which would require more notice and greater information provided to countries.’

China noted the petulant tone and used its mouthpiece, the Global Times, to put Conroy in his place, editorialising that there were ‘some discordant voices internationally, primarily from nations such as Australia’ but ‘the current complaints mostly amount to grumbling from operational-level authorities’.

It was Thucydides who observed that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ Today we suffer the humiliation of being unprepared to deal with the threat that China poses. It can get far worse.

China’s ballistic missile test demands more than diplomatic protest. Albanese must unite the Pacific against Chinese militarisation, strengthen Australia’s alliance with the United States and Japan, accelerate Aukus, and rebuild Australia’s defence forces. He should also work closely with Israel and Ukraine, learning from their battle-hardened experience how to use drones to counter a more heavily armed aggressor. And yes, he must win over the anti-Aukus delegates, not by telling lies about 1939, but by confronting the strategic reality of 2026. Because the challenge confronting Australia is not the ghost of Menzies, but the global ambitions of Xi Jinping.