Increasing Australia’s defence budget requires answering tough questions

We have a sometimes mystifying relationship with ideas about honouring those who serve our country, and with ideas about how we defend it. Past governments have been happy to spend half a billion dollars renovating the Australian War Memorial while so underfunding the Veterans Affairs Department that it couldn’t properly look after veterans in a timely way, as documented by a royal commission. In the long, benign sleep in which we have been happy to think we didn’t have to think much about defence, because #ANZUS, there have been the odd stirrings from slumber amongst the aficionados about what the…