Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong are flying to Washington for AUSMIN to “synchronise strategy” and trade soft shots with America’s freshly anointed secretaries, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio. The photos will be crisp, the flags will be plentiful, and the headlines will glow with words like “historic” and “consequential.” But once the cameras blink off, the real problems will remain exactly where Australia left them: sitting on the floor like unclaimed airport baggage.
We’re supposed to pretend that AUKUS is steaming ahead, yet at home it still looks more like a calendar exercise than a real capability. We don’t have sovereign sustainment, we don’t have the crews, we don’t have the nuclear workforce, and the shipyard is closer to a museum exhibit than an industrial engine. Timelines drift, costs climb, and every “workforce pipeline” feels like someone squinting at a whiteboard and hoping the numbers behave.
The missile situation isn’t much better. We say words like HIMARS, Tomahawk and LRASM as if speaking them summons crates. Meanwhile, the actual stockpiles are thin, local production is late, and the brochures continue to promise a future that never seems to land on Australian soil. And even when we try to build something jointly with the Americans, ITAR restrictions wrap themselves around the project until the whole thing slows to a crawl. “Seamless integration” usually translates to an 18-month wait for approval on a metal component.
Up north, we’ve invited U.S. bombers and Marines to rotate through the Top End, raising our strategic profile without building the hardened shelters, fuel storage, or air and missile defences needed to protect them. It’s like buying a sports car and storing it in a shed made of cardboard. And looming over everything is the roulette wheel of the U.S. Congress, where “ironclad” commitments can dissolve the second an appropriations fight breaks out.
But none of that will feature in the theatre ahead. What we’ll see instead is a choreography AUSMIN has perfected: Marles nodding earnestly as if he has fully absorbed the finer points of submarine nuclear stewardship; Wong smoothing diplomatic waffle into respectable English; Hegseth rolling up his sleeves to demonstrate televised toughness; and Rubio saying “Indo-Pacific” with the enthusiasm of someone who discovered it on a briefing note the night before. Together, they’ll declare this “the most consequential AUSMIN in a generation,” which is usually code for “we upgraded the backdrop.”
The language will be familiar. “Interoperability” will be celebrated, even though half the systems still refuse to talk to each other. “Speed to capability” will be promised, which generally means a slow committee has been renamed to sound faster. “Integrated deterrence” will drift across the lecterns, a phrase that always looks better in a diagram than in a budget. And “resilience” will be invoked proudly, even if the only thing that actually got printed was a concept brochure.
Meanwhile, the decisions that actually matter will once again be left untouched. No binding AUKUS timeline with real penalties for slipping. No real effort to unjam the ITAR bottlenecks that make cooperation impossible. No serious plan to harden northern infrastructure. No announcement of concrete missile production capabilities with dates, factories, or batch numbers. No clarity on what “Day 1” of a Taiwan crisis means for Australia—who moves, who supplies, who decides, and when.
What we’ll get instead is a working group to explore possible pathways that may, in the fullness of time, develop options worth considering. We’ll get a communiqué where adjectives outnumber actions four-to-one. We’ll get a staged photo where everyone leans forward like they’ve just cracked the code on a pie chart.
The subjects they’ll tiptoe around are the same ones everyone back home already knows: the state of the shipyards, the missing workforce, the thin fuel reserves, the lack of northern air defence, and the uncomfortable question of how we actually pay for any of this. “Reprioritisation” is the usual answer, which is a political way of saying: “Don’t ask.”
When the press conference arrives, Wong will deliver her trademark calm clarity, Marles will celebrate another milestone that looks identical to last year’s milestone, Hegseth will project strength at maximum volume, and Rubio will scatter the word “freedom” as generously as confetti. A journalist will inevitably ask what was actually decided, and the room will cooperate in generating a long, polished synonym for “not much.”
They could walk away from AUSMIN with real commitments: a 72-hour rule for export approvals, a defined northern hardening package with dates attached, a missile production plan with real numbers, or published wargame lessons that force actual improvements. But they won’t. Not because they can’t — but because choosing optics over outcomes is now the default setting.
In the end, the Hollow Centre scorecard remains consistent: flags, excellent; verbs, missing; acronyms, overflowing; deterrence, pending; interoperability, theoretical; missiles, check the warehouse. “Soft Shots” isn’t just the poster — it’s the doctrine. Four leaders, a sea of flags, a mountain of adjectives, and the Indo-Pacific still waiting for something real to arrive.
Wake us when someone builds a shelter, buys a bolt, or names a date that survives a calendar. Until then, enjoy the optics. They’re the only things running on schedule.
– The Hollow Centre
