I’ll be frank – Girt By Sea is a frustrating read. It’s an important and useful book, but I was hoping for something a little more…hmm, what’s the right word?

Here’s the thing. We’re facing immediate existential threats to global human civilisation from end-stage capitalism and climate change. In a few years the tipping points will turn into a record-breaking domino chain, after which we’ll be eating human flesh and drinking from puddles, yet we’re being assured by our politicians and Murdoch’s minions that the keys to our security are nuclear subs and ‘containing’ China.

I get it – China is run by the world’s largest totalitarian government, and they rely on total censorship, social-credit fascism, ever-increasing outward-facing nationalism, expansionist control of resources, and a ballooning military. They could flick a few switches and we’d be shut down as a national economy when the net goes dark and our utilities suddenly aren’t there any more.

But who else does that sound like? The US? Russia? Israel?

Every government is corrupt and violent, ours included; the only difference is the extent and style of that corruption and violence.

But those who believe the only way we can preserve our God-given right to endless consumerism is to spend all the money we have on nuclear subs and F35s which…[checks notes]…still can’t fly or shoot straight in rainy weather, are also the people who say the only way we can ‘save the planet’ is to ensure unregulated capitalism gives all our remaining money to the billionaires so the ‘trickle-down’ allows us mere mortals to crowd-fund a cage or two for the last koalas.

Girt By Sea is written well by academic authors who freely admit they’re ‘insiders’; professionals within the ‘Australian national security community’. And, because they’re insiders, and highly qualified researchers, their insights are worth hearing.

Their suggestions about how ‘the security community’ might better proceed in directing our nation toward some safe, stable state – free of the sort of nasty totalitarian control the Tibetans, Uygurs and poor bloody Hong Kongers are stuck with, are reasonable – even if Stratling and Wallis use the most mild and anodyne phrasing to put that across. They take care that no one in their community, no matter how rabidly inclined to check under their beds for Chinese assassins, need be made to feel discomforted by their measured critiques.

‘Angry’. That’s the word I was after. Anger. Absolute fury, in fact.

Instead of being livid that corrupt grifters stuck us with rubbish like AUKUS, then quickly found ways to ditch politics and suckle the myriad teats of that particular flying pig, Stratling and Wallis sound only mild caution.

We apparently only need to bridge the ‘institutional and ideological gaps’ between the Department of Defence and DFAT. We need to ‘expand [our] imaginations and ambitions, and be cautious about the roadblocks’. We need to ‘reflect on our assumptions’ about security.

Instead of tearing our corrupt, belligerent, patriarchal, neoliberal, Anglo post-colonial ruling ideologies a new arsehole, Strating and Wallis urge us to accept ‘broader notions’ of what security means, take an intersectional approach to the diversity of Australians, coordinate Statecraft with other departments, be a ‘better regional partner’, think about how climate relates to it all, accept the possibility that our regional neighbours might actually be worth listening to, and to change our current concept of ‘foreign aid’ from giving money to Australian companies so they can profit more efficiently from whatever nation they’re extracting profits from, and instead work with other nations to create genuine understanding, even friendship, without expecting anything for it.

See? It’s all very reasonable. Worth discussing over tea and a biscuit while we try to ignore Peter Dutton in the background, red-faced and spitting, wearing a Trump wig and comparing anti-war demonstrators to mass murderers. Strating and Wallis even suggest…well, ‘suggest’ is a bit strong, but they imply we might think about considering the possibility that AUKUS may pose one or two issues that, over time, we could perhaps talk about. Or have an inquiry or report or some-such. A report that could, for example, be written by experts and insiders in the Australian national security commu…oh, wait.

This was Strating and Wallis’ chance to lay bare the post-colonial lies and capitalist extortion of our peoples, our nation and our environment. Instead, in the nicest possible way, they avoid any of that to imply, to hint, to gently suggest that we, or those special elite who occupy the lofty realms of the Australian national security community, could perhaps better lead us to that glorious, safe, secure, cosy future, one where we aren’t trading body parts for medicine or forming mobs with which to storm the bunkers of billionaires and eat them.

So, to summarise – well written, well reasoned academic book, with a good, broad scope of inquiry in ‘re-imagining’ Australia’s security. The only thing missing, for me, is a couple of blood-dripping machetes and the dismembered corpses of Murdoch minions and political grifters who think nothing of cheating Timor Leste for an oil company, lying about weapons of mass destruction that don’t exist, imprisoning refugees, backing genocidal Israeli theocrats, or doing rotten deals that soak us for billions while quietly setting up cushy jobs for their post-political careers.

After setting up AUKUS, Scott Morrison waited exactly 18 months, the time legally required before private employment in the AUKUS arms industry was allowed, before he resigned and got a job in the AUKUS arms industry.

I wanted someone else, an insider, to expose and share that visceral anger. Instead I was advised to ‘re-imagine’ Australia’s security.

To the authors, I can assure them that I, and every other spec-fic novelist, has indeed imagined our future, and I regret to tell you that a slightly less vicious, slightly more inclusive, business-as-usual model isn’t going to do it.

Girt By Sea, by Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis, La Trobe University Press, 304p, ISBN: 9781760644512, RRP $36.99

B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and spec-fic writer, who has travelled to the future, and didn’t like what he saw.