Morrison government's selection of Newcastle as a possible subs base pitches Defence interest against Newcastle council 'nuclear-free' policy

Scott Morrison's 2019 election victory was a distant spectre amid a string of scandals on the conservative side of Australian politics.

Just last week, the ALP was ahead 49 per cent to 44 per cent, two-party preferred basis, in the latest published poll, by Essential in The Guardian.

Morrison's voter satisfaction rating was at a two-year low and this time last month Defence Minister Peter Dutton had to deny he was about to challenge his prime minister, who was sinking . . . dare I say it, like a submarine.

The next poll will be interesting indeed.

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Opposition leader Anthony Albanese knows Labor felt itself a shoo-in last time around, only to find that Australian voters can say one thing to pollsters but do something entirely different in the polling booth, when no-one is looking over their shoulders.

Labor's mistakes were obvious last time around, but Morrison appeared so shocked to beat Bill Shorten he had no other explanation than "a miracle".

As a member of the Horizon Church in Sutherland that's not a word he would use lightly.

"We believe that as we allow the Holy Spirit to reveal His purposes and to presence Himself among His Church, people's lives will be transformed," Horizon's website says.

I'd say Morrison's prospects have undergone a pretty dramatic transformation, and he hit the superchargers on Monday's subs announcement with Thursday's promise of Australia's biggest peacetime military expansion since WWII.

A "national security" election will test the political mettle of a Labor leader from the party's Left faction. Albanese's early mentor was the late Tom Uren, 32 years in Canberra and a leading light of the peace and anti-nuclear movements, whose life was shaped by spending the final three years of WWII as a Japanese prisoner of war.

After his Lowy Institute address on Thursday, Albanese was probed about Labor's commitment to AUKUS and nuclear submarines, as though his inquisitors expected him to roll over and say: "OK, you got me, we're secretly opposed but we're going along with it because of the election".

He said the ALP took less than 24 hours to support the project after he and Penny Wong, Brendan O'Connor and Richard Marles were officially briefed by Defence.

An "example of the maturity of the ALP" on national security, in contrast, he said, with the Coalition's "opportunistic" approach.

Yesterday morning's protest on the Newcastle foreshore appears to be the first organised community response to the proposed east coast subs base.

I doubt it will be the last.

On what we've seen so far, I don't think Novocastrians have too much to worry about.

Or to get worked up about, given the Navy's objections to civilians watching the subs from a few hundred metres away on the Honeysuckle foreshore.

Then again, Newcastle finished ahead of Port Kembla and Brisbane in the Defence studies look very much like those the PM referred to.

Either way, we'll hear plenty about it in the coming weeks, as Liberal Brooke Vitnell - married to longtime Morrison staffer Julian Leembruggen - tries to replace Labor's Meryl Swanson as MP for Paterson.

Vitnell was introduced as a solicitor at her father's Port Stephens law firm when unveiled last year as the party's star Hunter Region candidate.

Which she is.

But she also worked for Bob Baldwin from 2012 until he left parliament in 2015.

Next stop was Michaelia Cash's office, then Steven Ciobo's, before stints with Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Paul Fletcher - all notable Liberal figures in their own ways.

Little wonder one 2019 media profile called Brooke and Julian one of Canberra's most intriguing power couples.

The Defence base evaluations obtained by SA Senator Rex Patrick under FOI found nine of an initial 19 selections worth ranking by military, geographical, social and economic criteria to rate them by point-score.

Sydney was clearly favoured ahead of Jervis Bay, with the rest of the field, including Newcastle, a few days' sail behind.

Admirals can make recommendations, but politicians write the cheques.

If anyone says politics doesn't come into such decisions has forgotten the histories of Australian Submarine Corporation in Adelaide, the Anzac frigates going to Melbourne over Newcastle, and the various contracts the late Steven Forgacs bid for but lost before his former State Dockyard floating dock was shipped out of Carrington in 2012, last heard of heading for Namibia.

On national security, what the public hears, and what Defence and intelligence agencies say in classified briefings, may be two different things.

Nuclear submarines are big news but the bigger story is the reasons our elected leaders agree we need them in the first place.

My generation - unlike my father in WWII and his father in WWI - did not had to face conscription or a national call to enlist.

I hope for my children's generation that they don't either.

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