Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?
Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.
I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.
We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.
Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.
But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.
But they don't do everything, and frankly drones are very overstated: they're not magic, and the idea of fielding masses of things when your adversary is at least China backed is pretty farcical: we can't ever win a conflict on cheap mass production because we don't have it.
So a handful of hard hitting long range weapons is going to be a key part of the strategy: because if we can't hit the factories, we can't win period.
Pushes the defensive line quite a bit further out from the mainland, and you could potentially cover choke points for a naval invasion from the north.
That puts Jakarta in range. I'm sure the Indonesian military took note as well.
Plus we've got Tomahawks now, that's 2500km range, sea launched.
It's also shoring up diplomacy with Japan, South Korea, was trying to with India, when Biden was attempting to move India away from China.
The future wars are going to be mostly unmanned and Australia will need hyper-local defence, so has to be low cost and easily deployed.
A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.
This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.
In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.
This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.
The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.
Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.
Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dice on a handful. Every now and then you have to prune back the organizations that are not working, and give a shot to startups to see if they can do better.
If you can't tell, I believe in big, transparent, government.