Christopher Pyne understands the power of office – always announcing funding in his defence industry portfolio that less energetic ministers would not bother with. On Friday he told us about five new projects including $2.2m for the University of Newcastle which will “explore the development” of virtual reality based training for resilience and $183k for Griffith U to work on the possibilities of a portable detector of airborne biological threats. Billions for fighter jets it isn’t but it demonstrates sensible spending on defence – that it makes the minister look hard working is entirely incidental.