When Britain's prime minister (1956-63) Harold Macmillan was asked about the biggest threats to his government's plans, he supposedly replied, "events dear boy, events".
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Governments always encounter unforeseen developments, some of them, seismic.
War is a big one. For some unfortunates, an event to end all events.
But for those outside the physical danger zone, war's mind-focusing urgency can still dominate, trivialising existing grievances and making politics-as-usual feel petty, redundant.
Both Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese will be pondering this right now. Modelling the electoral impact of a ground-war in Europe and calibrating their presentations to suit.
The former leads an exhausted government, if unconvincingly. The latter leads in the opinion polls, pretty convincingly. Yet Russian lawlessness and heightened fears, however unfounded, of a Chinese move on Taiwan, could up-end this.
This electoral problem is a difficult one to quantify, and no easier to discuss because dwelling on domestic politics seems almost immoral when millions of Ukrainians are in harm's way.
Australia will not send troops, but then neither will NATO, nor the US nor anybody else.
This will be a war fought between Russian forces and desperate Ukrainians, armed with US and other new weapons technology but still grossly outnumbered in the field.
Beyond that, the pressure will be applied to Russia economically and culturally through sanctions and rhetoric.
Which means despite its non-proximity, Australia will be involved. The Morrison government has already pledged expert assistance to combat Russian cyber-attacks.
The role Australia plays and the extent to which voters feel unnerved by the worsening national security environment, has the potential to save Morrison's premiership. He knows this which is why he ratcheted up the anxiety factor during last week's parliamentary sitting.
At a hastily convened emergency session of the UN Security Council yesterday, country representatives lined up to condemn Vladimir Putin's risible pretences for sending Russian forces into the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine.
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Yet after the debacles and humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin knows the US and NATO have no appetite for entanglement in Ukraine.
Rather, the West will try to shame the Russian autocrat into tempering his actions.
That means enforcing a string of financial sanctions which include things like limiting Russian access to capital markets, banning the travel and freezing the assets of super-wealthy oligarchs, and denying Russian companies payments in British Pounds and US dollars.
Australia will be drawn into these both literally and rhetorically.
Risks abound.
The political orthodoxy tells us voters tend to play safe in times of heightened uncertainty. That can mean retaining an underwhelming incumbent government.
In seeking to leverage that advantage, Morrison risks overplaying his hand, possibly to the detriment of Australian national security as we saw in his attack on bipartisanship last week.
And in trying to echo government tub-thumping in order to avoid being seen as equivocal on national security, Albanese could actually add to an atmosphere of voter anxiety.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
