When Kevin Andrews became Defence Minister late last year, his only apparent qualification for the job was a willingness to do whatever Tony Abbott wants. That is a worry, because the Prime Minister's penchant for making whimsical decisions extends to issues that are far more important than knighthoods for royal dukes. He takes the same approach to Defence.

And that matters because, after 18 months of doing very little in Defence, the Abbott Government – if it is still the Abbott Government – will soon start to take some really momentous decisions. Probably first up will be the choice about our new submarines. No one except Abbott himself and his personal staff think that buying them straight from Japan makes any sense at all, but that seems to be exactly what he has been determined to do.

Perhaps that will now change, if Abbott is serious about saving his leadership. Certainly Liberals from South Australia will be urging Abbott to prove that he has learned how to listen to his colleagues by dropping his Japanese plan, in favour of what everyone else knows to be the only credible way forward. That is an open competition between the leading alternatives, including options to build the submarines locally. Let's hope so.

But the submarine project is not the only big defence decision to be made over the next few months, and the others do not have such obvious local hip-pocket implications, so there will not be a posse of anxious local members snapping at Abbott's heels over them.

These decisions will most likely be set out in the Government's new Defence White Paper, due around the middle of the year. Since the preparation of the White Paper began a year ago it has been clear that all the key ideas would be coming from the Prime Minister's office.