AS you may have read in Thursday's and Friday's Newcastle Herald, I spent Wednesday and Thursday at the first two days of the three-day annual Hunter Defence Conference, where a roster of high level military and industrial speakers set out the landscape as they saw it in relation to Australia's position and role in what is usually described, euphemistically, as the deteriorating security outlook.
Some of the speakers continued to use those carefully calibrated terms, but others, more forthright, said what everyone knows; that we are talking about two countries, China and Russia.
