We will provide guidance to households, to businesses, and to government. Each of these focus areas will be led by an expert in that domain, and advised by Australia’s best.
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Defence
Australia depends on its military to protect the continent, and the ADF is also routinely called on for domestic emergencies — bushfires, the pandemic, floods — three domestic deployments in five years. But air and missile defence has significant gaps, munitions stockpiles and domestic production cannot sustain a prolonged conflict, and the defence industrial base lacks the sovereign manufacturing depth to surge under crisis.
This focus area therefore covers military preparedness and force capacity, air and missile defence, munitions stockpiling and production, sovereign manufacturing of platforms and weapons systems, and the case for a civilian body that takes domestic emergency work off the ADF.
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National Security
Comparable nations maintain civil defence personnel, shelter programmes, and standardised warning systems to protect their populations. But Australia fields a fraction of the civil defence personnel, has no national shelter programme — neither hardened nor designated — no standardised warning system, and no agency responsible for building any of these.
This focus area therefore covers civil defence and emergency coordination, shelter programmes, counter-terrorism, border security, and the case for a dedicated civil preparedness agency that takes this work off the ADF and puts it where it belongs.
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Sovereignty and National Continuity
A sovereign nation must be able to govern itself under crisis, make what it needs, and direct its own industry. But Australia’s manufacturing share of GDP sits at roughly five per cent — the only developed nations lower are two small European tax havens. Foreign interests own critical assets including mines, ports, agricultural land, and data centres, and much of what a crisis would demand can no longer be built here.
No agency holds a whole-of-nation preparedness ledger, no one publishes how ready the country is, and no one is answerable for closing the gaps.
This focus area therefore covers government continuity under crisis, foreign interference and espionage, sovereign manufacturing capacity, commandability of Australian industry, critical minerals processing, and the protection of sensitive research and intellectual property in universities.
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Economic and Supply Security
Australia is one of the world’s great wheat exporters, and it has committed under treaty to hold strategic fuel reserves. But it holds not a single day of grain in a national reserve, and as fuel passes three dollars per litre, Australia is in its fourteenth year of non-compliance with its fuel stockpiling obligations. Single roads serve entire towns, single ports handle the majority of a state’s freight, and no legislation exists for wartime-scale resource allocation or rationing.
This focus area therefore covers strategic reserves of fuel, grain, water, and medical supplies; energy grid resilience; transport and logistics chokepoints; last-mile distribution and cold chain resilience; critical minerals stockpiling and onshore processing; trade concentration risk; economic mobilisation frameworks; and fiscal, workforce, currency, and insurance resilience under sustained pressure.
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Technology
Australia depends on digital and space systems for communications, navigation, weather, surveillance, and financial services, and AI is transforming both the threat landscape and the tools available to defend against it. But state-sponsored cyber operations target critical infrastructure, quantum computing threatens current encryption, and counter-space capabilities put satellite systems at risk.
This focus area therefore covers AI-enabled attacks, deepfake fraud, and sovereign AI capability; cyber security of critical systems; quantum risks to encryption; space and satellite resilience; sovereign technology development; and the technical tools to detect and counter disinformation, as distinct from the public literacy dimension in Social Resilience.
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Health and Medical
Australia’s hospital beds per thousand people sit more than ten per cent below the OECD average, and the system is built for an ordinary week. But the pandemic response became the largest domestic military operation in the country’s history, the contents of the National Medical Stockpile have not been published in over a decade, and active ingredient manufacturing for most medicines is concentrated offshore.
This focus area therefore covers hospital surge capacity, pharmaceutical supply chains, domestic vaccine and medical equipment manufacturing, pandemic preparedness, blood supply under crisis, mass casualty response beyond a single city, and mental health system capacity under sustained pressure.
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Environmental Security
Australia faces bushfires, cyclones, floods, and droughts with increasing severity and frequency, and its agricultural output depends on soil, water, and ecosystems already under stress. But infrastructure hardening lags, biosecurity threats to agriculture are growing, and ecosystem decline is cascading into fisheries, food production, and livability.
This focus area therefore covers climate change adaptation, natural disaster preparedness, biosecurity and introduced species, long-term agricultural viability, and the ecological dimension of water security including river health, groundwater depletion, and salinity.
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Social Resilience
Most Australians say they want to contribute to the country’s security, and local and neighbourhood cohesion remains strong. But national belonging is in decline, volunteering rates have fallen significantly over the past six years with an ageing volunteer base, and most people who want to help do not know how. No agency tracks the whole picture.
This focus area therefore covers social cohesion, community trust and civic responsibility, disinformation resilience and media literacy (the public dimension; technical countermeasures sit in Technology), violent extremism and radicalisation, volunteering and community mutual aid, immigration and integration infrastructure, and population displacement planning.