Why Essington?
It’s a big claim to make in a wealthy, stable nation. But preparedness isn’t a feeling — it is a series of decisions, and every one of them has a number attached: how many days of fuel we hold, how much grain, how many of us have a place in a shelter. Other developed nations make those decisions and publish the results. We have put Australia beside them on eight measures. On seven of the eight we are in the bottom three countries, and on five we are last.
On grain, on shelter, on what households are told to keep, on civil defence and on what we still make for ourselves, we come last of every country measured. On fuel we are second last, and on hospital beds and air defence we are in the bottom third. The scorecard is the whole page in one table; from there you can take any measure on its own.
Behind every number on this page is a body whose job it is to hold it — an agency that keeps the reserve, tells households what to do, and reports back on how ready the country is.
Australia has no such body. No one keeps the whole ledger, no one is told to close it, and no one publishes how we are doing. That absence is why the Essington Institute exists.
| Responsible agency | Fuel stockpile16 | Grain stockpile16 | Industrial base16 | Shelter3capacity as a share of population | Household guidance5 | Readiness published6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finland | In place: NESA | Yes: About 270 days held; the law requires 180 (Decision 568/2024) | 86% | 3 days | In place: Yes | ||
| Japan | In place: Disaster Management Agency | No: Rice reserve about 17 days after the 2025 releases, against a ~51-day target (MAFF, March 2026) | 156% | 3 days | In place: Yes | ||
| Sweden | In place: MSB | 66% | 7 days | In place: Yearly survey | |||
| Germany | In place: BBK | 0.6% | 10 days | Partial: Partly | |||
| South Korea | In place: MOIS and KNOC | Yes: Government rice reserve, about 110 days of consumption (MAFRA, 2025–26) | 280%+ | 3 days | None: No | ||
| Indonesia | In place: Bapanas and Bulog (food) | Yes: Bulog rice reserve about 62 days, above the 4 million-tonne target (July 2026) | 3 days | Partial: Partly | |||
| Estonia | In place: Rescue Board and EVK | 7 days | In place: Yes | ||||
| Singapore | In place: SCDF and SFA | Yes: Rice Stockpile Scheme: importers hold two months of imports in government warehouses, by law | None: No household guidance | Partial: Not published, by policy | |||
| Norway | In place: DSB | No: About 15 days today; contracts signed to reach ~90 days by 2029 | 45% | 7 days | In place: Yes | ||
| China | In place: MOIS and KNOC | Yes: About 230 days of grain in the country, the largest holdings on Earth (USDA estimate) | None: No household guidance | None: No | |||
| France | 3 days | Partial: Partly | |||||
| United States | No: The Bill Emerson trust has held cash, not grain, since 2008 (USDA) | None: No | |||||
| United Kingdom | No: No food reserve (Defra Food Security Report 2024) | No: No shelters since 1968 (Resilience Action Plan, 2025) | None: No household guidance | Partial: Partly | |||
| New Zealand | 3 days | In place: Yearly survey | |||||
| Canada | 3 days | None: No | |||||
| Australia | No: No strategic grain reserve exists | No: No civil-defence shelter programme exists |
in place partial none Provided by us at the InstituteHover or focus a mark for the detail
Without trucks, Australia stops. And nothing moves without diesel — not the trucks, not the harvest, not the generators behind hospitals. Serious nations hold a strategic reserve against the day the ships stop, and set a floor in law.
Australia holds fifty days against a ninety-day treaty it signed, and has sat below that line since 2012. Only thirty-three days of it is refined fuel actually in the country.
A grain reserve is the oldest form of preparedness there is: food set aside for the year the harvest fails or the imports stop. Finland keeps nine months of it; China keeps the largest store on Earth.
Australia keeps none. We are one of the world’s great wheat exporters and hold not a single day in a national reserve.
A shelter is somewhere to put the population when the sirens go. Switzerland has a hardened place for every citizen; Taiwan and Korea designate subway stations and basements to hold millions more.
Australia has no programme of either kind — not a hardened shelter network, not even a register of designated buildings. The bar is empty because the thing does not exist.
The first days of any disaster are survived at home, on what a family already has. So governments tell households a number: keep this many days of food, water and medicine. Germany says ten. The Nordics say seven.
Australia gives no national figure at all. What guidance exists is left to the states and the Red Cross, and it doesn’t agree with itself.
Someone has to run the shelters, sound the warnings and move people out of harm’s way. Nations that take the threat seriously legislate a body to do it — South Korea conscripts three million into its Civil Defence Corps; Switzerland, Taiwan and Poland field hundreds of thousands more.
Australia has the State Emergency Service, twenty-six thousand volunteers, and nothing else — among the smallest civil-defence forces per head of any nation that has one. When the SES is stretched, the only fallback is the army, and calling in soldiers is not a civil defence.
This is not a country short of willing hands. A hundred and ninety thousand of us volunteer as firefighters; half the country says it would fight to defend Australia.9 But volunteering has fallen from thirty per cent of us to twenty-three in six years, no agency publishes the age of its volunteers, and nobody’s job is to keep the whole ledger. The raw material of a prepared nation is here. The system that organises one is not.
When a crisis produces casualties, the question is how many beds the system has to absorb them. It is the one measure on this page about spare capacity to surge, rather than a reserve set aside.
Australia has 3.8 beds per thousand people, below the OECD average. It is a system with little slack — enough for an ordinary week, but not built for the day the ordinary week ends.
Reserves run out; a factory does not. The deepest form of preparedness is the ability to make what you need — the fuel, the steel, the medicine, the munitions — when the ships stop coming. It is measured here as the share of the economy that is manufacturing.
Australia makes less of its own economy, proportionally, than any other developed nation on this page. At five per cent of GDP, manufacturing has been hollowed out to the point where much of what a crisis would demand can no longer be built here at all.
Protecting cities and infrastructure from missiles and drones has become a civil-defence question, not just a military one — as Ukraine and the Middle East have shown. There is no single official number for it, so we score each nation on the ground-based layers it can field, how much of it is home-built, how many distinct systems it runs, and whether it has been proven in combat.15
Fighters are a real means of air defence and this measure does not count them. A squadron cannot hold a continuous umbrella over a city the way a battery on watch can, and cannot touch a ballistic warhead at all, but it covers far more airspace than any single battery. Australia operates 72 F-35As and six E-7A Wedgetails; none of that is in the score below.
| Tier 1 | Can defend against a serious missile and drone campaign, and largely makes its own interceptors. |
|---|---|
| Tier 2 | Strong and layered, much of it home-built. |
| Tier 3 | A credible modern defence with a real gap — no ballistic-missile layer, or wholly reliant on imports. |
| Tier 4 | Limited: a layer or two, mostly bought in, not enough to stop a determined attack. |
| Tier 5 | Negligible — little or no ability to defend the nation’s airspace. |
Australia sits in the fifth and lowest tier. It runs one ground-based air defence system: NASAMS, two batteries, operational in 2026. The man-portable missiles it used to hold were given away.17 There is no long-range layer and no ballistic-missile defence at all, on a continent now within range of the region’s newest missiles.
Figures as published at July 2026. Every source, as-of date and comparison caveat is in the notes at the foot of this page.
It is tempting to look at the United States, Britain and Canada and feel comfortable, because they sit in the bottom half of the table with us, and for the same reasons. None of them holds a reserve of its own, tells households what to keep, or maintains shelters. Comparing ourselves to them tells us very little.10
New Zealand is the one worth watching, because it did something about it. In 2025 it wrote minimum fuel holdings into law, onshore and by product, and a Crown diesel reserve opened at Marsden Point in July 2026.10 That took a year, not a generation, and it is the same instrument available here.
When something goes wrong at a national scale, there is only one organisation in the country that can move quickly and at size, so we send it. A fire, a pandemic and a flood have each pulled the Defence Force into work at home.7
“Defence must be the force of last resort for domestic aid to the civil community.”
Defence Strategic Review, 2023Defence has asked to be let go of this. Its own review said the states should handle all but the most extreme disasters without it, and nothing has been built for them to do that with. Germany has a federal relief agency for exactly this work, about eighty-eight thousand people, nearly all of them volunteers. We have nothing like it.8
Finland runs its whole system — the fuel, the grain, the agencies behind them — on a fund of about €2bn ($3.3bn).4 That is about $584 a head. At the same rate Australia would be holding $16.3bn, and we hold nothing like it.4 We are not short of the money. What we do not have is anyone whose job it is to be ready — to keep this ledger, publish it, and close it line by line.
The Essington Institute is being built to be that body: national capacity, industrial readiness, and household preparedness, pursued together. If the blank column on this page bothers you the way it bothers us, we would like to hear from you.
score = normalise( Σ (base × sov × div) over all layers + sustainment + combat )
base BMD 9 · long-range 7 · medium 5 · short 2 · man-portable 1
sov ×1.0 imported → +0.2 home-built system · +0.4 home-built missile
(onshore-assembled counts half)
div 1 system ×1.0 · 2 ×1.16 · 3 ×1.25 · 5 ×1.37 (saturating log)
sust. + up to 20% of the score spread, by count of home-made missiles
combat + 30% of the spread for proven GBAD; +30% for proven counter-drone
tiers 1: 80–100 · 2: 60–79 · 3: 40–59 · 4: 20–39 · 5: 1–19
Systems firmly funded and arriving before 2030 count as a striped build-out (▹), not yet as held capability. Combat-proven status uses the current record: a system suppressed or destroyed in an active war does not count as proven — which is why Iran, whose high-end systems were beaten in the 2025–26 war, earns no such bonus. Australia scores lowest of the nations charted: NASAMS (two batteries, operational 2026) and nothing else — one system, no long-range or ballistic-missile layer. NASAMS is scored in the medium-range band: its published engagement range is about 33 km, the manufacturer calls it a “short to medium range” system, and the US Army’s equipment catalogue classes it medium-range. Australia’s own project name, Short Range Ground Based Air Defence, is the dissenting description. Australia fires the baseline AIM-120 AMRAAM and the AIM-9 Sidewinder, not the extended-range AMRAAM-ER round, which is held by Qatar, Hungary, the Netherlands, Taiwan and Egypt but by no nation charted here (Defence, 22 July 2025). Sources: national defence ministries, the US Missile Defense Agency, and dated system-status reporting; system counts for China and other closed states are open-source estimates. ↩