It’s a big claim to make in a wealthy, stable nation. But preparedness is not a feeling — it’s a decision that leads to numerical outcomes, and it’s one Australia hasn’t made. To understand our own position, it’s useful to look at other developed nations. This page is a ledger to do that with.
Prepared countries publish their numbers: days of grain, days of fuel, shelter places per head, and who is answerable for each. Australia can be measured the same way. Every figure comes from an official source, listed at the foot of this page.
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 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
| 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. Its only modern system is short-range NASAMS — two batteries, operational in 2026 — plus legacy man-portable missiles. It runs just two systems, no medium or long-range layer and no ballistic-missile defence at all, on a continent now within range of the region’s newest missiles. Finland, by contrast, fields seven systems: no bigger, but far more serious about the problem.
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 | Household guidance5 | Readiness published6 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland | NESA | 3 days | Yes |
| Sweden | MSB | 7 days | Yearly survey |
| Norway | DSB | 7 days | Yes |
| Estonia | Rescue Board and EVK | 7 days | Yes |
| Japan | Disaster Management Agency | 3 days | Yes |
| Germany | BBK | 10 days | Partly |
| Indonesia | Bapanas and Bulog (food) | 3 days | Partly |
| Singapore | SCDF and SFA | None | Not published, by policy |
| New Zealand | None | 3 days | Yearly survey |
| United States | None | “Several days” | No |
| United Kingdom | None | None | Partly |
| France | None | 3 days | Partly |
| South Korea | MOIS and KNOC | 3 days | No |
| China | Split (NFSRA and others) | None | No |
| Canada | None | 3 days | No |
| Australia | None | None | Not measured |
Figures as published at July 2026. Every source, as-of date and comparison caveat is in the notes at the foot of this page.
Three times in five years, the institution built to fight wars was sent into Australian streets and paddocks because nothing else existed at scale. The Black Summer fires drew the first compulsory call-out of the Reserve in its history. The pandemic became the longest domestic military operation ever mounted. The 2022 floods did it again.7
“Defence must be the force of last resort for domestic aid to the civil community.”
Defence Strategic Review, 2023Defence itself has asked to be let off the job. Its own review told the states to handle “all but the most extreme” disasters without it. Nothing has been built to do that. Germany keeps a federal relief agency for exactly this work — eighty-eight thousand people, nearly all volunteers. Australia keeps a phone number for the Defence Minister.8
Most of the English-speaking world is missing from these charts for a reason: there is nothing to chart. The United States has no agency for this, no food reserve, and its oil reserve is at its lowest since 1983 — about 15 days of what the country burns. Britain meets its 90-day oil obligation, and stops there. Canada, an oil exporter, holds no reserve at all.10
New Zealand is the small exception, and the proof this can be fixed. Most of its 90 days is paper — claims on stock held overseas, with only 38 days actually in the country, fewer than we hold. But in 2025 it wrote real floors into law: 28 days of petrol, 24 of jet fuel and 21 of diesel, all held onshore. This month a Crown diesel reserve came online.10 Being unprepared runs in the English-speaking family. One neighbour has started breaking the habit.
Finland runs its whole system — the fuel, the grain, the agencies behind them — on a fund of about €2bn ($3.3bn).4 Australia does not lack the money. It lacks a body whose whole job is being ready: one that keeps this ledger, publishes it, and closes 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: short-range NASAMS (two batteries, operational 2026) plus legacy man-portable missiles — two systems, no medium/long-range or ballistic-missile layer (assessed by the United States Studies Centre, 2026). 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. ↩