$425 Billion and Still Missing the Point

What Australia's Defence Strategy Means for Your Life

Imagine it's a Tuesday morning. The power has been out for six hours. Your phone is at 40%. The internet is out too. You don't know if it's a local fault or something bigger. Your kids need to get to school. You have half a tank of petrol. You go to the government's emergency website, in Australia that is NEMA — and there's nothing there telling you what to do in this scenario.

Now imagine that same morning in Finland. Every household received a government booklet years ago — what to store, who to call, how long systems might be down, what to do if communications fail. Their government had that conversation with its citizens before it needed to.

Today’s blog is an opinion piece and I’m saying what needs to be said out loud. It’s more critical than I would usually write but I’m passionate about helping people understand their future and that of the world and how to be best prepared instead of having constant and overwhelming anxiety about the next crisis or shock!

Key Points

In April 2026, Australia released a $425 billion National Defence Strategy. Even though they added ‘civil preparedness’, nobody sent you a booklet to help you prepare.

Where we stand and where we’re going: there is no government playbook for the population. No booklet. No community protocol. No local warden system. For a country the NDS says is facing its most dangerous strategic environment since World War II — that omission is significant.

Because what it says is we’re not preparing for natural disasters and that’s all our state, territory and federal emergency services give advice for. We’re preparing for state and non-state threats on top of natural disasters, and we’ve all been living a life of convenience founded on stability. We’re not preparing citizens for a future of instability.

That gap — between what governments are planning and what citizens actually know, can access, and can do — is what this blog post is about. Not to alarm you. To arm you with awareness and information.

This gap has not gone unnoticed. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute published a detailed roadmap in May 2025 — Building National Preparedness: A Road Map for Australia and What We Should Learn from Finland — that made the case explicitly: Australia lacks a comprehensive national preparedness framework fit for the range of threats it faces. Beyond natural disasters, Australia remains poorly prepared. There is no regular public discourse about national risks, no planning or capability development for mitigating them, and no regular program for educating, training or exercising communities.

ASPI's recommendation — establish a National Civil Defence Agency as a federal statutory authority — was available when the NDS was written.

More recently, on June 2, 2026 — two days before this piece was published — ASPI's The Strategist published a pointed analysis: Preparing Australia for a Future of Overlapping Risk. Its core argument is one the NDS doesn't engage with at all: governments still organise around discrete shocks, but the operating environment increasingly delivers continuous, concurrent and cascading pressures across economic, social, technological and environmental systems simultaneously.

Overall, the NDS feels like it missed an opportunity to be bold, consider multiple futures and have a coordinated and holistic strategy for the real defence of Australia that includes citizens as active participants rather than passive. The strategy's title includes the word 'national.' The nation — its households, its communities, its everyday people — is largely missing from it.

What the NDS Actually Is — A Quick Translation

The 2026 National Defence Strategy is the government's plan for navigating what it describes as the most dangerous strategic environment Australia has faced since World War II. Released on April 16, it comes paired with a $425 billion Integrated Investment Program.

I’ll translate that into household terms — because that's how this actually affects you.

$425 billion over ten years works out to roughly $16,000 per Australian household. Doesn’t seem like a lot but that money sits alongside a 4.35% cash rate, inflation running at 4.6%, a housing affordability crisis that isn't resolving and a highly volatile job market. It competes with hospital funding, childcare, and cost-of-living relief that households are actively demanding right now.

Here's roughly where it goes:

• 41 cents in every dollar: maritime and naval capability
• 23 cents: submarines — that won't arrive until the 2030s (if they arrive at all & might not actually be fit for purpose)
• 5 cents: cyber (one the most prolific and serious threats you face as an everyday Australian)
• ~1 cent: preparing the civilian population (and that’s not actually what’s happening in the strategy)

To be fair, the 2026 NDS is a genuine step forward. For the first time, it explicitly names civil preparedness, fuel security, and economic security as domains of national defence. It draws real lessons from Ukraine and from the Iran conflict currently driving Australian fuel prices.

But there's a structural problem no added categories can fix: this document was written by Defence, led by Defence, and shaped by Defence's institutional worldview. Sure, there was probably rounds of consultation, review and feedback but it’s not the same as a multiagency lead strategy that is required for proper defence and the complexities we’re set to face in the future. The Office of National Intelligence — designed to provide the whole-of-government threat picture a strategy like this requires — was not in the lead. Neither were Treasury, Home Affairs, or DFAT or other very relevant agencies. The result is a military investment plan with strategy language attached. And that shapes everything that follows.

The Civil Preparedness Illusion

The NDS added civil preparedness as an explicit category — $4.8 billion for fuel stockpiling and a new National Fuel Council. Genuine improvements on 2024. Though I have two criticisms with its characterisation as civil preparedness and yes, I know that Defence is often deployed to assist following natural disasters etc.

First, the timing. Notice how civil preparedness entered the strategy: maybe as a reaction to an actual fuel shock caused by the Iran conflict. Not because planners foresaw the gap or acknowledged that civil preparedness means active citizen participation. Because the gap became impossible to ignore in real time and that its clear our Defence assets need fuel to function around Australia. That's not strategy — that's crisis management laundered into strategy language after the fact.

Second, what is actually characterised as civil preparedness is not only about civilians and more about making sure Defence has what it needs to support civilians in defence of Australia…or at least that’s how it read to me. I’ll unpack why this is effects you.

The SES — Australia's State Emergency Services — are extraordinary. Over 20,000 volunteers, skilled and community-rooted. They are also eight separate state-or territory-based organisations with no federal command authority and no integrating layer connecting them to a national security response. They were designed for natural disasters. In a genuine national security crisis — a sustained cyberattack, a fuel shortage, a coordinated threat — that architecture has no national command layer. I’ll get to NEMA shortly.

ASPI recommended in November 2025 that Australia establish a National Civil Defence Agency — a federal statutory body with the power to set national standards, coordinate state civil defence, and build genuine public preparedness. That recommendation was available when the NDS was written. From what I can see, it was not adopted. Maybe it’s being worked on across other departments but again, this is the problem – it’s not actually strategic defence of Australia if it’s happening in silos.

What this means practically: there is no government playbook for the population. No booklet. No community protocol. No local warden system. For a country the NDS says is facing its most dangerous strategic environment since World War II — that omission is significant.

Compounding factors and why a strategy is required: The Three Tensions Nobody's Resolving

The US Reliability Paradox

The NDS calls the US Australia's 'closest ally' while acknowledging it may be less available as a security guarantor. An alliance you're hedging against is not the same as an alliance you can rely on. The strategy doesn't resolve this tension — it just holds both positions simultaneously. Which is fine if you have a buffer or another option – which the strategy doesn’t offer either.

The China Trade Contradiction

China is named as the primary military threat while remaining Australia's largest trading partner. The strategy commits to building a force capable of participating in conflict against its biggest economic partner (maybe not that explicitly) — without saying anything about what that means for Australian households (and your wallet), jobs, or export revenues.

The Middle Powers Opportunity Missed

At Davos in January, Canadian PM Mark Carney framed it plainly: 'Middle powers must act together, because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.' Australia is exploring middle power relationships bilaterally — the Jakarta Treaty with Indonesia is a good development. But a collective architecture with Japan, South Korea, Canada and Pacific partners or even parts of Europe — pooled critical minerals, shared technology, coordinated economic coercion responses — is missing from the NDS.

Overall, the NDS feels like it missed an opportunity to be bold, consider multiple futures and have a coordinated and holistic strategy for the real defence of Australia that includes citizens as active rather than passive.

What Are We Actually Preparing Australians For?

Here is the most fundamental gap in the entire document — and the one least discussed.

The NDS describes the threat environment in considerable detail. It names China's military build-up. It acknowledges US alliance uncertainty. It references the Iran conflict, the lessons of Ukraine, the rise of grey zone operations. And then it allocates $425 billion accordingly.

What it never does is answer the question every Australian should be asking: prepared for what, exactly?What scenarios are civilians expected to face? What does a week of fuel rationing look like? What happens to your hospital if the electricity infrastructure is attacked? What does your community do if digital communications fail for 72 hours? The NDS doesn't say. And because it doesn't say, nobody is building the systems to answer those questions at the level where Australians actually live.

This isn't a peripheral complaint. It is the central failure of the document's claim to be a 'national defence' strategy. A military strategy tells armed forces what to prepare for and why. A national defence strategy tells the whole nation — including its citizens — the same thing. The 2026 NDS is the former wearing the language of the latter. The time of writing a national defence strategy only for military defence has passed.

What NEMA Actually Does — And What It Doesn't

Australia does have a national emergency management agency. NEMA was established in September 2022, combining two previous agencies into a single body designed to lead Australia's emergency preparedness, response and recovery.

NEMA does genuinely important work. It runs round-the-clock all-hazards monitoring. It coordinates national stockpiles of emergency goods — shelters, generators, sandbags — which state and territory governments can access in a crisis. It runs an annual National Preparedness Summit and Exercise Convergence, which brings together 350 professionals from government, emergency services, critical infrastructure, logistics and health to war-game catastrophic scenarios.

Notice who is in the room for that exercise: government officials, emergency service professionals, critical infrastructure operators, supermarket logistics teams. All essential. The citizen is the beneficiary of these exercises — not a participant in them. And while everyone in that room is a citizen, they won’t be thinking with their civilian hat on – they’re focused on representing their agency.

NEMA's website has a location-based section on preparing for emergencies – at it’s heard it’s natural disasters. It is a website, with a ‘national’ resilience library that goes back to your state or territory service with information about what to do for a natural disaster NOT what the NDS is preparing for. There is no household guide. No 72-hour self-sufficiency framework. No public education campaign. No school curriculum. No community warden system. No multilingual resources distributed proactively to households in high-risk areas. For the agency whose mandate explicitly includes public preparedness, the public-facing preparedness offering is strikingly thin and not fit for the future threats and risks Australian civilians should prepare for.

The structural reason is revealing: NEMA was built — and funded — primarily around natural disaster response and recovery. Floods, fires, storms. It is very good at that. But the NDS is describing a different threat environment entirely: cyberattacks on infrastructure, fuel supply disruption, grey zone operations, cascading system failures. NEMA's architecture was not designed for that category of threat, and nothing in the NDS changes that. So who does it in Australia?

What Finland Built — and Why the Gap Matters

The comparison with Finland is not a flattering one for Australia — and it is specific enough to be actionable, not just rhetorical.

Finland's approach is built around a single clear principle: when citizens can cope on their own for at least 72 hours, authorities can focus on managing the crisis and helping those most in need. That sounds simple. The infrastructure built around it is not.

Finland's citizen preparedness guide is published on its national digital platform, Suomi.fi, and was developed collaboratively by 24 government agencies simultaneously — including the Bank of Finland, the Ministry of Defence, the Police, the Red Cross, the Mental Health institute, the Meteorological Institute, and the Security Intelligence Service. It covers what to store, what to do in a power outage, how to shelter, how to contact authorities when normal communications fail, and how to help vulnerable neighbours. It is available in 15 languages plus sign language. It was updated as recently as March 2026.

Finland also runs a national safety campaign that has reached over one million secondary school students. It maintains civil defence shelters with capacity for 3.6 million people, all capable of activation within 72 hours. Apartment buildings are legally required to have emergency plans, and residents are expected to know how to activate their building's shelter independently.

The result: 58% of Finnish households have already acquired 72-hour emergency supplies. That is not an accident of culture — it is the product of a sustained, whole-of-government, citizen-facing preparedness framework that treats preparedness as a civic skill, not a specialist function.

Australia has a website.

The ASPI Roadmap — and the Integration Lag

This gap has not gone unnoticed. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute published a detailed roadmap in May 2025 — Building National Preparedness: A Road Map for Australia and What We Should Learn from Finland — that made the case explicitly: Australia lacks a comprehensive national preparedness framework fit for the range of threats it faces. Beyond natural disasters, Australia remains poorly prepared. There is no regular public discourse about national risks, no planning or capability development for mitigating them, and no regular program for educating, training or exercising communities.

ASPI's recommendation — establish a National Civil Defence Agency as a federal statutory authority — was available when the NDS was written.

More recently, on June 2, 2026 — two days before this piece was published — ASPI's The Strategist published a pointed analysis: Preparing Australia for a Future of Overlapping Risk. Its core argument is one the NDS doesn't engage with at all: governments still organise around discrete shocks, but the operating environment increasingly delivers continuous, concurrent and cascading pressures across economic, social, technological and environmental systems simultaneously.

The piece names what ASPI calls the 'integration lag' — the growing mismatch between the speed at which risks compound across systems and the speed at which institutions can coordinate a response. Energy disruption affects food production. Financial stress constrains logistics. Climate shocks reshape supply chains. Fuel is not simply an input — it is the condition that determines whether the whole system functions. These pressures don't sit in isolation. They accumulate.

The implication for ordinary Australians is direct: the next crisis probably won't arrive as a single, identifiable shock that NEMA can respond to and the SES can manage. It will arrive as a set of overlapping, interacting failures — some natural, some geopolitical, some technological — that overwhelm systems designed to handle one thing at a time. A fuel shortage during a heatwave during a cyberattack on the grid is not three separate emergencies. It is one cascading event, and no current Australian framework is designed to manage it. I’d argue these things are happening, close together at the moment which is why people feel anxious and overwhelmed!

That is the real answer to the question the NDS never asks: what are we preparing Australians for? Not a single event. A world of overlapping, concurrent, cascading risk — where the gap between government response capacity and citizen self-sufficiency is not a detail to be addressed later. It is the strategic vulnerability itself.

What This Means for You — Three Pivots

This opinion piece is designed to help you see the environment you'll actually be navigating — so your decisions are calibrated to reality rather than to a version of Australia the NDS itself says no longer exists.

Pivot 1: Your Information Environment Is Now a Security Issue

Foreign influence operations are documented, active, and specifically designed to exploit the kind of complex, emotionally charged geopolitical environment Australia and other nations are currently living through. What you read, share, and believe is part of a national security picture. Developing genuine information hygiene — knowing your sources, cross-referencing, being sceptical of content designed to provoke rather than inform — is the 2026 equivalent of locking your front door.

Your action: Audit your three primary news sources this week. Ask who funds them, what perspective they consistently amplify, and whether you cross-reference with anything that challenges your view.

Pivot 2: Build Your Household Fuel and Energy Buffer

The government is spending $4.8 billion acknowledging Australia needs a national fuel buffer. Your household equivalent is practical: keep at least half a tank as a minimum, understand your local supply vulnerability, and have a 72-hour plan for what happens if your area faces an energy disruption. Not survivalism — the minimum strategic buffer the NDS itself is now building at national scale.

Your action: Map your household's energy dependencies this week. What doesn't work without electricity or fuel? What's your 24-hour plan if both are disrupted?

Pivot 3: Invest in Your Local Community as Your First Layer of Resilience

In any real disruption, your actual first responders are your neighbours, your local networks, and the community relationships you've already built. This is the civil preparedness layer the NDS doesn't fund. Social cohesion at street level is also what foreign influence operations specifically target — a community that trusts each other is significantly harder to destabilise.

Your action: Identify three neighbours you could genuinely call in an emergency. If you can't name them, that's your starting point.

The Bottom Line

The 2026 National Defence Strategy is not a bad document. It is, in many ways, the most honest strategic assessment Australia has published.

But honest diagnosis and complete and comprehensive strategy are different things. A document written primarily by Defence that misses key threat actors, treats civil preparedness as a reactive addition, allocates 1% to the civilian population and 23% to submarines that don't exist yet (and may never), and gives Australians no practical framework for their own role in national defence or resilience — that document has real gaps.

And, yes, I know it was written by Defence as a Defence Strategy but at some point did anybody ask if the time and resources spent pulling it together was commensurate with the threats and risks of today and the future? It feels like it was produced because it’s been the “done thing” and Australian citizens are owed more than this when it comes to $425 billion in tax payer money for ‘national defence’ and civil preparedness.  

The strategy's title includes the word 'national.' The nation — its households, its communities, its everyday people — is largely missing from it.

In a world where the next shock is more likely to arrive through your fuel pump, your electricity grid, your social media feed, or your community's fracture lines than through a naval formation, those gaps are not academic. They are personal.

The bridge between global strategy and your household doesn't exist yet in any government document. That's why building it — for yourself, your household, and your community — is not optional. It's the pivot. I can help you with that!

FuturePivots helps you translate high-level global events into practical systems for your life, household, and business. Explore the Prep and Ready Pivot to start building your personal resilience system today: learn.futurepivots.com.au