Public preparedness education gap is a national security vulnerability — and I’m done waiting for it change

The Lowy Institute mapped the threat to Australia. I spent 15 years writing the version of this for government. Nobody wrote the version for your kitchen table — until now. 

It’s 11pm on a Wednesday. Jessica — 38, mortgage, two kids, a job she’s not sure will look the same in two years — is in bed scrolling her phone. She’s been doing it for 45 minutes. She knows she shouldn’t, but something in her can’t stop.

A news headline catches her eye: “China could strike Australia with ballistic missiles, new report warns.” She clicks it. Reads halfway through. Feels that familiar dread. Puts her phone face-down. Doesn’t sleep well.

By morning, the feeling is still there, but there’s nowhere to put it. There’s the school run, the mortgage repayment that went up again, the inbox that never empties. The thought she keeps coming back to isn’t really about missiles. It’s simpler than that: if this was actually something I needed to act on, surely someone or an authority would have told me what to do by no, right?

Nobody has. And that silence does something specific — it teaches people that the absence of instructions means the absence of risk. It doesn't. The ANU National Security College's most extensive public consultation on this question — more than 20,000 Australians surveyed since late 2024 — found something telling: most people feel government shares too little information about these threats, even as they worry that poorly handled communication could cause panic. What I think this means is that government share too little information about how it would impact them at the person level rather than the nation level. That's not a trust problem, and it's not really an appetite problem either. It's a vacuum. People aren't choosing to ignore the risk. Nobody has built them a way to act on it.

I’ve seen this pattern plenty of times. The briefing gets written, gets actioned at the top, and stops there — while the people who’d actually have to live through any of it are never given much of a starting point. It’s part of why I moved into this work.

So let’s close that gap, starting with this one.

What the Lowy Institute actually found — in plain language 

The report — Understanding the Chinese Military Threat to Australia, published by the Lowy Institute in June 2026 — is rigorous, credible analysis. It maps China’s military capabilities across missiles, air power, naval fleet, submarines, marines, and cyber forces, projecting forward to 2035.

The coverage of it focused on ballistic missiles and bombers. Understandably — they’re visual, dramatic, easy headlines.

But here’s what the coverage didn’t have room to explain: the most serious threats to Australian households don’t require a single weapon to land on our soil. They work by disrupting the systems we’ve built our entire lives on top of — and parts of them are already underway.

1. Maritime trade disruption — what’s on your shelves

99% of Australia’s international trade by volume — 1.6 billion tonnes worth $650 billion a year — moves through our ports. Fuel, medicine, electronics, food inputs we don’t produce domestically. A naval threat in the shipping lanes of the Indonesian archipelago doesn’t need to fire a shot to change your life — ships slow down, insurance costs spike, importers reroute. We saw a preview during COVID, when shelves stripped within hours.

2. Undersea cable sabotage — your connection to everything

Up to 95% of all international data flows through physical undersea cables on the ocean floor — your banking, work, communications. These cables are publicly mapped, which makes them findable. A cut doesn’t announce itself. It just starts failing.

3. Cyber attacks on critical infrastructure — already happening

The Australian Signals Directorate has confirmed that state-sponsored cyber actors continue to target Australian governments, critical infrastructure, businesses and individuals. Power grids, water systems, banking, hospital networks — the kind of pre-positioning the Lowy report describes as similar to submarines waiting beneath the surface.

We’ve already had a preview of what this looks like in practice. In November 2023, a cyberattack forced DP World — which handles roughly 40% of Australia’s sea freight — to shut down operations at its Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle terminals for three days, stranding tens of thousands of shipping containers nationally. Separately, Australians experienced data breach events at a rate of roughly one per second across 2024, a twelvefold increase on the year before.

The part nobody is planning for

Here is the argument I actually want to make, and it’s not the one the news cycle is having.

It isn’t that the threats themselves are being hidden — they’re not. They’re public, documented, and the subject of credible, repeated analysis. The problem is what happens in the space after a threat report lands, where government has a strategy and the public has a headline, and nothing connects the two.

History is fairly consistent on what happens in that gap. When a population is surprised by disruption it had no framework for — a shortage, a blackout, a system failure — the secondary effects are often worse than the original event. Panic buying empties shelves faster than any blockade could. Price gouging and scarcity create the conditions where organised exploitation moves in. Trust between neighbours and institutions frays exactly when it’s needed most.

None of this requires a missile. It only requires a population that has never been taught how to respond.

That is the actual vulnerability. Not the report. The silence after it.

Governments plan for the threat. Almost nobody is planning for how an unprepared population behaves once the threat lands. That gap — not the missile range, not the cyber capability — is the part that should concern you most. 

This isn’t a fringe view. ASPI — the Australian Strategic Policy Institute — published a roadmap in 2025 stating plainly that “the Australian Government isn’t doing enough to prepare Australian citizens for the more volatile and uncertain strategic environment that we face,” noting there is no regular public discourse about national risk, no coordinated capability development, and no regular program for educating or training the public. The same report points to Finland’s “comprehensive national security” model — which integrates civilian and military preparedness, and sends every household practical guidance as a matter of course — as the benchmark Australia has not yet built towards.

Separately, ASPI’s 2025 strategist commentary has argued for a dedicated civil defence capability, distinct from natural-disaster-focused emergency management, to lead national preparedness against hostile threats specifically. It hasn’t materialised.

What we have instead is an emergency management system built almost entirely around natural disasters — vital, but only one layer of a threat environment that now includes cyber attacks, supply chain shocks, and cascading infrastructure failures that don’t wait their turn.

Australian Red Cross research found 90% of Australians have been affected by an emergency or disaster in their lifetime — yet only one in three (35%) were prepared for it.

This is where I think about Diane. 

Diane is 51, juggling work, a mortgage, and the quiet, relentless coordination of her ageing parents’ lives — appointments, medications, aged care assessments, the calls that come at inconvenient times and never have easy answers.

When I think about what infrastructure disruption actually means at a kitchen table, I think about Diane’s parents’ medications. About a home care worker who can’t reach them if fuel supplies are being stressed. About a hospital system already stretched before any added pressure. About the MyAgedCare portal and the online banking that hold Diane’s family together, sitting on infrastructure the Lowy report confirms is already a target.

Nobody has ever sat Diane down and walked her through what any of this means for the people she’s responsible for, or what she could do about it in an afternoon. That’s not a personal failing. It’s an education that has simply never been offered.

And then there’s the business Diane works for, or the one Jessica’s husband runs

Households aren’t the only ones living without a plan. Most Australian small businesses are running on a buffer of around 30 days of cash on hand, with research putting the proportion holding minimal or no cash reserve at all somewhere between 15% and 27%. That’s the financial reality before anything geopolitical even enters the picture. A supply chain disruption that delays stock by a fortnight, a fuel price spike that blows out delivery costs, a few days of card payment outages during a cyber incident — any one of these can be the difference between trading through a disruption and not trading at all.

Now layer the human side on top of that. If petrol queues lengthen, if public transport is disrupted, if there’s genuine uncertainty about whether it’s safe or sensible to leave the house, some people simply won’t come to work. Not out of drama — out of the same instinct that has them stockpiling consumables and reading the news at 11pm. When the ground feels unstable, people protect their home first. Most businesses have no plan for what happens to rosters, deliveries, or cash flow when that instinct kicks in across a whole street, let alone a whole region.

And underneath all of it sits a question that barely gets asked: what is an employer actually responsible for here?

I’m not a lawyer or a legal expert but it got me thinking. Under Australia’s work health and safety laws, employers already carry a legal duty to manage psychosocial hazards — the workplace conditions that cause psychological harm, not just physical injury. Sustained uncertainty and a lack of clarity about what to do are explicitly named hazards under the model Code of Practice, sitting alongside things like excessive workload and poor organisational change management. That duty doesn’t disappear when the source of the uncertainty is global instead of internal. A workforce quietly carrying unspoken dread about disruption, supply, or safety — with no information and no plan from their employer — is a psychosocial risk sitting in plain sight.

Most workplaces have a fire evacuation plan pinned to the wall. Very few have ever had an honest conversation with their staff about what the business, and its people, would actually do in a sustained disruption. That conversation is overdue, and it doesn’t require alarming anyone to have it — it requires exactly the same calm, practical approach I’m asking households to take.

The education has to start now — not when something happens

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I’m not saying panic. I’m not saying build a bunker. I’m not saying the missiles are coming for your suburb.

I’m saying that the only time most people learn how to respond to disruption is in the middle of it — which is the worst possible time to be learning anything. The households and communities that handle a crisis well are not the ones who guessed right. They’re the ones who had already thought it through, calmly, in advance.

It has to be taught, not improvised. And right now, almost nobody is teaching it — not to households, and not to the businesses and workplaces that households depend on for their income.

Start with these five moves

• Build a 2–4 week pantry buffer. Not hoarding — strategy. Maritime disruption hits shelves before it hits anything else. We are an island!
• Treat half a tank of fuel as empty. Australia now imports around 90% of its fuel needs, with only two oil refineries left in operation nationally. Any disruption hits petrol first.
• Build a 72-hour offline capability. Cash on hand, a battery radio, printed medication lists and contacts. If the internet went down for 72 hours, what breaks in your home?
• Know your local infrastructure. Your nearest independent pharmacy, your evacuation route, your backup communication options. Situational awareness is free.
• Build your social capital. The homes that navigate disruption best have existing relationships before they need them. Who in your network has skills or knowledge that would matter?

Concern about national security among Australians rose from 42% in November 2024 to 64% by February 2026. In an earlier wave of the same study, fewer than one in five respondents believed Australia was ‘very’ or ‘fully’ prepared for any of the 15 threats surveyed.  Source: ANU National Security College, ‘No Worries? Australian attitudes to national security, risk and resilience’, March 2026

Worried and unprepared is an exhausting place to live. The doomscrolling that keeps Jessica awake at 11pm isn’t really about the missiles. It’s a mind searching for agency it has never been given a framework to find.

The bottom line

The Lowy Institute did its job. The analysts did their job. The version of this written for government will keep getting written, and it should.

What’s missing is the version written for you — the so-what and the now-what for the Jessica who can’t sleep, the Diane who is already carrying too much, and the employers who haven’t yet realised this is part of their job too. That translation barely exists anywhere in this country. In its absence, anxiety just accumulates and trust in government decreases, with nowhere useful to go.

FuturePivots is that translation. It’s the briefing nobody else is writing — built specifically for the people the original one was never meant to reach.

See the gaps. Shape your systems. Own your resilience. That isn’t a slogan. It’s the heart of how to be prepared and ready to pivot when the next shock hits.

The absence of public preparedness education is a national security vulnerability. The education has to start now — not when something happens. 

The Prep & Ready Pivot is the practical starting point I’d recommend for anyone who has read this and wants somewhere real to put that energy. It takes the complicated how, why, when and what of an all-hazards approach to preparedness, and turns it into a calm, practical implementation plan — built to meet the world as it actually is today.