Warnings Without Action
Australia’s Pattern of Strategic Complacency and the Case for a Parliamentary Inquiry into National Resilience
This discussion paper was prepared to accompany the March 2026 IIER-A Proposal for a Parliamentary Inquiry into National Resilience.
Why this narrative, and why now
This paper accompanies the proposal for a Parliamentary Inquiry into National Resilience and Preparedness. Its purpose is not to repeat the proposal, but to set out, in plain terms, the pattern of behaviour that makes such an inquiry necessary.
Across two decades, successive Australian governments, of both political persuasions, have been warned, in detail and in writing, of foreseeable national risks and vulnerabilities. The warnings have come from defence and strategic reviews, from royal commissions, from parliamentary committees, from independent research bodies, from allies and trading partners, and at times from within government itself. In almost every case, the warnings have been acknowledged, sometimes formally received, occasionally praised, and then left unacted upon until events forced a reactive response.
The thesis of this paper is straightforward: Australia does not have a knowledge problem; it has an action problem. The country knows what it should be preparing for. It does not prepare. The reason is not primarily bureaucratic inertia, nor incompetence, nor lack of resources. The reason lies in a political culture in which the federal electoral cycle has consistently crowded out the longer time horizons that genuine national preparedness demands. Successive governments have treated national risk as an issue to be managed in the news cycle rather than addressed in the planning cycle.
This is the gap between knowing and doing. It is the gap that the proposed Parliamentary Inquiry into National Resilience and Preparedness is designed to close.
1. The pattern: warning, report, recommendation, deferral
The most striking feature of Australia’s national-resilience record is its repetitiveness. The same broad sequence has played out across multiple domains, under multiple governments, over multiple decades:
• A vulnerability is identified, often years before it manifests as a crisis.
• A report, inquiry, white paper, or strategic review documents the vulnerability and proposes remedial action.
• Government acknowledges the report and, sometimes, issues a formal response.
• Implementation is partial, deferred, or quietly abandoned, frequently because the political cost of action is judged higher than the political cost of inaction within the relevant electoral horizon.
• A change of government, or a change of minister within the same government, resets the policy clock. Inquiries lapse. Recommendations are not tracked through to delivery.
• A crisis arrives. A reactive, hastily assembled response is mounted. The cost of that reactive response is invariably greater than the cost of the preparation that was deferred.
• A new inquiry is commissioned to examine what went wrong, and the cycle begins again.
This is not a caricature. It is a description of the actual record across fuel security, pandemic preparedness, climate-security risk, defence capability, sovereign industrial capacity, and disaster resilience. The case studies that follow trace the pattern in each domain.
2. Liquid fuel security: fifteen years of warnings, one Strait of Hormuz
No single domain illustrates the warning-without-action pattern more sharply than Australia’s liquid fuel security. The chronology speaks for itself.
In February 2013 and February 2014, the National Roads & Motorists’ Association published two reports, authored by Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO (Retd), documenting the growing fragility of Australia’s liquid fuel supply chain. A third report in December 2014 benchmarked Australia’s transport energy policies against those of seventy-five other countries and found Australia alone among developed oil-importing nations in relying entirely on commercial market forces for transport-fuel security. Australia held no government-owned reserves, mandated no industry stockholdings (later addressed), and had no “Plan B” for a significant supply interruption. By that time, fuel-import dependency had risen from around 60 per cent in 2000 to over 90 per cent, and onshore stocks were measured in days, not months.
In 2015, the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee tabled its inquiry report into Australia’s transport energy resilience and sustainability. It recommended a whole-of-government fuel supply risk assessment that explicitly included military disruption scenarios. The recommendation was not implemented in any meaningful sense until a Liquid Fuel Security Review was initiated by a separate Joint Parliamentary Committee in 2018.
By 2018, transport fuel imports exceeded 90 per cent. By September 2020, faced with the imminent closure of the last four oil refineries in the country, the Government finally responded with a subsidy package designed to keep two of the four refineries open until 2027.
The 2021 IIER-A report Australia – A Complacent Nation characterised the response as “too little, too late, and too short-sighted,” noting that no public plan existed for what would happen after 2027. The most charitable interpretation was that the issue had been moved off the agenda for the next federal election.[1]
Throughout this period, IIER-A and other independent bodies repeatedly warned that the next regional fuel-supply shock was a question of when, not whether. The December 2014 NRMA report asked whether Australia would “wait for a regional Crimea event” before paying attention. Eleven years later, the question answered itself: the recent conflict-related disruption to petroleum flows through the Strait of Hormuz exposed precisely the vulnerability that had been documented in detail since 2011; a vulnerability that, on more careful examination, is materially more severe than official figures suggest, once fuel in transit within the Exclusive Economic Zone is excluded from the calculation of sovereign controllable reserves.
The cascade was foreseeable and was foreseen. Liquid fuel supply, defence operational readiness, freight and logistics, agricultural inputs, and the broader economy were exposed simultaneously, because they all depended on the same imported, foreign-shipped, single-route input. This is precisely the kind of cascading interdependency a national resilience framework would have been designed to anticipate. Australia did not have such a framework. The JSCFADT inquiry into the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, which reported in December 2020, recommended the development of a national resilience framework. As at April 2026, more than five years later, no formal Government Response has been tabled in Parliament.”
3. Pandemic preparedness: the ‘black elephant’ in the room
The COVID-19 pandemic was not a Black Swan. It was, in the words of the IIER-A 2021 Australia – A Complacent Nation report, a “black elephant,” a foreseeable risk, visible to anyone willing to look, that nobody wanted to address because the cost of action was perceived as too high. Pandemic-readiness reviews, sovereign manufacturing reports, and supply-chain assessments had all flagged Australia’s exposure well before 2020.
The exposure was structural. Australia imported over 90 per cent of its medicines, 90 per cent of its liquid fuels, and depended on foreign-owned and foreign-controlled shipping for some 98 per cent of its imports and exports. The Therapeutic Goods Administration had publicly identified Australia as particularly vulnerable to medicine shortages. There was no publicly available information on the level of medicine stocks held in Australia’s commercial supply chain, and no government mandate of any minimum stockholding. By contrast, the Finnish Government’s Decree on Mandatory Reserve Supplies of Medicines specified more than 1,400 medicinal products to be stocked at levels of between three to ten months’ supply.
When the pandemic arrived, Australia’s health system entered the crisis with roughly twenty-five per cent fewer hospital beds per capita than the OECD average and only 9.4 intensive-care beds per 100,000 population, compared with 33.9 in Germany. The Victorian Government had been warned by its own Health Department at the onset of the crisis that its frontline pandemic defence was in disrepair. “Just-in-time” supply models, prized in normal times for their efficiency, became single-points-of-failure overnight. Surge capacity, routinely characterised in budget reviews as “waste” or “redundancy,” turned out to be exactly what a resilient system requires.
The post-event inquiries followed the established pattern. The Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 reported in April 2022. The JSCFADT inquiry into the implications of the pandemic also reported in 2022, calling explicitly for a national resilience framework. The Commonwealth COVID-19 Response Inquiry reported in 2024, with nine guiding recommendations, nineteen immediate actions, and seven medium-term actions. Each inquiry confirmed, in essentially the same terms, that the country had not been ready for a foreseeable event, and that pandemic planning was not integrated with broader emergency-management and resilience frameworks.
Whether those inquiries’ recommendations have been translated into structural change, sovereign manufacturing capacity for essential medicines, transparent and verifiable supply chains, mandated stockholdings, integrated whole-of-government resilience planning, is itself one of the questions the proposed Inquiry must answer.
4. Climate-security risk: ‘Missing in Action’
The climate-security file is, if anything, a starker example of the pattern, because the warnings have come not only from external bodies but from Australia’s own Parliament.
In 2018, a Federal Parliamentary Senate Inquiry identified climate change as “a current and existential national security risk.” The inquiry recognised that Australia and its regional neighbours occupy the part of the world most exposed to climate impacts, and that climate change is already affecting the health of Australians, the severity of natural hazards, the spread of infectious diseases, and water security for agriculture. It explicitly noted the failure to adopt a fully integrated, whole-of-government approach to climate-security risk.
There has been no substantial policy response to that 2018 report. The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s 2021 assessment, Missing in Action, concluded that successive Australian governments had been, and continued to be, missing in action on their obligation to prevent, protect, and prepare for climate-crisis impacts. Policymakers, bureaucrats, and security analysts had largely focused on traditional, narrow security concepts and downplayed or ignored climate disruption and human security.
The 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires intersected directly with this pattern of warning and inaction. The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements reported in 2020. Its Chair, ACM Mark Binskin AC, summarised the issue in a single line: “unprecedented is not a reason to be unprepared.” The Royal Commission’s recommendations on national coordination, information-sharing, and emergency-response capability are now five years old. The Senate Select Committee on Australia’s Disaster Resilience, appointed in November 2022, examined preparedness and recovery workforce models. A response to its interim report was tabled in December 2024. Broader systemic progress remains limited.
Climate is not a domain where Australia can quarantine the risk at the border. It is not a pandemic that can be locked down. It is a steadily intensifying set of physical, security, and economic stresses that the 2018 Senate inquiry told the country to prepare for. Eight years on, the integrated whole-of-government response that inquiry called for, still does not exist.
5. Defence: nine white papers, nine reform programs, declining preparedness
The clearest illustration that the warning-without-action problem is not driven by lack of money or lack of attention is the defence portfolio itself; the area of greatest declared political consensus, and the area in which the political cycle has been most damaging.
Between 2007 and 2022, Australia invested in the order of $695 billion in defence. Over the same period and a little before, the country churned through approximately thirty-eight defence-related ministers across twenty-three years, who collectively commissioned nine defence white papers and nine separate reform, restructure, or transformation programs. Defence Minister churn has been bipartisan: when one major party criticises the other for it, the only honest qualifier is that both have done it in roughly equal measure.
The 2023 Defence Strategic Review, commissioned by the incoming Labor government, found that the Australian Defence Force was “not fully fit for purpose” in the face of the current strategic environment. That finding sits uneasily alongside the scale of investment and the volume of policy work over the preceding period. The most plausible explanation is institutional: an organisation as large and complex as Defence cannot absorb successive politically driven reviews, restructures, and ministerial changes and still execute coherent long-term capability planning. Senior leadership is disempowered; expert advice is filtered through political risk; review follows review with insufficient time to implement, evaluate, and learn.
The submarine saga is the case study within the case study. In 2009, the Government identified a future requirement for an expanded submarine fleet to be available by the mid-2030s. Over the intervening fifteen-plus years, successive governments selected — and successively unselected — Japanese, French, and finally an AUKUS combination of used US Virginia-class boats and a yet-to-be-designed UK SSN, the latter scheduled for the 2040s. That is roughly a decade after the original 2009 timeline, and notably after the period in which the 2023 DSR judged heightened conflict risk could materialise. The strategic-warning time has shortened; the capability arrival date has lengthened. The two trends move in opposite directions.
A bipartisan strategic complacency has compounded the problem. The AUKUS announcement in September 2021 was made without prior public articulation of the strategic case, without a tabled national-security strategy, and without a national defence strategy in place — the latter following only in 2024, three years after the partnership was announced. The arrangement was endorsed by the then-Opposition within hours of the announcement. There has been no substantive parliamentary debate on what is, by cost, the largest single project in the Commonwealth’s history.
None of this is presented as opposition to defence investment, or to AUKUS, or to any specific platform decision. The point is narrower and more uncomfortable: a country that cannot table a defence strategy until three years after announcing its largest-ever defence project, that cycles thirty-eight ministers through the portfolio in two decades, and that commissions nine reform programs without completing any of them, has a structural problem that money alone will not solve.
6. The common factor: an electoral-cycle political culture
Across every domain examined above, fuel, pandemic, climate, defence, the same underlying dynamic recurs. The federal political horizon, in practical terms, runs three years, and often shorter. National-resilience preparation runs decades. The two horizons are not compatible, and where they conflict, the shorter horizon almost always wins.
Several features of the Australian political system intensify this mismatch:
Prime ministerial instability
Between 2007 and 2022, Australia had six prime ministers in fifteen years. Only three of the eight prime ministers of the 21st century were defeated at a general election; the others were removed by their own parties. Each change of leader has typically brought a change of leadership team, a re-set of priorities, and a corresponding disruption to long-running policy work. The casualties of that disruption have consistently been good policy, expertise, institutional trust, and long-term thinking.
Ministerial churn within portfolios
The defence-portfolio numbers cited above are not unique. Energy, health, climate, and immigration have all seen rapid ministerial turnover. Where preparation requires sustained ministerial focus over multiple years — stockholding regimes, sovereign manufacturing programs, integrated risk frameworks — the chances of any single minister carrying a reform through to delivery are low, and the chances of the next minister continuing rather than re-starting are lower still.
News-cycle adjudication of policy
When the news cycle, rather than evidence, adjudicates policy, no minister wants to risk negative coverage by attempting reform whose costs are immediate, but whose benefits are not visible until well after the next election. The public service learns, over time, that the politically safer course is to offer ministers what they want rather than the honest advice they require. Honest advice on long-term risk is, by definition, advice about costs incurred today for benefits realised under someone else’s government.
‘Just-in-time’ public policy
Former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran AO, observed in January 2020 that in a democracy like Australia’s, most things are done on a just-in-time rather than a clear-sighted, forward-thinking basis, because little can be done in government unless the public wants it. The pandemic that arrived weeks after his observation made the cost of just-in-time public policy painfully visible. Five years on, the structural shift to a clear-sighted, forward-thinking basis has not occurred.
Marketing risk away rather than addressing it
The 2021 IIER-A report observed a recurrent federal-level tendency to market success stories and to dismiss discussion of risks and vulnerabilities for short-term political gain. Risk-talk loses votes; reassurance wins them. The asymmetry is structural and predictable, and it explains why leadership on resilience has more often emerged from State and Territory governments, from community and industry actors, and from the security and emergency-response community (those who actually deliver services to Australians), than from the federal political level.
None of these features are unique to one party or one government. They are properties of the system within which both major parties operate. That is precisely why a remedy must be structural: legislated reporting requirements, institutionalised tracking of inquiry recommendations, a standing national resilience framework with teeth, rather than dependent on the goodwill of any particular minister or government.
7. The compounding factor: opaque foreign influence
Layered on top of the electoral-cycle problem is a second, less visible factor: substantial flows of foreign money into Australian policy advocacy on multiple sides of the major resilience-relevant debates, particularly in energy, industrial, and climate policy. The 2024 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security review of the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 found, and the Government accepted, that the scheme had failed to achieve its intended purpose. A parallel Senate inquiry into lobbying regulation found the existing code applies only to third-party lobbyists; a partial and incomplete picture of Commonwealth-level lobbying.
The point here is not partisan and is not directional. Foreign-funded advocacy operates across the political spectrum and on multiple sides of the same debate. The point is that decisions which have shaped Australia’s sovereign capability, energy resilience, and industrial base have been taken in an environment where the federal transparency regime, by the Government’s own acknowledgement, has not been able to illuminate who is funding which advocacy and to what end. That is a question Parliament can and should examine on resilience grounds, as a matter of sovereign capability rather than as a matter of political contest.
8. Why previous inquiries have not been enough
Australia has not lacked for inquiries. The proposal’s appendix lists nine distinct prior parliamentary or independent inquiries with material relevance to national resilience over the past decade. Each produced findings; many produced sound recommendations. None has been enough. The reasons are instructive:
• Each prior inquiry was scoped to a single domain - fuel, pandemic, natural disaster, foreign-influence transparency, and therefore could not examine how vulnerabilities in one domain cascade into others. The Strait of Hormuz disruption is a textbook case of cascade across fuel, defence, freight, agriculture, and the broader economy that no domain-specific inquiry would have integrated.
• Several inquiries did not receive a formal Government Response. The 2022 JSCFADT report, with its explicit call for a national resilience framework, is the most consequential example: as at March 2026, no formal Government Response had been tabled in Parliament.
• Inquiries have not generally examined the implementation record of their predecessors. There has been no standing mechanism to track which recommendations from prior inquiries have been delivered, which have been quietly abandoned, and which lapsed when an election changed the government or dissolved a committee.
• None has examined the foreign-influence dimension as a resilience question, rather than as a partisan or counter-intelligence one.
• None has examined the political-cultural dimension (the role of the federal electoral cycle and ministerial churn in defeating long-horizon preparation) as a structural problem in its own right, requiring structural remedy.
The proposed Parliamentary Inquiry into National Resilience and Preparedness is designed to address all five gaps simultaneously.
9. The case for the proposed Inquiry
The proposal of 28 March 2026 sets out the inquiry’s scope, mechanism, and expected outcomes in detail. The narrative purpose of this paper is to make plain why the inquiry as proposed is the necessary next step, rather than another iteration of the same pattern.
Four features of the proposal deserve emphasis in any discussion intended to garner cross-party support:
Whole-of-nation scope
The proposed inquiry would, for the first time, examine national resilience as an integrated system: supply-chain vulnerability, sovereign capability, cognitive resilience, foreign influence, and preparedness for strategic disruptions beyond natural disasters, considered together. Earlier inquiries’ findings would be integrated rather than re-litigated.
Implementation accountability
The proposal calls for explicit mechanisms to track recommendations from this and prior inquiries through to delivery, with reporting on reasons where recommendations are not accepted, and including the cases in which inquiries have lapsed because of a change of government. This is the structural remedy for the deferral pattern. Without it, the same cycle will recur.
A legislated National Resilience Framework and regular Parliamentary reporting
A legislated requirement for the Australian Government to establish, maintain, and update a National Resilience Framework, supported by a regular State of National Preparedness Report tabled in Parliament, would, for the first time, place national-resilience reporting on the same standing footing as the budget. It would create a forcing function for honest disclosure of national stockpile adequacy, surge capacity, exercise programs, and supply-chain resilience, regardless of which government is in office.
Bipartisan, cross-spectrum constitution
The proposal explicitly recommends a Senate Select Committee composition that includes representatives from across the ideological spectrum. The foreign-influence question, in particular, is one that can only be examined credibly by a committee that does not look like it has prejudged any particular direction of influence. The same is true of climate-security and energy resilience. A genuinely cross-spectrum inquiry is the only configuration in which Parliament can hope to establish findings that survive the next change of government.
10. Conclusion: closing the gap between knowing and doing
Australia’s national-resilience problem is not that the country does not know what to do. The reports, inquiries, royal commissions, and strategic reviews of the past fifteen years, a non-trivial fraction of which are listed in the proposal’s appendix, have set out, with admirable specificity, what should be done. The problem is that what should be done has not been done.
The single most consistent reason is a political culture in which the time horizons that matter are the time horizons of the next election. That culture has produced fuel insecurity that the Strait of Hormuz has just made tangible; it produced a pandemic-preparedness gap that COVID-19 made visible; it has produced a climate-security policy vacuum that is visible every fire season; and it has produced a defence-procurement record in which the country can spend nearly seven hundred billion dollars over fifteen years and still be told that its forces are not fully fit for purpose.
None of this is the fault of any single government, party, or individual. All of it is the cumulative product of a system in which longer time horizons have not been institutionalised, and in which the political incentives to defer have consistently outweighed the political incentives to prepare. That is the system the proposed Inquiry is designed to begin to change.
ACM Mark Binskin’s line from the 2020 Royal Commission, that “unprecedented is not a reason to be unprepared”, has by now been quoted often enough to risk losing its force. But it is the line on which any honest discussion of national resilience eventually rests. Australia has been warned. The warnings have been documented. The cost of continuing to defer is not theoretical; it is being paid, in increments, every time another foreseeable disruption arrives and finds the country not ready.
The question the proposal poses, and which this paper invites Members and Senators to consider, is not whether Australia can afford to commit to the proposed Inquiry. It is whether Australia can afford not to.
Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO (Retired)
Board Chair
Institute for Integrated Economic Research – Australia
[1] In 2026, the Labor Government extended the subsidy program until 2030; however, without a clear statement of intent for what would happen after that.