~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 25th March, 2026.
Labor’s failure to grasp the implications of the new world disorder have been on full display in recent weeks as war in the Middle East roils our economy, fuelling inflation and threatening serious food and energy shortages.
The Albanese government’s reactive and piecemeal response reveals a lack of preparedness for a crisis that many have warned about and should have been anticipated.
Our over-reliance on imported fuel and fertilisers has been pointed out repeatedly.
However, little has been done to address these crucial supply chain vulnerabilities. Instead, we have policy on the run.
Meeting sectoral demands for improved fuel and food strategies won’t fix the looming polycrisis.
Only a fit-for-purpose national security strategy can address the complex interrelationship between economics, geopolitics and emergency planning. But the last – and only – national security strategy was by the Gillard government 13 years ago. It has never been updated.
The time to prepare for conflict is not when war is imminent, or has begun, but when times are peaceful. That moment has passed and Australians are now bearing the consequences. Why were we so unprepared? Many of our political and corporate elites failed to recognise that the deteriorating security environment warranted a change in thinking from a peacetime to a near wartime mentality. Latter-day Cassandras were dismissed as alarmists and even warmongers.
But they have been proven right.
Real-world events have shattered the illusion that the generational peace Australians have long enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
Europeans who smugly proclaimed that war on their continent had been consigned to the dustbin of history received a rude shock in 2022 when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in pursuit of his imperial ambitions. This should have been a wake-up call that Pax Americana was fracturing and we needed to lift our game on defence. Again, nothing was done. While Europeans and pacifist Japan ramped up their defence spending, ours flatlined despite warnings from Defence Minister Richard Marles that our strategic circumstances are the most challenging and dangerous since the end of World War II.
Putin’s invasion was followed in short order by the murderous Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 supported by Tehran and its proxies, igniting a series of linked conflicts across the Middle East leading to the current US-Israeli strike against Iran.
Warning lights should have been flashing red in the National Security Committee of cabinet spurring serious attempts to immediately increase fuel reserves, identify supply chain risks, move from “just in time to just in case” planning and redouble efforts to make more of what we need in this country – otherwise known as sovereign capabilities.
But apart from laudable efforts to support Australian critical minerals miners, the government hasn’t done nearly enough to build the resilience needed to mitigate rising geopolitical risk.
We have wafer-thin petroleum reserves. Anthony Albanese hasn’t delivered on his promise to build a strategic merchant fleet that could carry oil and other essential commodities in emergencies.
Perversely, he now appears to be considering higher taxes on gas exports when the world is facing a critical gas shortage, risking a collapse in new investment.
Ironically, it took a New Zealand foreign minister to bell the cat. Winston Peters has admitted his country and Australia ought to have been better prepared for the Iran war oil crisis and made “serious mistakes” in allowing fuel refineries to close because they were “too cocky” about the state of the world.
It should have been obvious that an unusually peaceful period in world history has ended and we are returning to the historical norm. The respected Peace Research Institute Oslo reports that the world is experiencing a surge in violence not seen since World War II. Sixty-one conflicts were recorded across 36 countries in 2025. PRIO research director Siri Aas Rustad warned: “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift.
The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago.
“Conflicts are no longer isolated.
They’re layered, transnational and increasingly difficult to end. It is a mistake to assume the world can look away.”
And this may be only the beginning.
The next decade could see escalating conflict around the world that will directly impact on Australia, the most serious of which would be a military confrontation between China and the US over Taiwan. To borrow from the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, that would be the “mother of all battles”, dwarfing the supply chain and geopolitical upheavals of recent weeks.
It’s no surprise that revisionist powers China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are united in their desire to unravel a rules-based order crafted by the US and fellow democracies that has served Australia well. But few foresaw that an American president would actively participate in the dismantling of this order. Serial interventionist Donald Trump has led a revolution “against the very world that America made”, says Carnegie’s Stewart Patrick.
If you think that’s a stretch, read the 2026 US National Defence Strategy. It dismisses “the rules-based international order” as a “cloud castle” abstraction.
Dispelling the false assumption that geography will continue to cushion us from overseas shocks is a task of government.
But the message isn’t getting through often or sharply enough.
When the Ukraine conflict first broke out, complacent elites, who should have known better, asserted that a conflict in distant Europe wouldn’t affect Australia.
That was patently wrong. Global supplies of key agricultural products, energy and metals were severely disrupted. The drone war with Russia revealed a potentially fatal structural flaw in our defence force. We have no effective counter-drone capability.
The same people continue to argue that we shouldn’t get involved in a Taiwan conflict because it’s far away and doesn’t concern us. That canard should be rebutted. Much of our trade and energy goes through the South China Sea. If simmering tensions over Taiwan erupt into military conflict, war will come to our shores whether we like it or not.
Our geography won’t protect us.
The question is: Does the Albanese government have workable contingency plans in place for such an eventuality?
Alan Dupont is chief executive officer of geopolitical risk consultancy The Cognoscenti Group and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute.
