As Australia was swept by panic buying and medical shortages this year, the scenes were eerily familiar for one of the country’s most senior military planners.
Key points:
- The ABC has obtained a confidential report which exposes essential services’ vulnerabilities during a global crisis
- Australia’s reliance on imports for health care, water treatment, fuel and maintenance were identified as key vulnerabilities
- There are growing calls within the Federal Government for a new national security strategy to make Australia more self-sufficient
In a secret meeting only a year earlier, the Defence Department’s director of preparedness Cheryl Durrant and a group of Australian industry leaders had predicted a strikingly similar scenario.
“We predicted the unpredictable,” says Ms Durrant, who left the department in January.
“We knew the problems, we knew this might be coming, we knew that various things needed to be done.”
The ABC has obtained a confidential report prepared for Defence just a year before the COVID-19 outbreak, which provides a forecast of Australia’s vulnerabilities in a global crisis.
Ms Durrant is speaking out about the predictions after ending her 30-year Defence career because she believes it is her duty to convince Australia to prepare for an increasingly unstable world.
“I’ve looked at the global situation,” she says. “It’s no use festering in a bunker somewhere in Canberra — it’s a time of crisis.”
She says the risks to Australia are snowballing, with climate change, US-China tensions and the rise of nationalist governments among the key threats to global stability.
The report, which Ms Durrant commissioned to plan for the growing threats, lays out a timeline of how Australian essential services would collapse within just three months of a crisis worse than the COVID-19 threat, which would put a halt to global trade.
“If you think of the COVID crisis as a test run, it’s really a critical thing for us to learn from this,” she said.
“The lesson is expect the unexpected.”
Preparing for the worst
As the Defence Department’s director of preparedness and mobilisation, Ms Durrant planned for horror scenarios that would keep most Australians up at night.
Last year, she commissioned a landmark review of Defence planning — the first so-called mobilisation review since the Cold War — to prepare for what the department concluded was an increasingly likely global crisis.
“We saw three main possibilities of that happening: the increasing and escalating effects of climate change and natural disasters; a global power conflict, probably between America and China; and finally a pandemic — one with a much greater death rate than what we’re seeing with the COVID crisis,” Ms Durrant said.
“The review looked at the big issues, like if we had to go to war, do we have enough fuel? Do we have enough energy?
“Can the national supply chains and our national infrastructure support