Unprepared

Synopsis

Australia faces the most dangerous strategic environment since the Second World War. China is building the largest military in Asia. The United States is distracted and its commitment uncertain. Australia's northern approaches are undefended. Its fuel reserves would last thirty-four days in a conflict. It imports eighty percent of its major defence equipment from countries it cannot guarantee access to.

And yet: Australia is rich enough, free enough, and favourably placed enough to change course — if it acts now. It sits above a mineral endowment that the world's great powers all need. Its democratic institutions remain intact. Its alliance relationships are deepening. Its geographic isolation, so often characterised as a weakness, is in fact a defender's dream in an age of missiles.

Unprepared makes the case for national transformation across eight interdependent pillars: resource revenue capture, wartime fiscal architecture, industrial re-shoring, demographic strategy, strategic decoupling from China, maritime and northern defence, alliance deepening, and regional architecture. The programme is costed at approximately A$200 billion per year in defence spending alone, funded through Norwegian-style resource revenue capture, and tested against fifteen divergent future scenarios.

The window to act is closing. This book argues it has not yet shut.