iscover
Yet again the “Lucky Country” is finding that luck is far from a strategy to navigate life, but this didn’t happen overnight, rather it has been years, if not decades, in gestation, and frankly, we’re all to blame.
For pretty much as long as we’ve been a federation, Australia has been the beneficiary of a “big brother” security policy. Whether we were leaning on the British Empire or hitching our wagon to the United States, that protection gave us the breathing room to build a prosperous, stable nation while the rest of the 20th century went up in flames around us.
This “strategic benevolence” – essentially a long-term safety net – allowed us to ride the wave of massive economic growth and industrialisation through the Second World War and beyond. It’s how we earned the “Lucky Country” title, booming through the late 1900s while someone else walked the beat.
The problem? We never really grew up.
Both the Aussie public and our leaders have been stuck in a bit of “cognitive adolescence”, constantly torn between wanting to act like an independent adult and running back to our strategic benefactors the moment things get hairy. This “She’ll be right” attitude only got worse in the ’80s and ’90s. When the Cold War ended, we swallowed the “End of History” myth, hook, line and sinker, convinced the good times would just roll on forever.
It’s no wonder then that Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 (after the initial shock of 2016) felt like a bucket of ice water to the face. His “America First” approach to geopolitics made it clear that the old alliance guarantees aren’t what they used to be, even as things go south right on our doorstep.
What this has revealed is that the global order isn’t just fraying at the edges anymore; it’s being violently reshaped by whoever has the biggest boots on the ground. For those keeping score, the picture is getting pretty grim.
The current conflagration in the Middle East has done more than just spike our petrol prices – it has incinerated the last illusions of a stable world. By pulling our primary ally’s focus away and stretching global resources thin, this conflict has proven that the “rules-based order” we’ve leaned on for decades is effectively on life support.
Closer to home, the “peaceful” Indo-Pacific is looking more like a powder keg every day. Between the looming shadow of Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific and the sudden friction between Thailand and Cambodia, our backyard is becoming increasingly crowded and hostile.
From the frozen trenches of Ukraine to the high-stakes US raid on Nicolás Maduro and even the renewed American gaze towards Greenland, a brutal old reality has returned with a vengeance: might makes right.
This global chaos has dragged Australia to a crossroads we’ve spent the better part of a century trying to avoid. We are staring down a “coming-of-age” moment that won’t be settled with a few polite speeches; it’s going to be a hard, gritty slog. As a nation, we’re now faced with two very different paths.
On one hand, there’s the “hard yakka” option. This is the moment we finally stop playing the “junior partner” and start doing the heavy lifting ourselves. It would require a massive, coordinated national effort to transform Australia into a self-reliant, consequential middle power, one that can actually hold its own when the world gets ugly.
On the other hand, we have the classic “She’ll be right” approach. We acknowledge that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but we decide to change absolutely nothing. We keep drifting on our current trajectory, keep our fingers crossed and pray that the “Lucky Country” tag has enough juice left to protect us for one more generation.
Ultimately, the era of cruising on someone else’s dime is well and truly over. The only question left is whether we’re ready to stand on our own two feet before someone else decides our future for us.
As Alan Dupont, chief executive of the Cognoscenti Group, starkly observed in a piece for The Australian, titled For years our elites dismissed the warnings. Now we’re at the edge of a polycrisis, Australia’s long nap from history is over. We are no longer drifting through a peaceful summer; we are standing at the edge of a polycrisis, a tangled and increasingly complex web of economic, geopolitical and social disasters that our current leadership seems fundamentally ill-equipped to handle.
A contemporary Gordian knot
Australia’s modern history is a story of “cognitive adolescence”. We’ve spent a century torn between a desire to be our own boss and a desperate need for the protection of the British Empire or the United States.
This safety net allowed us to boom throughout the 20th century, even as the rest of the world tore itself apart. We convinced ourselves that our luck was a permanent feature of the Australian landscape rather than a temporary byproduct of a US-led global order.
Dupont pointed out that this complacency wasn’t just a vibe – it was a policy failure, saying, “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.”
The “Cassandras” warned that the era of “just in time” logistics and outsourced security was ending. They were ignored in favour of the “End of History” triumphalism that suggested liberal democracy and global trade had won forever.
Now, with 61 conflicts recorded across 36 countries in 2025 alone, and the ramifications of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East starting to bite at home, that illusion has been shattered.
War in the Middle East and the energy trap
The current war in the Middle East has acted as a brutal stress test for the Albanese government, and by Dupont’s estimation, they are failing. This isn’t just a “distant conflict”; it is a direct hit to the Australian kitchen table. The war has roiled our economy, fuelled inflation and brought us to the brink of food and energy shortages.
The government’s response has been “reactive and piecemeal”. Despite years of warnings about our wafer-thin fuel reserves and our reliance on imported fertilisers, the transition to “just in case” planning hasn’t happened.
Dupont noted: “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 ... Instead, we have policy on the run.”
This “policy on the run” is most evident in our energy sector. While the world faces a critical gas shortage, the government is considering higher taxes on gas exports, a move Dupont described as “perverse” because it risks collapsing new investment exactly when we need to be asserting our sovereign capabilities.
A splintered Pax Americana and the schizophrenia our primary benefactor
Perhaps the most jarring and confronting realisation for the Australian public has been the decay of the “rules-based order” we’ve relied on since 1945. We used to believe that international law and shared values would protect us. That “cloud castle”, as the 2026 US National Defence Strategy called it, is evaporating.
The return of Donald Trump in 2024 and his subsequent 2026 National Defence Strategy have made it clear: the US is no longer interested in being the world’s unpaid security guard. As Dupont noted via Stewart Patrick, Trump has led a revolution “against the very world that America made”.
This shift has emboldened revisionist powers. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are no longer just “competitors”; they are actively working to dismantle the status quo.
Meanwhile, Russia continues its slow, bloody imperial grind in Ukraine; the Middle East is a tinderbox of linked conflicts involving Iran and its proxies, drawing comparisons to the Balkans pre-1914; and then of course, closer to home, the Western Pacific sees rising Chinese antagonism and confidence as America continues to be distracted by the “sandbox”.
For Australia, the most terrifying prospect is a conflict over Taiwan, in what Dupont called the “mother of all battles”. If that erupts, the supply chain disruptions we see today will look like a picnic. Much of our trade and energy flows through the South China Sea, if that tap is turned off, our geography won’t save us.
Our sovereign capability gap
One of the most stinging critiques in Dupont’s analysis is the failure to build “sovereign capabilities”, the ability to make what we need and protect what we have.
We are a nation that prides itself on “hard yakka”, yet we have allowed our fuel refineries to close and our strategic merchant fleet to remain a campaign promise rather than a reality. Ironically, it took New Zealand’s Winston Peters to “bell the cat,”, admitting that both nations were “too cocky” and made “serious mistakes” in their lack of preparedness.
Dupont highlighted a specific, terrifying flaw in our current military set-up, saying, “The drone war with Russia revealed a potentially fatal structural flaw in our defence force. We have no effective counter-drone capability."
While countries like Japan and various European nations have ramped up defence spending in response to the “new world disorder”, Australia’s spending has effectively flatlined. We are talking the talk. Defence Minister Richard Marles has called this the most dangerous time since World War II more times than many of us would care to count, but as Dupont reinforced, we aren’t walking the walk.
Finally our ’coming of age’ moment?
But importantly, where does this leave us? Well, simply, Australia is at a fork in the road.
We can no longer afford to be the “adolescent” nation, rebelling against our protectors while hiding behind their skirts. We are facing a “coming-of-age” moment that requires a fundamental shift in our national DNA.
For Dupont, we have two distinct choices: Transform or decline. We knuckle down and recognise that the world has changed immeasurably. This requires a “coordinated, holistic, national effort” to move from a lower-tier middle power to a consequential, self-reliant nation.
This means fixing our fuel security, building our own drones, securing our food supply chains, and finally updating the National Security Strategy (which hasn’t been touched since the Gillard government in 2013) or steer into the skid with the “She’ll be right” trajectory. We acknowledge the mess but do nothing. We keep hoping that the “Lucky Country” tag is a suit of armour.
We continue to rely on “just in time” deliveries from a world that is increasingly hostile to our interests.
In the face of this, it is becoming increasingly clear that the “generational peace” Australians have enjoyed was an anomaly of history, not the norm. The data from the Peace Research Institute Oslo confirms it: the world is more violent and fragmented than it has been in decades.
These conflicts are no longer isolated; they are “layered and transnational”.
Alan Dupont’s analysis is a sobering bucket of cold water for a nation that has been “too cocky” for too long. The polycrisis is here, roiling our economy and threatening our security.
If the Albanese government and the Australian public don’t move from a peacetime mentality to a “near wartime” focus on resilience and sovereign capability, we will find ourselves at the mercy of a world where “might makes right” is the only law that matters.
The era of cruising on someone else’s dime is over. The question isn’t whether the world will change, it already has. The question is whether Australia has the “hard yakka” in it to stand on its own two feet before the “mother of all battles” arrives at our doorstep.
Final thoughts
Look, I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but the sun is finally setting on our long, comfortable nap from the reality of history.
Transforming Australia into a genuine regional power, one with the economic muscle, diplomatic weight, military teeth and critically, the cultural and social cohesion, and willingness to back it up isn’t just an aspirational daydream anymore.
In a world where “might makes right” has returned with a vengeance, self-reliance has become a cold, hard necessity of national survival.
It is time for an Australia that stops looking for a “big brother” to do the heavy lifting and starts taking full responsibility for its own skin. We need to be the ones shaping a stable, prosperous Indo-Pacific, rather than just crossing our fingers and hoping our “strategic benefactors” don’t get too distracted by the next conflagration in the Middle East or eastern Europe.
For too long, we’ve been caught in a structural pincer movement, the nation’s economic anchor which has seen us tie our prosperity to China’s markets and its voracious demand versus the security anchor, in which we’ve hitched our safety to a US alliance that is increasingly looking inward, as seen in the 2026 National Defence Strategy.
This has left us exposed to a global contest that for many Australians is only just now becoming a reality, never mind it being one that we didn’t start and can’t control. But that doesn’t have to be our future. In a world increasingly fractured between democratic and authoritarian systems, we need a “coming-of-age” moment.
Australians deserve a frank, unvarnished conversation about where we stand and what we value. And let’s be clear: that conversation can’t stay trapped in the Canberra bubble. It has to involve the Australian people, the ones who will pay the taxes, carry the risks, and ultimately defend the decisions made in their name.
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch at
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
