For some years I have worked at both ends of disaster. At one end are the first minutes, hours and days, the world of emergency and disaster management, when the forest is alight or the floodwater is still rising and the community hall has been unlocked before anyone has worked out who is in charge. At the other, the world of climate adaptation, with much longer timelines, where planning schemes, housing policy, insurance and adaptation pathways are debated in meeting rooms, to decide what we are building for the decades ahead.

At the level of ideas, the two ends have been converging for a while. The IPCC’s 2012 report on extreme events tied disaster risk reduction to climate adaptation, and the Sendai Framework, which is the UN roadmap for countries to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks, treats climate as a driver of disaster risk. The ideas have met, but the institutions, and the people inside them, mostly have not, divided as they are by expertise and career path, by timeframe and by the constraints each works under. One set works on the next disaster event, another toward 2050; one knows who is exposed and which road goes under first, the other holds the levers over land use, building standards and managed retreat (which is a proactive, planned strategy to permanently relocate people, structures, and infrastructure away from areas vulnerable to environmental hazards).

In that separation a good deal of our future risk accumulates, as if we were being asked to mop the floor while the conversation about the leaking roof happened in another building.

(Picture by Getty Images)

The work of getting through

The near work goes by several names. In its formal guise it is emergency and disaster management, and more broadly it is resilience. In ecology, Holling used the word ‘resilience’ to distinguish a system that returns to equilibrium after a disturbance from one that can absorb the disturbance and reorganise while keeping its function; later scholars extended it to social systems, to describe a society’s capacity to absorb a shock and then adapt.

On the ground, though, resilience seldom looks like a definition. It looks like the person who knows which neighbour has mobility issues and will need help early, or the firefighter who knows a road marked accessible becomes a creek after heavy rain. There is real intelligence in this, and in the first hours it can be the difference between a system that bends and one that breaks.

When resilience becomes a loop

But resilience also carries an ambiguity that has not escaped those who have been caught in one disaster after another. In everyday language it means bouncing back, a fine thing to see in a household or a landscape, though in public policy it can become a trap the moment it is used to praise coping while ignoring the amount of support they need, or what people are being asked to bounce back to. Often it is back to housing that will flood again and insurance they can barely afford, in other words, to the same exposure as before with nothing changed but the emergency kit.

This is where resilience turns conservative, not in the political sense but the structural one, good at helping a system survive and less good at asking whether the system produces the harm. As communities grow more practiced at enduring events that need not be inevitable, and volunteers more tired at once, emergency services and community networks holding it together are left to make up for the consequences of decisions taken elsewhere. That burden is carried unevenly, heaviest on those with the least room to move, the renters and carers, the people on casual wages or without secure cover. Offered without any path to reducing exposure, resilience becomes an additional burden to endure.

Bringing the future into the room

Climate adaptation changes the question. It begins from the recognition that the baseline is moving, that the future will not be a warmer copy of the past, and that the hazards themselves are changing in frequency and force, sometimes in ways that are not linear, as we are beginning to see across the planet. The IPCC describes adaptation as adjusting to actual or expected climate and its effects, to reduce harm or seize any opportunity that opens up.

That is larger than emergency response can hold, reaching into what we build and protect, what we stop approving, and what we may have to move or let go. None of these are easy conversations, because a house is never simply an asset, and people live inside the decisions we make. This is why adaptation cannot stay abstract, or wait for a later decade: it is a discipline of the present, but where the future enters through the choices being made now.

The risk of maladaptation

Adaptation has a difficulty of its own. Because it works through models and maps and plans, it can drift from the lives it means to serve, so a strategy ends up technically elegant but socially thin, describing future risk without changing present capacity. There is a sharper danger too, which Barnett and O’Neill call maladaptation: measures meant to reduce climate risk that end up deepening vulnerability or pushing it elsewhere. A seawall, for instance, can protect one stretch of coast while worsening the erosion along the next. The useful question runs deeper than whether a measure reduces risk in general: whose risk falls and whose rises, and who is left holding what remains once the deciding is done. This is where people who work close to disaster have most to offer, because they know how a plan behaves once it meets the ground.

This would ask whether the action could unintentionally shift risk onto another community, worsen inequality, encourage new development in risky places, damage ecosystems, undermine First Nations rights, increase long-term dependency, or protect assets while leaving vulnerable people behind. This would be particularly important for major mitigation infrastructure, development controls, relocation decisions, housing policies and economic recovery investments.

Where the two meet

None of this is about choosing between resilience and adaptation, since we need both, and each corrects the other’s failings. Resilience on its own can settle into forced endurance with no way out, while adaptation on its own can produce strategy with no roots in a place. Adaptation lends resilience a longer horizon, turning the question from how people get through the next flood toward how the conditions behind it might change before the one after. Resilience lends adaptation its footing, since no plan is carried out by a community in the abstract, but by particular people and the trust built up over years.

Their clearest meeting point is social infrastructure, the relationships and local institutions through which people coordinate and act together. Some of it is easy to see, in libraries and halls and neighbourhood centres; some is harder, in reciprocity and local leadership and the confidence to knock on a stranger’s door. Recovery research finds that communities with stronger social ties come through disasters better, and Eric Klinenberg has argued that social infrastructure deserves being treated as infrastructure in its own right, rather than as the soft accompaniment to the solid kind. If we fund a bridge because it lets people move, the local organisation that brings people together earns the same standing, because it is what organises people when everything else is failing.

The connective tissue of a place

The Northern Rivers showed this plainly through the 2022 floods, when neighbours and informal responders, neighbourhood centres and community halls, volunteer networks and local media and trusted local leaders were, in effect, the region’s first disaster infrastructure, often first to respond and last to leave. Public policy still tends to fund the physical and assume the social. The risk in that is obvious once you have watched a place hold itself together with the second while the first has failed.

To say this is not to shift responsibility onto communities. If anything the reverse is true. Disaster resilience, and in particular community-led resilience, needs to be funded and supported well before disasters, not only propped up during recovery. Local communities cannot be expected to fill the gaps left by underinvestment, fragmented governance or a slow formal response.

It also helps to treat local capability as something to be built and mapped, not only assumed. Adaptation planning tends to map hazard and exposure well and local capacity poorly, yet a town’s ability to get through the next event rests on ordinary things: a known risk profile, an agreed set of safe places, a way to check on the people who might be missed, and trained local connectors with a working line to council and emergency services. Mapping that capability means counting the formal assets, the rural fire brigades and the SES, the health services and evacuation centres, the roads and energy and communications networks, but also the informal ones the formal map usually omits, the trusted leaders and organisers, the local community resilience group, the food networks and farmers, the cultural and youth and faith groups, the disability advocates and First Nations networks that carry a place when the lights go out.

There is also the matter of what repeated disaster does to the people who keep showing up. Many in the Northern Rivers are carrying cumulative trauma, and the volunteers and workers and responders asked to be resilient are often the most depleted. Adaptation that took this seriously would be trauma-informed, treating grief and fatigue, distrust and burnout as part of the region’s actual adaptive capacity rather than as recovery footnotes, since a community’s emotional reserves are as real a resource as its roads.

The question of fairness

Then, there is also a question of fairness. Risk is not spread evenly, because vulnerability is not; it is made rather than given, produced by decisions about housing and income, land use and insurance, and political voice. People living in a flood zone are often the ones who can least afford an insurance. The hazard may be natural; the disaster is always partly social. So when the people who carry the exposure are absent from the rooms where it might be reduced, a choice has already been made on their behalf, and risk settles wherever power is thinnest.

There is something uneasy, too, in celebrating a community’s resilience while leaving it to absorb risk that could have been reduced. Preparedness is real and necessary work, and it was never going to stand in for prevention. But preparedness without long-term considerations about how to ensure people and Country are removed from harm’s way in the first place is equally important.

This is why joining disaster resilience and climate adaptation cannot stay a technical exercise: it has to carry questions of equity and authority from the start. In particular, it has to make room for the authority and knowledge of First Nations communities in relation to Country, against a long habit of treating Country as a passive surface for risk rather than as living and relational. Further, practices such as cultural burning, caring for Country and the management of cultural landscapes are not tools to be folded into a government plan without proper authority and resourcing, and without protection for cultural knowledge; they belong to Traditional Owners, and adaptation is stronger where it is clear how First Nations organisations will help make the decisions, and not only be consulted on them, and how different Nations across a region will be recognised and resourced. Seen this way, adaptation is a question of custodianship and justice as much as a technical one.

Fairness is easier to hold onto when it is written into how decisions are judged. Climate adaptation would be strengthened by an explicit principles framework to guide the assessment of actions and ensure consistency across agencies, councils and communities. Such a framework might include principles such as: do no harm; avoid creating new risk; prioritise those least able to adapt through private means; recognise First Nations self-determination and cultural authority; protect social as well as physical infrastructure; support community-led resilience without transferring government responsibility onto communities; regenerate ecological systems; be transparent about trade-offs; maintain public accountability over time; and avoid maladaptation.

On this, a related consideration would be that each major proposed climate adaptation action should be tested against a maladaptation screen. This would ask whether the action could unintentionally shift risk onto another community, worsen inequality, encourage new development in risky places, damage ecosystems, undermine First Nations rights, increase long-term dependency, or protect assets while leaving vulnerable people behind. This would be particularly important for major mitigation infrastructure, development controls, relocation decisions, housing policies and economic recovery investments.

Climate adaptation could also make equity more practical by adopting a targeted-universalism approach: universal adaptation goals for the whole region, with targeted support for those least able to adapt privately. This includes renters, people in insecure housing, low-income households, people with disability, older residents, young people, First Nations communities, isolated rural residents, uninsured or underinsured households, small businesses and community organisations.

What this asks of emergency and resilience practitioners

For those of us in emergency management and community resilience, the shift is significant. Our task is still to help people get through, and always will, because the first post-disaster hours are real and capability saves lives. But alongside it sits another question: what are we helping people return to? A flood plan or a resilience network need not sit apart from decisions about housing, land use, drainage and insurance; it can be a doorway into them.

The knowledge gathered in disaster resilience is diagnostic as much as operational, showing where a system is brittle, where the water goes, and which so-called low-probability event has become a regular visitor. That knowledge needs to travel upstream, into the meeting rooms where exposure is decided, and be spoken plainly.

What this asks of adaptation practitioners

For those of us in climate adaptation, the shift runs the other way: less to write plans for communities than to really build them with those who will live inside them. Consultation counts for little once the choices that matter have been framed, and a strategy changes nothing until it moves real budgets and the conditions people live in. It helps if a plan can answer a few plain questions: who is safer once it is done and who might be worse off, and what it changes now rather than in a distant 2050. Those questions are easier to ask when social infrastructure is funded as part of the work rather than left to run on goodwill, and when a measure is tested for maladaptation before it is announced.

One of the more promising things I saw recently, working with a council in Melbourne, was it treating adaptation less as one team’s plan than as a lens the whole organisation could use, with its adaptation team working alongside human resources and communications, customer service, operations and IT, helping each ask what a changing climate meant for the work it already did. The literature calls this mainstreaming, and in Victoria, the Municipal Association and the Greenhouse Alliances have pressed councils toward a whole-of-organisation approach, while the Victorian Climate Resilient Councils program was created to help build that capacity across services and operations. Widely recommended, it is still unevenly done, but carried into the enabling functions rather than left with planning and assets, it turns adaptation from a document into a habit of mind.

Two further habits would help. The first is to plan for compounding disaster events that arrive together rather than one at a time, since a place like the Northern Rivers rarely gets a hazard in isolation: a flood brings road closures and telecommunications failure and displacement in its wake, a heatwave arrives with power outages and pressure on the health system and the isolation of people who cannot leave a hot house. Testing an action against those cascades, across roads and energy and communications, housing and health and the organisations that absorb the overflow, tells you more than testing it against a single clean scenario.

The second is to treat managed relocation with the seriousness it demands, and well before particular decisions are forced. My region already knows the weight of buybacks and lost homes and uncertain futures. Relocation can offer safety when a place can no longer be made safe, yet done carelessly it produces trauma and dispossession, and a deeper unfairness than it set out to cure, so it needs principles agreed in advance: consent and who pays, renters as much as owners, mental health and social ties, connection to Country and the future of the land after a buyback. It is a social and emotional process as much as a property transaction.

The plans that do the most good are rarely the ones that describe the future beautifully; they are the ones that change the present wisely.

The plans now being drawn

Some of this thinking has been sharpened by the Disaster Adaptation Plans that the NSW Reconstruction Authority is now rolling out across the state, the Northern Rivers among them. The effort is welcome, and I have already put some of these considerations to the team working on it. Its strongest feature is the refusal to shrink disaster adaptation down to a single hazard, agency, dataset or technical fix. That multi-hazard framing is really valuable, because flood and bushfire, heatwave and landslide, coastal erosion and cyclone, storm and infrastructure failure are not separate problems in practice; they arrive tangled up with housing stress and insurance withdrawal, with road isolation and failing communications, with the strain on mental health and the fragility of local economies, and with plain inequality. Holding the built and the social, the economic and the natural together in one frame is indeed the right approach.

The opportunity now, as I see it, is to make the bridge between underpinning values, risk evidence, options and implementation much clearer. The public materials describe the process well, but it is not yet obvious how the technical data and the community’s values, the local knowledge and the economic analysis, the equity considerations and First Nations governance, and in the end political judgement, will be weighed against one another when the hard choices arrive. That weighting is where everything crunches, because adaptation is never neutral: the same plan can protect people and places or, handled without care, shift the risk onto those with the least power to refuse it, or lean on First Nations knowledge without the authority that should govern its use.

Two halves of one task

Resilience and adaptation are not rival programmes or competing vocabularies but two halves of one public task: to help places live through what is already arriving while changing the conditions that would otherwise let the harm keep repeating. Resilience asks how we get through this; adaptation asks what has to change so it does not keep happening; and we need both questions at once.

If resilience comes to mean only the capacity to absorb one more shock, and then another, it becomes a hard and narrowing thing that asks too much of those already carrying too much. But if it grows to include the capacity to learn, to reduce our exposure, to strengthen our relationships, and to change course while there is still a course to change, it becomes something larger, closer to the agency of people who see the roof is leaking and reach for the mop as builders improve their roof. That larger capacity is what adaptation, at its best, tries to protect. The people in emergency vehicles who risk their lives to save strangers, those opening the community halls to spontaneously organise a community response, and those drawing the long-term plans are all working on one question about time: what kind of places do we want to still be here, and for whom, after many more of these events have come and gone?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Leadership Health and Culture Forum, organised by Business NSW. It was an energising day, bringing together around 100 leaders from across the Northern Rivers and across industries, to reflect on leadership, wellbeing and organisational culture.

One of the panellists, Tim Jack Adams, Founder and CEO of GreenX7, began with a simple exercise. Using a QR code, everyone completed a quick “battery check”, rating different aspects of their wellbeing across eight dimensions: purpose, physical health, sleep, nutrition, fun, mental health, friendships and relationships.

The results painted an interesting picture.

Across most dimensions, people rated themselves somewhere between 60 and 65 per cent. Purpose scored the highest, at around 74 per cent, while sleep was the lowest, at about 54 per cent. Interestingly, the results in the room seem to echo wider findings collected at national level.

Those numbers resonated with me throughout the day because they seemed to capture something I encounter regularly when working with leaders and organisations. Many people genuinely care about what they do. Their work gives them meaning. They want to contribute. Yet many are also deeply tired.

(Photo by Jeferson Argueta)

A paradox of modern leadership

During my presentation, I found myself building on Tim’s observations.

Perhaps the challenge facing many leaders today isn’t that they need to do more, but they need to learn how to do less. That may sound counterintuitive in a culture that celebrates productivity, responsiveness and constant growth. Leadership advice often focuses on becoming more efficient, more strategic and more resilient. The underlying assumption is that better leadership comes from increasing our capacity to produce.

I’m beginning to wonder whether we’ve reached the limits of that way of thinking.

The organisations I work with are navigating growing complexity. Disasters, geopolitical instability, workforce shortages, regulatory burdens, psychosocial risks, increased customer expectations, and rapid advances in AI all compete for attention. When complexity increases, our instinct is often to respond with another strategy, another plan, another meeting or another reporting requirement.

Sometimes, however, the most valuable thing we can create is space.

From machines to living systems

I suspect our understanding of leadership is still deeply influenced by the industrial age.

For more than a century, we have tended to think about organisations as machines that can be optimised through better planning, tighter control and greater efficiency. We measure productivity, monitor KPIs, track inputs and outputs, set targets, optimise workflows and build dashboards to manage performance.

None of these tools is inherently wrong. They have helped organisations become more efficient, more accountable and more capable of delivering at scale. But they also reveal the mental model we’ve inherited: if we can measure it, optimise it and control it, better outcomes will follow.

That way of thinking made sense when organisations were primarily concerned with producing more goods, more quickly and at lower cost but today’s organisations face a different challenge. Their greatest asset is no longer machinery or physical capital. Increasingly, it is the creativity, judgement, relationships and adaptability of the people who work within them.

The signs that something isn’t working are becoming difficult to ignore. Research from Gallup suggests that employee engagement has declined globally, with disengagement carrying an enormous economic cost. Terms such as the “Great Resignation” and, more recently, the “Great Detachment” reflect a broader sense that many people feel increasingly disconnected from their work.

I don’t think these are simply workforce trends but symptoms of a deeper issue. Somewhere along the way, many organisations have become exceptionally good at managing work while paying less attention to what makes work meaningful.

Work has the potential to be deeply human. It can be creative, purposeful, relational and even joyful. Personally, I love my work. I would probably do much of it even if I weren’t paid because it gives me meaning, connection and the opportunity to contribute to something larger than myself.

Yet many workplaces unintentionally reduce work to labour: a sequence of tasks to complete, targets to meet and outputs to produce. In doing so, we risk optimising performance while diminishing the very qualities that enable people to do their best work.

We’ve become remarkably good at measuring work, but much less skilled at cultivating the conditions that make good work possible.

Organisations are made up of people, and people are living systems. Living systems don’t thrive through constant extraction. They require periods of effort and recovery, challenge and reflection, growth and renewal. We recognise these rhythms everywhere in nature. Healthy forests, rivers and ecosystems regenerate because they don’t operate at maximum output all the time. Perhaps organisations are no different.

This is where the idea of regenerative leadership resonates with me. Rather than asking how we can get more from people, regenerative leadership asks a different question:

How do we create the conditions in which people can flourish over the long term?

The gardener rather than the engineer

I sometimes think about the difference between an engineer and a gardener. An engineer solves problems by controlling variables. A gardener cannot force a seedling to grow by pulling on its leaves. Growth happens because the conditions are right: healthy soil, enough water, sunlight and time. In other words, you don’t control a living system into growth, you cultivate it.

Regenerative leadership has something in common with gardening. Our role is becoming less about forcing outcomes and more about creating the conditions from which good work, healthy relationships and wise decisions naturally emerge.

That requires patience, trust and the humility to accept that not everything can—or should—be controlled.

What does this look like in practice?

Of course, regenerative leadership doesn’t mean lowering expectations or avoiding difficult decisions. Leaders still have budgets to manage, targets to meet and people who depend on them. The pressures are real.

The shift is less about doing less work and more about working differently.

In practice, it might mean being clearer about priorities so that everything isn’t treated as urgent. It might mean giving people more autonomy over how they achieve outcomes rather than managing every step of the process. It might mean asking whether another meeting is really necessary, or whether people need uninterrupted time to think. It might mean simplifying processes instead of adding another layer of reporting. It might mean checking whether workloads are realistic before asking people to become more resilient. It might mean creating space for reflection after an intense project rather than rushing immediately into the next one. It might mean reducing unnecessary emails, shortening meetings or protecting periods of uninterrupted work. It might mean noticing when a team is tired, acknowledging it openly and adjusting expectations accordingly.

None of these ideas is particularly revolutionary. Rather than asking, “How do we get more out of our people?”, regenerative leadership asks, “How do we increase our people’s capacity to think, create, collaborate and adapt?”

Those are very different questions.

Extractive leadership takes value out—of people, attention and relationships. Regenerative leadership seeks to leave people more capable, more confident and more alive than they were before the interaction.

Regenerative organisations won’t eliminate pressure. Every organisation experiences periods of intense effort. The difference is that they avoid making constant intensity the norm. Just as healthy ecosystems move through seasons of growth and recovery, healthy organisations need rhythms that allow people to renew their energy, learn from experience and prepare for what comes next.

Regeneration begins at home

This also raises a more personal question.

Can we lead regeneratively if our relationship with ourselves is fundamentally extractive?

The battery survey suggested that many leaders have plenty of purpose, but less energy than they need. I suspect that is becoming increasingly common.

Purpose matters, but purpose alone cannot sustain us.

Sleep, recovery, reflection, time in nature, meaningful relationships and moments of stillness are not distractions from leadership. They are part of the conditions that make good leadership possible.

The cultures we create often reflect the way we treat ourselves. When leaders model constant busyness and exhaustion, organisations absorb those behaviours. When leaders value authentic relationships, thoughtful decision-making, recovery and healthy boundaries, they give others permission to do the same.

One small practice I’ve introduced is starting our Monday morning team meeting by acknowledging how I’m arriving. Sometimes I tell the team that I’ve had a wonderful weekend with my family and, if I’m honest, part of me would rather still be there than at work. That doesn’t mean I’m uncommitted, but simply that I’m human. I’ve found that when leaders are willing to be genuine about their own experience, it gives others permission to be honest about theirs. That honesty often creates deeper trust, stronger relationships and, ultimately, a greater sense of purpose in our work together.

I’ve also noticed that my own energy follows rhythms rather than straight lines. Some days I can focus deeply for hours and accomplish an extraordinary amount. Other days, my concentration is poor, my creativity is low and progress feels slow. Some days I work long hours because the situation genuinely demands it. Other days I deliberately slow down to recover, reflect or simply… do nothing (read about my non-thinking chair here).

People sometimes describe me as a high achiever. I appreciate the compliment, but it has never felt quite right. I don’t wake up each morning thinking about what I seek to achieve that day. Most of the time I’m simply doing work that I mostly love. Ironically, I’ve found that when work is driven by curiosity, purpose and enjoyment rather than relentless striving, the results often seem to take care of themselves.

That observation isn’t unique to me. Biology itself works through rhythms rather than relentless effort. Muscles grow because they alternate between stress and recovery. Sleep consolidates learning. Attention naturally fluctuates. Ecosystems move through seasons. Even the human heart functions through alternating contraction and relaxation.

Life isn’t linear, it’s rhythmic. Why should our organisations be any different?

What matters isn’t operating at maximum capacity every day. What matters is whether, over weeks, months and years, we are building or depleting our capacity to do meaningful work.

Or perhaps more simply: Does our work leave us feeling more alive?

Towards regenerative leadership

The Taoist tradition speaks of wu wei, often translated as “action without unnecessary force”. It doesn’t mean doing nothing. Rather, it points towards acting in harmony with the situation instead of constantly trying to force outcomes.

That idea has become increasingly meaningful to me.

A leader practising wu wei understand that leadership may be becoming less about commanding, controlling, optimising and extracting, and more about creating the conditions in which people, teams and communities can adapt, learn and thrive together. To do so, they observe carefully, listen deeply, create the right conditions and act decisively when action is needed, while having the wisdom to step back when it isn’t.

During a recent conversation, another business leader shared a metaphor that has stayed with me. He said he was learning to be less like a bee, constantly rushing from one issue to the next, and more like a flower. A flower doesn’t chase bees. It creates the conditions that naturally attract them.

I wonder whether leadership is sometimes the same.

For this, we need a mindset shift: if we continue to treat organisations as machines, we’ll probably keep searching for better ways to optimise performance. If, instead, we begin to see organisations as living systems, a different set of questions emerges.

How do we create the conditions for people to flourish?

How do we build organisations that leave people stronger rather than depleted?

How do we lead in ways that increase the capacity of people, communities and the living world to thrive?

In the end, the measure of leadership may not be what we accomplish ourselves, but whether we, and the people around us, experience greater capacity, deeper purpose and a stronger sense of being alive while doing the work.

What struck me is that there was nothing angry in it, nothing that announced itself as extreme; it was warm, confident, almost neighbourly. The narrative she was relaying is approachable precisely because it is simple, and that simplicity, I suspect, is what makes it so palatable to many Australians navigating a period of real uncertainty.

She is in plenty of company, and Australia is in plenty of company too. Across much of the Western world, parties once considered fringe have moved steadily towards the centre of political life, and countries long regarded as stable liberal democracies are discovering that their stability was perhaps more conditional than they had assumed. In France, my country of origin, the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen is a serious contender to the upcoming presidential election. Here, One Nation remains the most recognisable expression of that politics. It names grievances bluntly, it positions itself against a political class that many people feel has stopped listening, and it keeps returning, election after election, with an audience the major parties would prefer to explain away. Whether one supports or opposes the party seems to me less interesting than the question of why it persists, and what its persistence reveals about the pressures accumulating beneath Australian life.

Because the pressures are real. Housing has drifted beyond the reach of a generation. Household budgets are under sustained strain. Artificial intelligence is beginning to unsettle assumptions about work that most of us grew up inside. Climate change has stopped being a forecast and become, for communities like mine in the Northern Rivers, a recurring lived experience. The world beyond our borders feels less predictable than it did even five years ago, and trust in institutions, never quite as robust as we liked to believe, is wearing thin.

That Australia will face disruption is, I think, settled. What remains open is how people will make sense of it, and who will be offering them the story when they do.

(Picture by Kiros Amin)

The politics of uncertainty

When commentators discuss support for far-right politics, ideology usually takes centre stage. My own sense, formed over twenty-five years of working in places under stress, is that ideology tends to arrive late in the process. What comes first is a feeling: that the world one understood is changing too quickly, and that nobody with power is paying attention.

Australians have lived through extraordinary change over the past several decades — globalisation transformed industries and the towns built around them, digital technologies reshaped how we speak to one another, the economy became more interconnected and, for many people, harder to read. Much of this delivered real benefits, but change dislocates as much as it liberates, and it does not dislocate evenly. Some communities prospered while others watched their reasons for existing migrate elsewhere; some people experienced social change as recognition, others as loss. For those who feel their work, their identity or their place in the order of things slipping, political messages that offer simple explanations begin to resonate.

Researchers studying this pattern across democracies keep arriving at a similar mixture — economic insecurity, cultural anxiety, status loss, distrust of elites, a longing for order — and they keep underscoring that most of the voters involved are not extremists. The Dutch scholar Cas Mudde has spent his career tracing how a politics once treated as outside the bounds of acceptable debate becomes, through repetition and through the willingness of mainstream figures to borrow its language, simply one position among others. But the people drawn to it are, as the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue from decades of survey data across Western democracies, less often embracing its ideas than reacting to a sense that the cultural ground has shifted beneath them, that much of what they once took for granted has slipped to the margins while they were not consulted. They are people looking for a story that explains what is happening to them. Some of the available stories channel uncertainty into solidarity. Others channel it into blame, and blame, unfortunately, travels faster.

Housing and the search for someone to blame

For many Australians, the most immediate anxiety is not ideological at all; it is financial. Housing has become perhaps the clearest symbol of a system whose fairness people have begun to doubt. For younger Australians, ownership recedes a little further each year, renters absorb rising costs with little security, mortgaged households sit exposed to every rate decision, and food, energy, insurance and transport keep claiming more of whatever remains.

But economic stress alone does not produce far-right politics. People endure hardship without turning on each other, as anyone who has spent time in disaster-affected communities can confirm. The danger appears when financial pressure combines with a conviction that the system itself has stopped being fair. When people feel locked out of what their parents took for granted, they go looking for explanations, and the political actors offering the clearest villains gain an advantage. The COVID-19 pandemic sharpened all of this. For a couple of years the state reached into ordinary life in ways most Australians had never known, official advice moved as the science moved, and for a good many people the distance between what they were told and what they felt hardened into a durable suspicion of government and official expertise that has not lifted since.

The actual causes of unaffordable housing are tangled: planning systems, tax settings, investment incentives, construction capacity, and decades of accumulated policy choices. None of it fits on a placard. Blaming migrants, international students or urban elites is much simpler, and this redirection, in which structural problems are converted into resentment of visible groups, is one of the recurring dangers of economically stressful periods.

The underlying concerns about population growth and service capacity are legitimate policy questions; they become corrosive when they are detached from any analysis of the system and attached instead to whole categories of people, many of whom are themselves vulnerable. Part of what gives the grievance its force, I think, is that for a long time these questions were treated as illegitimate to raise at all, so that people with ordinary worries about housing or the pace of change found themselves placed outside respectable opinion before they had finished speaking, and that dismissal, repeated often enough, teaches people that the institutions are not interested in them and that someone willing to give blunt answers is at least paying attention. Far-right politics tends to thrive precisely there, in the gap between real pressure and false explanation.

At the same time, part of this is not really about housing or wages at all. A good deal of the anxiety is cultural, about the pace at which a familiar place can change its character, about languages in the shops one does not recognise and customs one was not raised inside, about the slow loss of a shared world that people had assumed, perhaps without ever examining the assumption, would simply continue. I do not think it serves anyone to treat all of this as bigotry. We are attached to the familiar, a sense of common life is part of how trust and cooperation are built, and change that outpaces the work of making a “we” will be felt by some as loss, however much it enriches the whole. The mistake many governments have made is to refuse the conversation, to treat the discomfort as illegitimate and the people voicing it as beneath argument, which leaves the field to whoever is willing to give the feeling its ugliest form.

And yet there is a line in here that matters more than the rest, and it is the line my real estate agent crossed without noticing. There is a difference between worrying that change is coming too fast and deciding that some of one’s fellow citizens are not really part of the country at all. The first is something a democracy can argue about and act on. The second, the sorting of Australians into the assimilated and the suspect, into the real and the not-quite, is less a concern about culture than a claim about who is permitted to belong, and no amount of legitimate unease about pace excuses it or requires it. The harder task, for anyone who wants to take the anxiety seriously rather than weaponise it or dismiss it, is to hold those two apart.

The same mechanism, everywhere you look

Artificial intelligence is running a version of the same logic through white-collar Australia. Earlier waves of disruption were understood, accurately or not, as threats to manual and routine labour; AI reaches further, and teachers, analysts, lawyers, graduates and public servants are beginning to wonder whether the qualifications they spent years acquiring are rapidly losing their value. The political significance, I suspect, lies less in any eventual outcome than in the uncertainty itself. People can endure difficult circumstances when they can see where they fit in the future; they struggle when they cannot see themselves in it at all, and if large numbers of Australians come to feel insecure despite having done everything that was asked of them, the resulting frustration will go looking for answers.

Climate change carries the same political charge, though its texture is different, because it has stopped being an argument about the future. It is often assumed that disasters build support for climate action, and sometimes they do; I have watched communities discover capacities they did not know they had. But when recovery is slow, bureaucratic or underfunded, as it is often the case, disaster deepens mistrust, and people who feel abandoned begin to see government not as a source of protection but as something distant, indifferent and outright problematic. If climate action is experienced as something done to communities rather than with them, resistance follows, and the politics becomes volatile in ways that favour whoever offers the simplest explanation.

And I do not think those of us who want a fairer and lower-carbon Australia can hold ourselves entirely apart from this. The cultural changes of recent decades, many of which I welcome, were often pursued as though their rightness was self-evident and the people who hesitated were simply behind, and a politics that keeps telling people they are on the wrong side of history should not be surprised when some of them decide they would rather not stand on its side at all. The backlash that Norris and Inglehart describe is, in part, a reaction to a manner as much as to a set of policies.

A more unstable world compounds all of this, as tension abroad makes appeals to borders and sovereignty more persuasive and turns suspicion of foreign influence into suspicion of migrant communities, while social media amplifies each of these anxieties and rewards a certainty that nuance can never match. And the amplification is not only social. In Australia, where much of the press has long sat with a single proprietor in News Corporation, an outlet with a standing commercial interest in grievance gives the simple story a daily platform and a respectable frame that no fringe account could manufacture on its own.

The deeper issue is a widespread search for certainty and meaning during a period of profound disruption. This is where far-right and conspiratorial politics become effective: they provide a compelling, easy to grasp, story. The story may be distorted, but it carries emotional power, because it tells people that their suffering is not random and that someone, somewhere, is responsible. My real estate agent was holding a version of that story, and what she said was not so much hatred but the reassurance of being understood.

Influence without victory

When people imagine the rise of far-right politics, they often picture a fringe party sweeping into government. Australia’s political system makes that outcome unlikely, at least in the near term. The Westminster system, combined with compulsory and preferential voting, creates substantial barriers for smaller parties: winning a sizeable share of the national vote is one thing, converting it into enough lower-house seats to form government is another entirely.

The more plausible scenario is influence without victory. History suggests that political realignments tend to occur gradually, as established parties respond to electoral pressure by adopting positions previously associated with challenger movements. Immigration, national identity, law and order, and energy policy have all shifted this way in various countries at various times, and Australia has experienced a similar dynamic. As housing keeps deteriorating, as AI unsettles employment, and as climate impacts intensify and geopolitical tension grows, frustration with existing institutions will deepen, and the positions of the major parties will move with it. A movement can significantly alter a country’s political direction without ever occupying the prime minister’s office.

The greater likelihood, in other words, is not the rise of a particular party so much as the gradual transformation of the political centre itself, as established parties, responding to the same electoral pressure, absorb positions they once kept at a distance.

Of course, none of this is happening in isolation from the wider world. What can be said in one democracy shifts what becomes sayable in others, and the last decade in the United States has done a great deal to move that boundary. The rise of Donald Trump and the movement around him has taken positions that not long ago sat at the edge of acceptable politics and placed them at the centre of one of the two major American parties, and in doing so it has shown political actors elsewhere, here included, that the old penalties for crossing certain lines may no longer apply. Mudde’s mainstreaming now has a living example behind it, and a One Nation operating in a world where the American right has made so much of this ordinary finds a good deal more room to move than it would have a decade ago.

The standard response, at this point, is a list: invest in housing, strengthen public services, support communities through transition, rebuild trust. All of it may be true, and all of it collides with the question of how it will be paid for. Those questions deserve more space than I can give them here, and I will return to them in a separate article. For now, what matters is the demand side of the equation: why the simple story keeps finding an audience, and what might compete with it.

Resentment or solidarity

None of this means Australia is destined for a far-right future. The pressures that generate resentment can also generate solidarity, and I have seen both, sometimes in the same town in the same day! A disaster that exposes institutional weakness can simultaneously strengthen community networks; economic strain can encourage scapegoating in one street and collective action in the next. The outcome is not predetermined, and what seems to tip it, in my experience, is whether people feel they have agency and a meaningful stake in what comes next. Individuals and communities that are connected and supported respond to disruption differently from those that feel isolated and ignored.

As disruption accelerates, people will reach for stories that help them understand what is happening and where they belong within it. The rise of One Nation is, in this reading, less a story about one party than a signal of the pressures moving through Australian society. The stories we choose to tell will shape whether those pressures feed division or renewal.

Panic-buying is rational behaviour

Imagine you’re at the supermarket and you see one person’s trolley full of canned food, household products, toilet paper. You don’t think much of it, you move on. Then a second person has a similar trolley, then a third, a fourth, and now you notice a few people moving fast through the aisles, grabbing what they can.

How would you feel? Probably a heightened sense of anxiety, a creeping fear of missing out. More likely than not, you too would start filling your trolley before the shelves were laid bare.

That is perfectly rational behaviour.

I know this is not how we remember it. The empty shelves of 2020 became a national joke, and the people who emptied them became the punchline. Politicians called them selfish, even un-Australian. I laughed at the memes too. But the research that came out of that period tells a different story, and it is not flattering to those of us who laughed.

When Jacob Keech (senior lecturer in psychology, Griffith University) and Karina Rune (senior lecturer in psychology, University of the Sunshine Coast) surveyed nearly 800 people after the lockdown panic buying, they expected to find a type: the hoarder, the anxious personality, the selfish few. They found nothing of the sort. Age, gender, income and household size didn’t predict who stockpiled. Neither did personality traits, not even past hoarding tendencies. What predicted it was how people read the risk in front of them, and what felt reasonable to do about it. Their conclusion was blunt: panic buying is driven less by selfishness than by how ordinary people interpret uncertainty.

Psychiatry draws the same line. As Carol Mathews, professor of psychiatry, University of Florida explains, stockpiling against an anticipated shortage is normal behaviour, the same instinct that has people in cold climates laying in firewood before winter, or people in hurricane country filling fuel cans before the season. It has nothing to do with hoarding disorder, which is a serious illness with a different profile altogether.

The distinction is simpler than we made it: stockpiling is planned, panic buying is the same act done impulsively, under pressure, at the worst possible moment.

(Picture by Jas Min)

But panic-buying is a self-fulfilling prophecy

Here is the catch: thousands of people, each making a sensible decision at the same moment, create the very shortage they feared. Supply chain researchers describe it exactly this way, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Products start disappearing, people buy more in response, and the fear completes itself. The instinct is sound but the timing fails, because everyone reaches the same conclusion in the same forty-eight hours.

Which raises a question we mostly skipped at the time: whose job was it to prevent that? Governments told us not to panic buy. Easy advice to give, hollow advice to follow, when nothing had been done to make sure the supplies were there. Worse than hollow, possibly: researchers note that official warnings against panic buying can backfire, because the warning itself draws attention to the coming rush. The Prime Minister announces there is no need to hurry to the supermarket, and the announcement is the starting gun. A state that preaches restraint to households while running its own supply chains with no buffer is asking the shopper to carry a risk that was never theirs.

So if shaming doesn’t work, and warnings make it worse, what actually prevents panic buying? The answer is a different way of living.

The car fuel tank analogy

To explain, let me use a car fuel tank analogy. Many drivers wait until the tank is nearly empty before refuelling it. However, I’m inviting you to rethink such an approach. One, because running close to empty is actually detrimental to your car’s mechanics. But two, because if you refill when the needle reaches half, you always have fuel to run with. Half is the signal. When your tank reaches its half, you top it up.

Applied to a household, the half-tank rule looks like this. You ensure that every system you depend on is always kept at least half full, all the time. Power: have alternative ways to the main electricity grid, such as solar and batteries, portable power stations or a generator, to keep essentials running when the grid fails. Communications: have alternative ways to reach people when the mobile network is down, such as satellite communicators, satellite internet, UHF radios and more. Food and water: have enough for your household for about three weeks (more on food security in a previous article of mine). Cash: spare a few hundred dollars in a safe at home as payment terminals are among the first casualties of any outage. Medications: have scripts filled before they run to the last few days.

The prepared household and the panic buyer are doing the same thing, stocking up against expected scarcity, but the difference is timing. One does it calmly, on an on-going basis, in ordinary shopping trips nobody notices.

Three weeks is not a guess, and it is not a bunker. Flavio Macau, a supply chain academic from Edith Cowan University who tracked every Australian supermarket crisis since 2020, found that all of them resolved in under three weeks, and his advice to households was the same as mine: keep that much on hand, not during a shortage but at the next opportunity, simply so you have peace of mind next time. In practice it’s a pantry that runs a little deeper than habit, a few jerry cans, a charged battery, an envelope in a safe. Nobody visiting your home would know. But this changes how disruption affects you. When the flood warning comes, or the fire, or the next supply shock, you are not racing anyone to the shelves. You are topping up a system that never ran low. What is an emergency for others, is, for you, an errand.

Even better, don’t plan for exactly your household’s needs. Plan for more, deliberately. Some of the people around you will not have prepared, and when the moment comes you can be generous.

Employers have a role too

The same logic scales up, and here I want to speak to employers. An organisation is a household one size larger, and its people are its systems. Unprepared staff carry a cost rarely spoken of, as uncertainty keeps their brain’s threat system running, and a mind scanning for danger is a mind unavailable for work. So, when a forecast event is approaching, a flood, say, or a stretch of bushfire weather, give your staff an afternoon to prepare ahead of time rather than scrambling at the last minute; this gives them back a sense of control. The research on sense of control is now strong: feeling in control measurably buffers people against stress, and the effect appears causal, not just correlated.

A workforce distracted by what might be happening at home, or displaced because it did happen, is a continuity problem, and a measurable one. Deloitte’s work on the cost of Australian disasters now counts employment disruption and displacement among the short-term losses. The drag is on the ledger whether you manage it or not. An afternoon off to let people fill their own tanks is how you remove it.

Then there is the largest household of all. Deloitte Access Economics estimates that natural disasters already cost Australia around $38 billion a year, rising to at least $73 billion a year by 2060, and that is under a greenhouse gas low-emissions scenario we look increasingly unlikely to achieve. At that scale, the deepest preparedness available to a nation has little to do with stockpiling but is about reducing how often, and how hard, disasters strike. For climate-driven disruption, that means governments should urgently seek to reduce emissions, and actively lead the transition away from fossil fuels. Telling citizens not to panic buy while declining to slow the thing that will keep emptying the shelves is hypocritical at best.

The toilet paper panic-buyers were never the problem. They simply did, in forty-eight hours, what the rest of us could be doing over months. So consider this an invitation. Which of the systems you rely on — power, communications, food, water, cash, medications — is running near empty right now? Pick one and begin topping it up gradually, in ordinary shopping trips and small decisions nobody will notice. There is no rush; that is the point. A few months of unhurried filling, and the next disruption will find you with nothing you urgently need — able to stay home while others queue, and restock at your leisure once the shelves are full again.

The men who run toward it

In the 2022 Northern Rivers floods, men (and women) of all ages launched tinnie boats into brown water they couldn’t see the bottom of to pull strangers off rooftops. Firefighters in the 2019-20 Black Summer ran into walls of fire that consumed whole towns in hours. Soldiers risk their lives far from home, deploying into active conflict zones on missions that ask them to place the objectives of others above their own survival.

These acts are real. The courage is real. The risk is real and sometimes fatal.

They deserve to be received with genuine gratitude rather than taken for granted as simply what people do, and Australia is pretty good at recognising such heroic acts. There is something extraordinary in the human capacity to move toward danger rather than away from it — to subordinate self-preservation to the needs of others, particularly when these are strangers. Many men do this, repeatedly, without ceremony.

This piece begins there, with that acknowledgement, because what follows is complicated — and the complication is not a diminishment. It is an attempt to see the full picture, including the parts that the hero narrative, for all its power, tends to leave out.

(Picture taken by me)

The problem with heroes

We have become very good at capturing the heroic moment, the rescue, the act, the image that travels. We are considerably less good at what comes after, or at what runs alongside it, unseen, in the same men who perform those acts.

The hero narrative serves a social function. It creates meaning around events that are sometimes random and devastating. But it also creates a trap. The hero is defined by the moment of action. The crisis, for the people living it, lasts years. The hero narrative has no language for the long tail — for the firefighter who can’t sleep eighteen months later, for the flood responder who burned out and couldn’t care for his own needs, for the soldier who came home and found ordinary life wrong in ways he couldn’t articulate to anyone who hadn’t been there.

And there is a more specific trap inside the hero narrative: if you are a hero, the role definition does not include asking for help. Heroes help others. They do not become the person who needs helping. The identity that sustained you through the acute phase becomes, in the recovery phase, the thing that prevents you from getting what you need.

The research confirms what practitioners in this space have long observed. First responders — firefighters, paramedics, police, emergency workers — experience significantly elevated rates of PTSD, depression, suicide and substance use. These trends have worsened in recent years, not improved. The men who run toward disasters are, statistically, among the most psychologically at risk in our communities. Not because they are weak, but because what they carry is heavy, and the identity they carry it in does not easily permit them to put it down.

In the aftermath of disasters in Australia, domestic violence rates rise, alcohol and drug use increase, productivity falls, and mental health deteriorates — all while community attention is focused on the visible work of physical reconstruction, and the invisible damage accumulates beneath it. The Ten to Men study — the largest longitudinal study of Australian men in the world — found that one in three men reported having used intimate partner violence by 2022 (year of the big Northern Rivers floods), up from one in four when the study began in 2013. Men with moderate or severe depressive symptoms were 62 percent more likely to use intimate partner violence than men without those symptoms. The connection between men’s unaddressed pain and the harm they cause others is not speculative, but documented, longitudinal and Australian.

Yet the violence that follows crisis is not only the kind that makes it into police statistics. There is a slower, less visible kind that accumulates in households and relationships long after the acute phase has passed. The man who was heroic in the flood response but has been emotionally absent ever since. The mental and physical load of recovery — the appointments, the insurance claims, the children’s nightmares, the endless logistics of rebuilding — somehow transferred onto his partner without acknowledgement or decision, sustained by gender roles that were accepted without examination and a learned incompetence that exempts men from the domestic labour they are capable of sharing. The gradual closing off, not from hostility but from an inability to process what happened, to locate the feelings, to bring them into the relationship where they could be shared and metabolised together. The children who learn, slowly, not to bring their father their harder emotions because they are unsure how he will receive them.

This is slow violence. Not dramatic, not counted in any survey, but cumulative, and borne primarily by the people closest to the man who is struggling, behind closed doors.

This is why men’s mental health is not a private matter, but a community one.

The Australian question

There is a specific cultural layer to this that is worth addressing, because it is not universal, it is ours.

Australia has a particular flavour of stoicism. It runs through footy culture, tradie culture, the bush, through the entire inheritance of a country that admires the man who gets on with it, who doesn’t make a fuss, who absorbs difficulty without complaint and keeps going. “She’ll be right.” “Suck it up.” “Toughen up.” These phrases carry a genuine resilience tradition, a capacity to not catastrophise, to endure, to find dark humour in hard conditions, but they are also dismissive. They push men to hide their emotions, to pretend all is well when it is not.

Also, the problem is not only what this culture includes but what it excludes. The man who reads poetry. The man who tears at his children’s school concert. The man who says I don’t know what I’m doing and asks for help. The man who is sensitive, creative, intellectual, or who finds meaning in beauty or ideas or quiet rather than in physical toughness or competitive achievement. These men exist in Australia in large numbers. They are just given considerably less cultural permission to be themselves without apology.

“She’ll be right” is simultaneously a genuine coping capacity and an escape hatch from the honest reckoning that genuine recovery requires. It lets you avoid the harder question: is it actually right? And if it isn’t, what are you going to do about it?

The rugged, physically capable, practically competent man is a genuinely valuable archetype. But when it is the only archetype on offer, when every other way of being a man is coded as soft, suspect or foreign, it stops being a strength and becomes a constraint. A cage that many men inhabit for decades without realising they built it themselves, from materials the culture handed them before they were old enough to choose.

What I know from the inside

I have spent fifteen years working in some of the most difficult environments on earth and was confronted with unimaginable violence.

In North Korea, I witnessed the malnutrition, the controlled silence, the particular weight of a system designed to prevent people from knowing what they are missing. In Iraq after the fall of Saddam, I experienced the chaos, the disorientation, the strange energy of a world remaking itself in real time. In Congo, the refugee camps, the scale of human uprooting, the shattering powerlessness of watching people lose everything they had built. In Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, whole towns flattened, the organised looting of what remained, the smell of death in the air.

Through all of it, I was genuinely ok. I wasn’t suppressing, but processing. I was functioning, present, finding meaning in the work. And, if I’m honest, even seeking the thrill in the early years.

There is a certain kind of personality that finds clarity in extreme conditions that ordinary life does not provide. A brain surgeon is comfortable cutting through someone’s brain. I wouldn’t, but I had my version of such a particular temperament.

Then the 2022 Northern Rivers floods hit me like nothing hit me before.

I know this region. I live here. The people, the streets, the paddocks, the towns are familiar in the way that only home is familiar. And when the disaster came, my sense of what is normal was thrown upside down, quite literally: I saw a cow stranded on the roof of a two-storey house, transported there by floodwater and left when the water receded. I saw shipping containers standing upside down in the air. I saw the institutions we counted on failing in ways that were bureaucratic, impersonal and sometimes cruel. I saw the violence that surfaces when people are frightened and exhausted, the assaults, the egos, the ugliness alongside the heroism.

The surgeon who is calm in the operating theatre is not necessarily calm when the patient is someone they love. The professional distance that holds in every other context may simply not be available here. That is not a failure of toughness but a sign of what it means to belong somewhere.

In 2022, I experienced a deep trauma and clearly burnt out. It took me months to recover and, as part of this, I owned what was mine to own. I rested, reflected, shared. I made the apologies that needed to be made and did the forgiving I could do.

I say this not because my experience is exceptional — it isn’t — but because I think it is important to normalise mental health challenges, especially when experienced by someone who is typically a first responder. It is important to say these things out loud as the silence around them is part of the problem.

Thirty men

I recently spent five days on Country with twenty-nine other men — walking, meditating, moving through silence together, sharing meals, being present to each other without agenda. No phones, no roles, no performance of competence. We gathered not in a conference room or retreat centre but in the open air, exposed to the raw elements — rain, wind, sun, in the particular quality of stillness that Country produces. The container was the Dharma: a framework of practice and ethical intention that held the space without controlling it, that created enough safety for what needed to emerge to emerge. The intention was interbeing — not self-improvement or male bonding in the conventional sense, but a genuine encounter with ourselves, each other, and the web of life we are part of and responsible to.*

In that space, men opened up and told their stories. Personal, specific, intimate stories offered to other men who received them without judgement. Men who had lost people they loved. Men who carried rage at their fathers — the inheritance of pain passed down through generations of men who did not know what to do with what they felt. Men who couldn’t have erections anymore. Men frightened for the planet, for their children, for the future they were leaving behind. Men angry at other powerful old men — the Putins, Trumps and Musks of this world. Men confused, who did not know what their lives were for.

It became clear over those five days that every single man in that space was hurting or unsure in some way. Not some of them. Not the ones who were visibly struggling. Every one.

These were not fragile men. They were ordinary men — fathers, workers, business owners, retirees, community members, some of them the same kind of men who run toward disasters. Men of all ages, from their twenties to their eighties. And every one of them was carrying something they had not been able to put down, in a context where putting it down was finally, briefly, possible.

What I witnessed was not weakness but the most demanding kind of courage: to be honest about what you feel, in front of other men, without knowing how it will be received. And the equal courage of the men who listened: who stayed present to raw emotion without deflecting it, without fixing it, without making it smaller or more manageable than it actually was.

One research on young Australian men, known as the Orygen study, found that 84 percent feel expected to tough it out and not express their emotions, and 81 percent say those expectations make it harder to seek help when they need it. What I witnessed in that gathering was what happens when those expectations are temporarily suspended — and what becomes possible when they are.

What I have seen work — and what I am trying to do

Every year, around 2,500 Australian men die by suicide. Three times the rate of women. The research is consistent that men are significantly less likely to seek help before reaching that point, shaped by the same norms of stoicism and self-reliance that four out of five young Australian men say they feel.

There are men who need to be held accountable directly. The men who use power to destroy rather than build. The men who convert their own unprocessed pain into violence against the people closest to them. The men who sell a version of manhood through the manosphere that harms boys and girls alike. These things are real and they deserve to be refused clearly, in particular by other men, and certainly not excused or explained away.

But most men I know are not those men. Most men I know carry something they were never taught how to put down, and it causes harm in quieter, more everyday ways because of it. The slow violence described above. The emotional absence. The partner who carries the mental load alone. The children who sense their father is somewhere else even when he is in the room. The love that is real internally but never expressed in ways that is actually felt by others.

In that retreat, I watched men do things that Australian culture does not make easy. They cried. They said ‘I was wrong’. They said ‘I don’t know what to do’. They said ‘I am scared’. They said ‘I love you’ to men they had known for four days. And something shifted in the room, not dramatically, not permanently, but deeply and genuinely.

Now, in the hope of stirring the conversation about manhood away from rugged toughness, here is what I have seen work, and what I am trying to practice myself.

Men, share what you are actually feeling with the people around you — not the edited version, not the version that makes you look like you have it together, but the real one. What hurts. What you are frightened of. What you regret. This does not require a dramatic revelation. It can be as simple as saying to a friend that you have been struggling, or telling your partner that you are not ok and you don’t entirely know why. The point is not to perform vulnerability but to stop performing its absence.

Reach out to someone you have lost touch with. Not when you are in crisis, but now, while the impulse is available. A friend you have been meaning to call for six months. A family member you have been at distance from. Heck, give me a call. The reconnection does not have to be significant, it just has to happen.

Own what is yours. Say the apology that is overdue, for the harm you caused and attributed to circumstances. Take back the responsibility you quietly handed to someone else.

Say what you feel to the people who need to hear it. Tell your children you love them in ways they can feel, repeatedly, not once. Tell your partner what you appreciate, specifically. Tell a friend that his presence matters to you.

Share the load. Look honestly at what your partner, your family, the people around you are carrying on your behalf, and take some of it back. Not as a transaction but as a genuine reckoning with what you have been exempt from and who has been paying the difference.

Take responsibility for your own health — physical and mental. Book the appointment you have been putting off. See the GP. Talk to someone who can help you make sense of what you are carrying. Men die earlier than women, seek help less often, and wait longer before doing so. That is not toughness but a pattern of neglect that costs men their lives and costs the people who love them their fathers, partners and friends.

Ask for help when you need it. Not as a last resort, not when you are already at the edge, but as a practiced and ordinary thing. The man who asks for help early is not weak. He is the man who is still standing when the people around him need him.

Find a space — a men’s group, a retreat, a trusted friend, a therapist — where the performance of competence is not required. Where you can put down what you are carrying, even briefly, and let yourself be seen.

The Ten to Men data tells us that unaddressed pain frequently becomes perpetrated harm. The Orygen data tells us that four in five young men are suppressing what they feel. The suicide data tells us where that ends.

There are no strong men. There are only men hiding their real emotions away — and men who have found the courage to stop.

That courage is not about grand gestures. It is about the small and repeated choice to be honest, with yourself, with the people you love, with the men around you who are probably carrying more than you know. Most of them are waiting for someone to go first. It might as well be you.

*This gathering was the MenAware retreat, facilitated by Ken Golding and Ronny Hickel. MenAware may not be available in this form going forward, but Ken and Ronny’s work continues.

In the days and hours before a major flood or fire, something predictable happens. The Bunnings carpark fills up. The Woolworths shelves start emptying. The local pharmacy runs low on first aid supplies and prescription medications. People are not panicking. They are doing something entirely rational — going to the places they understand, instinctively, to be essential.

I have observed this pattern repeatedly across my career in disaster and emergency management. And what strikes me is not the behaviour itself but what it reveals. In the moment before disruption arrives, communities vote with their feet for what they consider critical infrastructure. They do not reach to their resilience plan — assuming they have one in the first place. They head to the businesses that have the supplies, the scale and the logistics to meet their needs.

The resilience conversation has largely failed to notice this — or at least to act on it. It talks extensively about community preparedness, social capital, emergency services capacity and recovery funding. It rarely talks about the businesses that communities instinctively turn to when things get difficult, as if commerce and community resilience were separate categories with no meaningful overlap.

They are not. And the gap between what people actually do when disruption arrives and what resilience planning formally acknowledges is a consequential blind spot in how Australia prepares for an increasingly disrupted future.

(Picture by Mick Haupt)

The invisible infrastructure

Think about what a functioning community actually requires on a daily basis: food, water, medicine, hardware, fuel, clothing, healthcare, financial services, communication, schools, roads, waste management (oh, and toilet paper too). Almost all of it is delivered through businesses — local, national and global — that rarely appear in resilience frameworks, community plans or disaster preparedness conversations.

The library gets mentioned. The community hall gets mentioned. The neighbourhood centre gets mentioned. The supermarket, the pharmacy, the hardware store, the GP clinic, the local accountant — the businesses that most people interact with most often and depend on most directly — are conspicuously absent from the conversation.

Resilience thinking in Australia emerged primarily from public sector and community sector traditions that are philosophically oriented toward collective welfare and public goods. Business tends to be treated as something that looks after itself — subject to market forces, motivated by profit, and therefore not requiring the same kind of deliberate support and integration that community organisations and government agencies do. This assumption is understandable. It is also, in the context of genuine community resilience, wrong.

The pharmacy is a business. It is also, in a post-disaster community, among the most critical services people need — and among the most likely to close if the building is damaged, the owner is displaced, or the revenue has dried up. The local accountant, bank and insurance broker are businesses. They are also, in the recovery phase, among the most important presences in a community navigating insurance claims, grant applications and financial decisions that will shape trajectories for years. The café and the pub are businesses. They are also the spaces where informal community connection happens, where people process shared experience, and where the social fabric that disaster research consistently identifies as the most important determinant of recovery is maintained and repaired.

Excluding businesses from the resilience conversation leaves a significant portion of the infrastructure that communities actually depend on unexamined, unsupported and unprepared.

What businesses actually do

Before a disaster arrives, certain businesses are performing a preparedness function that no resilience plan has formally assigned to them. Bunnings stocks generators, water containers, tarps and timber. Woolworths, Coles, Aldi and IGA hold the food reserves and supply chains that most households depend on. The local pharmacy holds the medications that people with chronic conditions need to survive an extended disruption. When people flood those businesses in the days before a disaster, they are drawing on commercial infrastructure that has been built and maintained for entirely commercial reasons — and that happens, in those moments, to be exactly what the community needs.

During a disaster, the businesses that remain open become anchors. The open supermarket, the functioning pharmacy, the hardware store still trading are not just commercial conveniences, but signs that the disruption is survivable, that supply chains are holding, that the community has not been abandoned. Their closure, conversely, accelerates the psychological and practical deterioration that compound crises produce.

After a disaster, business recovery and community recovery are not parallel processes. They are the same process. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found that post-disaster business recovery operates as a network, with certain businesses acting as recovery multipliers — their reopening accelerates the recovery of surrounding businesses through shared customers, service complementarities and physical proximity, which in turn accelerates the broader community’s recovery. The practical implication is direct: supporting the right businesses to reopen quickly is a cost-effective investment in community recovery available, and it is consistently underfunded and undervalued in current frameworks.

What this means for businesses

If you own or lead a business that serves an essential function in your community — a pharmacy, a hardware store, a medical practice, a supermarket, a fuel supplier, a financial services firm — your continuity planning is not just a commercial matter. It is a community matter.

This is not an argument for businesses to take on responsibilities that belong to government or emergency services. It is an argument for businesses to understand the role they actually play — the role communities already recognise they play — and to prepare accordingly.

In practice this means really thinking through your vulnerabilities before the disruption arrives. What would take your business offline? How long could you operate without normal supply chains? What are your staff’s capacity to function under genuine pressure? Do you have relationships with local emergency management organisations and community networks that would allow you to coordinate effectively when it matters?

It also means recognising the reputational and relational dimension of resilience. The businesses that remain open, that adapt quickly, that serve their communities under difficult conditions, build a depth of trust and loyalty that normal trading conditions rarely produce. The hardware store that stays open through a flood, the pharmacy that manages medication supply during an extended disruption, the café that becomes an informal community hub in the weeks after a disaster — these businesses are remembered. That is not a secondary consideration. It is a genuine competitive and community advantage.

What this means for planning and policy

For local government, emergency management agencies and resilience planners, the practical implications are straightforward even if they require a shift in how the conversation is framed.

Local disaster management plans should include business continuity as a core consideration. Which businesses are essential to community functioning in your area? What are their specific vulnerabilities? What would their closure mean for the people who depend on them? In the Northern Rivers, the months-long closure of supermarkets after the 2022 floods was not an outcome that had been adequately anticipated or planned for. It should have been.

Grant programs and subsidies for disaster resilience and recovery should explicitly include businesses — not just households and community organisations. Supporting a GP practice or a pharmacy to maintain continuity through a disaster is a community health investment, not a commercial subsidy.

Business owners and leaders should be in the room when resilience conversations happen — not as stakeholders to be consulted at the end of a process, but as essential contributors from the beginning. They have knowledge of supply chains, customer behaviour, local economic dependencies and community need that resilience planners rarely have access to. That knowledge is currently largely untapped.

The 2023 Australian Emergency Management Arrangements Handbook describes shared responsibility across government, community and business. The business dimension of that shared responsibility remains the least developed in practice. Closing that gap is not a complex policy challenge. It is primarily a matter of choosing to include in the conversation the businesses that communities have always known are essential — and treating their resilience as the community investment it actually is.

A simple test

There is a simple test for whether businesses are genuinely integrated into resilience planning in your community: find your local disaster management plan and search for the names of the businesses your community depends on. In most cases, they will not be there. That absence is not an oversight. It is a choice — one that communities and their planners make repeatedly, and will continue to make, until someone decides the conversation is worth having differently.

This is the second piece in a series exploring the difference between individualist prepping and community resilience. The first piece examined what the two approaches share, where they diverge, and what the evidence says about what actually works when things fall apart. This piece takes the argument further: what does genuine security actually require — and what does the way we approach it reveal about how we see ourselves and the world around us?

The central argument of this piece is simple, though its implications are not: the way you approach security shapes the security environment you end up inhabiting.

If you see yourself as isolated, surrounded by threats and responsible only for your own survival, you are likely to build a security posture based on separation, stockpiling and force. That posture may then make you more isolated, more visible as a target, and less embedded in the relationships that actually create safety.

If you see yourself as part of a community, you are more likely to invest in trust, intelligence, reciprocity and shared capacity. That relational posture gives you more warning, more options, more protection and better recovery when things go wrong.

In other words, your identity shapes how you perceive your environment — and how your environment responds to you shapes, in turn, who you become. The evidence for this — from disaster research, conflict zones and the sociology of violence — is more consistent than most people assume. This piece examines it.

The myth of the gun and the empty stomach

After publishing the first piece in this series, I received a number of comments making two related arguments, which reflect concerns I recognise and have thought about across many years of working in genuinely dangerous environments.

The first: when people are hungry enough, ethics disappear. Scarcity trumps solidarity. In the end, people will do whatever it takes to feed themselves and their families, and any community resilience model that doesn’t account for this is naive about human nature.

The second: a single weapon pointed at you changes everything. Good intentions and community relationships are no defence against physical force. At a certain point, the only thing that stops a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun.

I understand why these arguments feel compelling. They contain a real insight — genuine scarcity does change behaviour, and physical force is real and cannot always be talked or trusted away. But they also rest on a model of how violence works that is, in my experience and in the research, incomplete.

Both arguments imagine threat as a single, sudden, physical event that overrides all other considerations, and security as a binary condition achieved through sufficient individual force or sufficient individual stockpiling. That framing leads directly to the prepper model: stockpile enough food that hunger never becomes a lever against you, arm yourself so a weapon pointed at you doesn’t end the conversation.

The problem is that this framing misrepresents how violence actually works in most settings, for most people, most of the time. Violence is rarely sudden and binary. It is usually gradual, relational and contextual — shaped by conditions that have been building over time, conditions that are partly within our influence to shape.

(Picture by Getty Images)

The many faces of insecurity

To start with, the gun-and-hunger framing obscures the full range of threats that most people actually face. If by security we mean more than surviving a single confrontation — if we mean the conditions that allow people to live without chronic fear, coercion or preventable harm — then the threat landscape looks very different. Physical violence between strangers — the threat that prepper culture is primarily oriented toward — is statistically among the less common forms of violence that most people in most places actually face. Psychological violence, structural violence, state violence, domestic violence, economic coercion, social exclusion — these are the forms of insecurity that affect the most people, most of the time, in most contexts. A bunker and a firearms licence are largely irrelevant to all of them.

The Northern Rivers floods of 2022 offer a closer-to-home illustration of this. The violence experienced during and after the disaster was not only physical — it was multiple and layered. The floods created and exacerbated serious issues including family violence, housing insecurity, insurance disputes and economic coercion, alongside more visible forms of physical threat including looting and assault. Reports of domestic violence and alcohol and drug abuse increased significantly in the aftermath, while families were living in overcrowded conditions in tents and caravans, parents were physically exhausted, and children showed PTSD-type symptoms. The psychological impact emerged as a dominant theme, with rising rates of mental health issues, PTSD and suicidal thoughts — compounded by a slow recovery process, housing insecurity and financial stress. State violence was present too, not in the form of direct aggression but in the form of structural and bureaucratic constraint — government agencies unable to respond at the scale required, and processes that were complex to navigate and added burden to people already at the edge of their capacity. Against this full range of threats, what households and communities actually did was not arm themselves or fortify their properties. They organised watch networks, shared information, distributed food, checked on vulnerable neighbours, cooked meals for strangers, established informal support systems that the formal ones couldn’t provide, and held each other through sustained psychological distress over months and years. The security that mattered in that context — the security that reduced harm, maintained dignity and enabled recovery — was built from relationships, not from weapons.

This is important because if you build your security model around the wrong threat, you invest in the wrong responses. A household that has fortified itself against armed strangers while ignoring the psychological violence in its own relationships, the structural violence of its community’s economic conditions, or the slow accumulating violence of climate disruption, has built a model that addresses a rare threat while leaving common ones entirely unaddressed.

Security literacy begins with an honest assessment of what you are actually at risk from — not what you fear most vividly, and not what the most compelling survival narrative happens to feature.

But the gun-and-hunger model is incomplete in a second and deeper way — one that goes to the heart of how security is actually produced and who produces it.

You partly create the conditions of your own insecurity

The orientation you bring to potential threat partly shapes the threat landscape you actually inhabit. Not entirely. Not in all circumstances. But significantly, and consistently enough that the orientation is worth looking in more depth.

The prepper household that visibly signals stockpiled resources and defensive capability in a community where most households are struggling may be advertising resources worth taking rather than deterring those who might take them. The community that invests in relationships, trust and mutual aid is creating different conditions — conditions that tend, on the evidence, to produce better outcomes under sustained pressure, including lower rates of interpersonal violence and faster recovery from external shocks.

The research on social capital and disaster resilience, on post-conflict recovery, on the relationship between inequality and violence, and on community responses to crisis is consistent across multiple fields and scales. Collaborative societies fare better than adversarial ones — not because they are naive about threat, but because they have invested in the conditions that make threat less likely to emerge and more likely to be contained when it does.

Security is a collective good. In most circumstances, it is produced by being shared, not hoarded.

We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are

During my PhD research at the London School of Economics, I spent time studying how international aid organisations approached security in active conflict environments. One of my two case studies was Afghanistan. And one of the observations that had the most impact on me was something I encountered on a single street in Kabul, where three different international aid organisations were operating within a few hundred metres of each other, in the same threat environment, with three entirely different security postures.

The first had high walls, barbed wire, armed guards and vehicle inspection mirrors at the entrance. It was unmistakably fortified — designed to signal strength and deter attack through visible defensive capability.

The second had an open gate. Staff moved freely in the community. The organisation maintained active relationships with a wide range of local actors, including Taliban contacts and local warlords, and had sophisticated intelligence about the local security environment. Anyone could walk in relatively easily.

The third was barely visible. There was nothing about its presence on that street that clearly identified it as an international organisation at all. It had chosen invisibility as its primary security strategy.

All three experienced security incidents. The fortified organisation was attacked by the Taliban — a targeted, deliberate attack that the organisation understood as confirmation that its hardened posture was justified and necessary, and that further hardening was required. The open-gate organisation had staff kidnapped, but was able to secure their release without paying ransom, through the relationships and contacts it had spent years building. The low-profile organisation experienced mostly random, opportunistic incidents rather than targeted ones — consistent with the logic of its approach, and confirming to those within it that invisibility was the right strategy.

Each organisation looked at its experience and saw evidence that it had chosen the correct security posture.

The co-constitution of identity and security

However, to go deeper, what I observed on that street was not just three organisations making different rational calculations about the same threat environment and arriving at different conclusions, but three organisations whose identities — their sense of who they were, what they stood for, how they understood their relationship to the conflict around them — was then shaped in turn by the security incidents they experienced, which was reinforcing and deepening their worldviews and identities.

The fortified organisation understood itself as a potential target in a hostile environment. That self-understanding produced a hardened posture. The hardened posture signalled military-style presence, which in Taliban logic made it a legitimate target worth attacking. The attack confirmed the threat assessment. The identity as a target was reinforced. Further hardening followed.

The open-gate organisation understood itself as a community actor whose safety depended on acceptance — on being genuinely perceived as serving the population rather than as a foreign presence to be exploited or expelled. That self-understanding produced a relational posture. The relational posture produced intelligence networks and contacts. The contacts produced the capacity to resolve kidnappings of their staff through negotiation rather than payment or force. The identity as a community actor was reinforced.

The low-profile organisation understood itself as a neutral presence whose safety depended on invisibility. That self-understanding produced a minimal footprint. The minimal footprint made it a less attractive target. The mostly random rather than targeted incidents confirmed the approach. The identity as an organisation who needed to keep a neutral approach was reinforced.

This is what my PhD thesis, published in 2011 and accessible here, argued: that identity and security are not separate domains where one precedes and determines the other. They are co-constituted — each shaping and reshaping the other in a continuous feedback loop. In other words, we see the world as we are, and in turn, this perception of the world shapes the perception of who we are. The threats we perceive, the measures we deploy in response to them, and, in turn, the experiences those measures produce gradually shape who we say we are.

This dynamic is not unique to international aid organisations in conflict zones. It operates at every scale — in households preparing for disruption, in communities deciding what kind of relationships to invest in, and in the broader cultural conversation about what genuine safety actually requires. The research on how violence actually operates confirms this in two directions. People who understand themselves primarily as potential victims tend to develop a fearful mindset that reads neutral situations as threatening — and that internal state expresses itself outwardly in ways they are often unaware of: a hesitant gait, averted eyes, closed body language, a diminished sense of presence. The research on predatory target selection is consistent on this point: offenders assess non-verbal cues within seconds, and the signals of fearfulness and diminished situational awareness that a victim mindset produces are precisely the signals that attract predatory attention. The orientation meant to protect becomes, in practice, a marker of vulnerability.

And people who signal dominance through visible weapons, tactical gear and aggressive identity markers tend to invite challenge responses from others operating in the same status economy of violence, escalating threat rather than deterring it. Both postures, for different reasons, can produce the insecurity they were designed to prevent.

Understanding it changes what you think security requires. If identity shapes the threat landscape you inhabit, then the most important security investment is not in weapons or fortifications — it is in the identity you bring to the situation, and the relational conditions that identity produces.

How security actually works

In genuinely dangerous environments — the kind I worked in, across conflict zones in Central Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and elsewhere — security is built through a sequence of capacities that run from intelligence through prevention through deterrence through defence, with weapons appearing as one (possible but not always necessary) option within the last of these rather than the primary response to threat.

But before intelligence, prevention, deterrence and defence, there is something more fundamental: the identity you bring to the situation. How you understand and present yourself — who you are, what you stand for, what you are trying to achieve — shapes how others perceive you, how you relate to them, and what options are available to you as a result. An organisation that sees itself as part of a community will naturally build relationships with that community. One that sees itself as a target in a hostile environment will naturally build walls. Neither is making a purely tactical calculation. They are acting out of who they believe themselves to be. And that, more than any specific security measure, is what determines the threat landscape they end up inhabiting.

So, self-awareness comes first. In practice, this means asking honest questions before reaching for tactical responses. How do I understand my relationship to the people and environment around me — as a participant or as a potential target? How am I likely to be perceived, and does that perception serve or undermine my safety? What signals am I sending through how I present myself, how I communicate, and how I engage with others? Am I investing in the relationships and trust that would give me options if things deteriorated, or am I withdrawing from them in ways that leave me more isolated and more exposed? These are not comfortable questions, and they do not have simple answers. But they are more fundamental to genuine security because they determine the conditions in which everything else unfolds.

Intelligence comes second. Understanding the environment, the actors, the power dynamics, the early signals of deteriorating conditions. Having relationships that produce information. Knowing who controls what territory and what they want, and being known by them in return. This is the foundation; not because it eliminates threat, but because it makes threat visible early enough to respond before it becomes acute.

Prevention comes third. Creating the relational and structural conditions that make violence less likely to emerge. Building trust, maintaining agreements, being known as an organisation or person who delivers on commitments, ensuring that the people around you have reasons to want you safe. The open-gate organisation’s contacts I mentioned earlier didn’t just help it resolve kidnappings. They reduced the likelihood of kidnappings occurring in the first place, because harming that organisation meant harming relationships that mattered to people who had leverage over those who might cause harm.

Deterrence comes fourth. Making the cost of attacking you higher than the benefit — through visibility, relationships, information networks and the kind of embeddedness in a community that means an attack on you is also an attack on people others care about. This does not require weapons. It requires presence, trust and the kind of reputation that makes targeting you more trouble than it is worth.

Defence comes last. And even here, weapons are one option among several — and not necessarily the most effective one. Protective accompaniment, communication systems, evacuation protocols, community networks that notice when something is wrong, early warning systems — these are all forms of defence that carry fewer specific risks than arming.

Weapons introduce their own dynamics that are worth exploring. Accidents are more common than most people acknowledge; in many contexts, the evidence suggests that a weapon kept for protection is more likely to harm someone within the household than the imagined intruder. Escalation is a real and underappreciated risk: introducing a weapon into a confrontation changes its logic, because the other party now has reason to escalate their own response, and the endpoint of that dynamic is rarely the one the original weapon-holder imagined. The attraction of better-armed adversaries is a related problem — a visibly armed household or organisation signals that it has resources worth taking and the capacity to resist, which in certain environments draws exactly the kind of attention it was designed to deter. And the false sense of security that weapons can produce is perhaps the most insidious risk of all: the household or organisation that has armed itself tends to feel that the security problem has been addressed, which reduces the urgency of investing in the intelligence, prevention and deterrence work that would actually make it safer. The weapon becomes a substitute for the harder and more important work rather than a complement to it.

This is not an argument against all defensive measures. It is an argument for understanding where defence sits in the sequence — last, not first — and for being clear-eyed about what weapons do and don’t provide in that context.

The identity that underlies all of these layers is not incidental to them. It determines which layers you invest in, how you deploy them, and what threat experiences you are likely to have as a result.

What community security actually looks like when everything fails

The objection that community resilience cannot protect against real violence — that when law and order collapse, only force matters — is worth considering. I have worked and lived in contexts where law and order had genuinely collapsed: Iraq after the fall of Saddam, the Ituri region of eastern Congo during active civil war, Haiti in the weeks after the 2010 earthquake. These were not theoretical scenarios. They were environments where formal protection systems had failed entirely and people were navigating genuine physical danger with whatever resources they had.

What I observed in those contexts was not the war-of-all-against-all that the gun-and-bunker model predicts. It was something considerably more complex and considerably more hopeful.

Neighbourhoods organised informal watch systems — not armed militias, but networks of people who knew each other, trusted each other and shared information about what was happening and where. When a threat was identified, the response was collective and coordinated rather than individual and defensive. Informal agreements emerged between groups that had every reason to be in conflict, because the people involved understood that sustained conflict was more costly than negotiated coexistence. Social norms held in ways that formal enforcement could not have produced, because they were sustained by relationships and reputation rather than by the threat of legal sanction.

Individuals who were exhausted by violence took it upon themselves to create new ways of living together — not because they were naive about the dangers but because they had seen, at close range, what the alternative produced. These were not soft or idealistic people. They were people who had survived serious violence and concluded from that experience that the relational path offered better odds than the adversarial one.

When threats involved weapons, the responses I observed were rarely armed confrontation. They were evacuation, temporary relocation, negotiation and the mobilisation of relationships that could influence the people doing the threatening. These responses were not always successful. There were situations where the violence was so organised and so extreme that no amount of social capital could contain it. I am not claiming otherwise.

But my comparison is not between community-based security and illusory perfect safety. It is between community-based security and the fortified individual alternative. And on that comparison, the evidence from those contexts was consistent: the people and organisations most embedded in relationships and community networks had more options available to them under extreme conditions, not fewer. They had more warning, more assistance, more capacity to navigate and more routes out. The person who had spent years building trust and reciprocity had something to draw on when things became genuinely dangerous. The person who had spent those years fortifying their household and treating neighbours as potential threats had, in many cases, less.

Security in those environments was not the absence of threat. It was the maintenance of enough relational infrastructure to navigate threat when it arrived — which, in a context of genuine collapse, it reliably did.

Real security goes beyond protection from physical violence

There is a broader framework worth mentioning here, because it changes how the whole question of security is understood. The concept of human security — developed by the United Nations in the 1990s as a deliberate challenge to the military-focused model — defines security not as the protection of states or households against physical attack, but as the freedom of people from fear and from want across seven interconnected dimensions: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political.

On that understanding, security is not a single condition you achieve by arming yourself or stockpiling supplies. It is a quality of life produced by the functioning of multiple overlapping systems — social, economic, environmental and political — that support human dignity and reduce vulnerability across its many forms.

Community resilience, at its best, builds capacity across most of those dimensions simultaneously. The prepper model, focused almost exclusively on personal security against physical threat, addresses one dimension of one category while leaving the others largely untouched.

Genuine security — the kind that actually reduces vulnerability in the full range of ways that matter — is built relationally, systemically and collectively. It always has been.

The first time someone described me as looking like a prepper, I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or amused.

We have generators, portable power stations, solar capacity and batteries. Satellite communicators. Water storage and filtration. Emergency packs. Cash reserves. We teach our children bushcraft skills and we fish as a family. My wife has completed permaculture training, delivered food preservation and fermentation workshops, and built connections with local food growers that most people in our street don’t have.

By most practical measures, the label fits.

But spend five minutes in the prepper world — the tactical gear, the zombie apocalypse imagery, the heavily armed men preparing to defend their stockpiles against their neighbours — and the resemblance falls apart entirely. What we are doing looks similar on a checklist. The values, the orientation and the evidence about what actually works under pressure are almost opposite.

The difference is not what we grow, store or know. It is how we do it and who we see ourselves doing it with. We are not preparing to withdraw from the systems around us or to protect our household against the people around us.

We are not preparing to withdraw from the systems around us or defend our household against the people around us. We are trying to build capability that connects outward: to neighbours, community groups, local food networks, informal care systems and the relationships that research after disasters repeatedly identifies as critical infrastructure.

That distinction — between preparing to survive apart from your community and preparing to contribute to its survival — turns out to be hugely important. Not just as a values preference but also as a practical question about what actually works. And the research is clearer on this than most people in either camp realise.

At this stage, I’d like to clarify how I use the word “prepper” in this piece. I am not using it here to describe anyone who stores food, water, batteries or medication. Sensible household preparedness is not the problem. It is essential. I am using “prepper” to describe a particular orientation to preparedness: one that imagines safety as separation, scarcity as inevitable, institutions as mostly doomed, and other people primarily as threats.

That orientation is not the only form of prepping. Many people who identify as preppers are ordinary, practical, generous people responding to reasonable concerns. Some are deeply community-minded. Some are much more sophisticated than the caricature allows. But the individualist, survivalist and often militarised version of prepping remains culturally powerful, and it offers a useful contrast with community resilience.

The same water tank, battery, garden, radio or food store can express either worldview. The question is not whether you are prepared. The question is whether your preparedness increases only your private margin of safety, or whether it also increases the adaptive capacity of the people around you.

(Picture by A Chosen Soul)

A brief history of two movements

The survivalist movement emerged in the United States in the 1970s, shaped by Cold War anxiety, economic instability and a deep distrust of government and institutional systems. Through the 1980s and 1990s it accumulated considerable political baggage — associations with militia movements, racial anxiety and anti-government extremism that culminated in Waco, Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing. In the 2000s, many people who shared the practical orientation of survivalism but not its political extremism began using the term “preppers” — a rebranding that reflected a genuine broadening of the movement toward more mainstream concerns: natural hazards, economic disruption, pandemic preparedness, supply chain fragility and household self-reliance. Today, “prepping” and “survivalism” are often used interchangeably, though they are not always the same thing.

Community resilience has different roots. It draws from Indigenous and traditional community practices, mutual aid traditions, cooperative organising, working-class survival strategies, disaster management research, and the academic literature on social capital and disaster outcomes. It is also deeply place-based. It asks not only what a household owns, but how people relate to each other, to local institutions, to land, water, food, energy, Country and the ecological systems that make life possible.

Both movements have grown significantly since COVID. Both are responding to the same underlying reality: that the systems most people depend on are more fragile than they appear, and that this fragility is becoming more consequential as disruptions compound.

What they propose to do about it is however quite different.

What they share

The overlap between prepper and community resilience approaches is more substantial than either side tends to acknowledge, and identifying it clearly is helpful before examining where they diverge.

Both take systemic fragility seriously at a time when mainstream culture still tends to dismiss it. Both invest in practical skills that many urban and suburban households have largely lost: food growing, food preservation, first aid, water management, energy independence, communication redundancy, repair skills, navigation and basic self-reliance.

Both question the wisdom of total dependence on supply chains, centralised institutions and services that have repeatedly demonstrated their vulnerability under pressure.

Both, in their different ways, are trying to answer the same question: what do you do when the systems you normally rely on stop working?

This overlap matters because household preparedness is genuinely useful. A household that grows some food, stores reserves, has backup power, keeps essential medication accessible, understands local hazards and knows how to manage without reliable supply chains is less exposed than one that has none of those things.

The problem is not the toolkit. It is the orientation of the toolkit.

Preparedness can become withdrawal, or it can become contribution. It can produce a fortified household, or it can produce a capable household embedded in a network of reciprocal relationships. It can deepen suspicion, or it can increase trust. It can turn neighbours into imagined threats, or it can turn neighbours into the first layer of collective safety.

This distinction shapes everything that follows.

Where they diverge

Prepping and community resilience diverge in at least six ways: motivation, social orientation, culture, security, risk assessment and food security. These differences are not merely philosophical. They affect what actually happens under pressure.

1. Motivation: fear or contribution

The more individualist versions of prepping tend to be driven by fear: fear of collapse, scarcity, social disorder, institutional failure and other people. This is not an irrational response to genuine systemic fragility. Fear is a rational signal. It tells us that something matters and that something may be at risk.

But fear-driven preparation tends to produce defensive solutions: the fortified household, the long-term stockpile, the bunker, the armed perimeter, the withdrawal from community networks in anticipation of their failure.

Community resilience begins from concern too. It does not deny risk. But its motivation is more relational. It is grounded in a positive vision of what people can build and do together under pressure. Its ethos is less defensive than generative. The question is not only “how do I protect my household?” It is also “what capacity can my household contribute to the wider system around us?”

That shift changes the meaning of preparedness.

A generator is not just backup power for your own fridge. It can keep a neighbour’s medication cold. A satellite communicator is not just a device for your own safety. It can help relay information when phones fail. A garden is not just household food security. It can become a place of exchange, learning and relationship. A stored reserve is not only a private buffer. It can buy time for others.

2. Social orientation: separation or social infrastructure

The more survivalist approach anticipates the collapse of existing systems and builds parallel infrastructure in anticipation, including, in some cases, preparing to defend that infrastructure against others.

Community resilience invests in the social order that makes collective response possible. It assumes that people do better when they have relationships, trust, communication channels, local knowledge, practical skills and ways to coordinate before the emergency arrives.

This is where social capital matters, but the term needs to be used carefully. Some prepper communities may have strong bonding social capital: tight relationships within a defined group. That can be powerful. But community resilience also depends on bridging social capital — relationships across groups — and linking social capital — relationships between communities and institutions.

Bonding capital helps “people like us” look after each other. Bridging capital helps different neighbourhoods, cultures, classes, age groups and organisations cooperate. Linking capital helps communities influence, coordinate with and hold accountable councils, emergency services, health systems and governments.

Resilience requires all three.

A household or group that withdraws from wider community networks in preparation for their failure may become more capable in a narrow sense, but it can also contribute to the very failure it fears. It removes trust, knowledge, resources and practical capacity from the shared pool.

What sustains social infrastructure under pressure is not only practical connection — food networks, mutual aid arrangements, radio networks, shared equipment, local transport, community hubs — but emotional capacity.

Fear, grief, exhaustion and conflict intensify under sustained disruption. Communities that have not developed the emotional intelligence to navigate those states can fracture precisely when cohesion matters most. The ability to stay present with someone who is struggling, manage your own fear without projecting it onto others, repair relationships under pressure, de-escalate conflict and keep working with people you find difficult is not a soft extra is core resilience infrastructure.

The individualist prepper model, oriented towards toughness and external threat management, has little to offer here. Community resilience, at its best, treats emotional capacity as something to be developed deliberately, alongside food growing, water storage, first aid and communication redundancy.

3. Culture: performance or ordinary capability

The prepper aesthetic is often highly visible: military-style clothing, tactical equipment, weapons, threat displays, rugged masculinity and apocalyptic imagery drawn from zombie films and collapse scenarios. It signals individual formidability in a world imagined as adversarial.

This aesthetic is not universal among preppers, and it should not be mistaken for the whole movement. But it is culturally influential. It shapes how preparedness is marketed, imagined and performed.

Community resilience usually looks very different. In many of the community-led resilience spaces I have worked with, including the Northern Rivers, women have been central to the work. The culture is often grounded less in threat and more in care, coordination, practical usefulness, local knowledge and the ordinary labour of keeping people connected.

This is not because men are incapable of care or women are naturally resilient. It is because different cultures of preparedness cultivate different forms of behaviour, leadership and legitimacy.

The people building community food gardens, running fermentation workshops, organising neighbourhood networks, checking on older residents, mapping local food systems or coordinating recovery hubs are usually not dressed for a cinematic apocalypse. They are ordinarily dressed, locally embedded and motivated by what they want to build together, not only by what they fear losing alone.

This aesthetic difference is not superficial. It reflects a deeper cultural difference between a model that treats other people as potential threats and a model that treats other people as the primary resource when things go wrong.

4. Security: looking dangerous or being safer

There is also a practical point here from my experience working in war zones. In environments where the threat of violence is real and immediate, safety sits at the opposite end of what the prepper aesthetic implies: attract as little attention as possible. Wear civilian clothes. Do not display weapons. Do not signal resources worth taking. Do not look like a threat. Keep a low profile.

The person who looks most formidable is often the person most at risk. A visibly armed, militarily equipped posture may feel empowering in fantasy scenarios, but in many real settings it can make you more visible, more threatening and more likely to be targeted.

This does not mean security is irrelevant. It means security has to be understood more intelligently than “look dangerous”.

Community resilience does not pretend that risk disappears. Theft, violence, looting, aggression, domestic violence, opportunism and fear all matter in disaster settings. But safety is not built only through isolation and force. It is also built through visibility, trust, de-escalation, shared norms, local intelligence, distributed resources, communication channels, relationships with formal services and the capacity to notice when people are becoming unsafe.

Security is real. The question is whether it is built through suspicion and separation, or through collective situational awareness and mutual responsibility.

5. Risk: cinematic collapse or local compounding disruption

Both preppers and community resilience advocates engage seriously with risk. The prepper community includes sophisticated thinkers who analyse cascading failures, compounding pressures and systemic vulnerabilities with genuine rigour.

The difference is not always in the quality of the analysis. It is often in what the analysis is anchored to.

The survivalist imagination tends to anchor risk assessment to scenarios of civilisational breakdown: permanent grid failure, governmental collapse, the dissolution of social order, mass violence and long-term isolation. These scenarios are not impossible, but they sit at the extreme end of the probability distribution. Preparations optimised for them tend to emphasise long-term individual self-sufficiency and private defence.

Community resilience anchors risk assessment to the disruptions that arrive with increasing regularity: floods, fires, heatwaves, prolonged supply chain interruptions, climate variability, infrastructure failure, insurance retreat, cost-of-living pressure, health system strain and social fragmentation. These are less cinematic, but they are already here.

Preparing for them requires a different set of capabilities: understanding the specific hazard profile of your place, tracking how climate trends are shifting that profile, using forecasts and early warnings to act before disruption rather than only in response to it, and thinking in systems rather than isolated scenarios.

A bushfire does not just destroy homes. It disrupts roads, power, telecommunications, supply chains, schools, health services, local economies, mental health and social cohesion. A flood is not only water through houses. It is displacement, mould, insurance conflict, trauma, lost income, housing stress, damaged trust, exhausted volunteers and years of recovery work.

The question is not whether disruptions compound. Most serious people in both movements understand that they do. The question is which disruptions you are actually preparing for, and whether your preparation matches the lived reality of those risks.

6. Food security: storage or access

The difference in orientation produces a direct difference in how food security is understood. The prepper model tends to treat food security primarily as storage: accumulating enough reserves to survive in isolation for an extended period. The community resilience model treats food security as access: the ability to reach food through a diversity of sources when some of those sources are disrupted.

That includes storage. It also includes growing food, knowing local producers, understanding seasonal availability, preserving food, participating in food swaps, supporting local distribution systems, building relationships with farmers, developing informal exchange networks and protecting the social conditions under which people share.

The difference matters enormously under sustained disruption. Stored food runs out. Relationships and local food systems can renew themselves, if they are maintained. They require land, water, labour, trust, governance, local knowledge, time and care.

A household with twelve months of food but no relationships may be safer for a while. A community with gardens, growers, shared kitchens, distribution networks, local knowledge and trust has a different kind of resilience. It can adapt.

Community resilience is not automatically good

There is a risk in any argument for community resilience: it can make “community” sound inherently benevolent, inclusive and functional. It is not.

Communities can exclude. They can reproduce racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, class privilege and informal hierarchies. They can ignore renters, migrants, older people, young people, people with disability, people with different sexual orientation, people without cars, people without English, people without money, people without spare time and people who are socially isolated.

They can be captured by local powerholders. They can burn out the same small group of volunteers again and again. They can rely on unpaid women’s labour while celebrating it as community spirit. They can fracture through conflict, gossip, trauma, ego, exhaustion and lack of accountability.

That is why community resilience cannot mean vague neighbourliness or romantic localism. It has to mean deliberate work: governance, inclusion, role clarity, conflict capacity, redundancy, accessibility, power-sharing, care for volunteers, relationships with institutions and attention to the people most likely to be missed.

A resilience agenda that only works for homeowners with sheds, gardens, solar batteries and spare cash is not resilience. The test is whether it improves the options available to renters, older people, people with disability, low-income households, isolated residents and people already living under chronic stress.

Community resilience also cannot become an excuse for government retreat. Communities are often first to act because they are closest to the impact. They know the roads, the creeks, the vulnerable residents, the informal shortcuts and the actual conditions on the ground. But community-led action does not absolve governments of responsibility for warnings, infrastructure, emergency services, housing, health systems, communications, preparedness and recovery funding, planning decisions and climate adaptation.

Community resilience is not a substitute for competent government. It is what allows people to act before, during and after institutional response, but it should strengthen public systems, not provide political cover for abandoning them.

The task is not to choose between community and institutions. It is to build communities capable of acting, and institutions capable of listening, supporting, resourcing and being held accountable.

What the evidence says about what actually works

The evidence consistently favours the community resilience approach under the conditions that matter most — sustained, compounding disruption that exceeds individual household capacity.

In Chicago’s 1995 heatwave, Eric Klinenberg’s work showed that mortality was shaped not only by temperature, poverty or age, but by social isolation, neighbourhood conditions, institutional failure and the presence or absence of everyday social infrastructure. People died alone in places where social connection had already been eroded. Neighbourhoods with active street life, local organisations and stronger social ties fared better than places where people were isolated behind closed doors.

After Superstorm Sandy struck the northeastern United States in 2012, researchers studying recovery patterns found that communities with stronger social resources recovered significantly faster than adjacent communities with weaker ones, regardless of socioeconomic status. Social capital — the trust, reciprocity and mutual aid embedded in community relationships — can make poorer communities more resilient and its absence can make wealthier communities less so. Friends and neighbours are the first line of defence in a disaster, and communities with a reservoir of social resources have better outcomes than those without one.

The Northern Rivers floods of 2022 have become one of the most important Australian examples of community-led disaster response. The grassroots response showed the power of community-led action when formal systems were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. Recovery hubs appeared in community halls, neighbourhood centres, private homes and improvised local spaces, often ahead of formal mechanisms. When official flood monitoring systems failed, local residents recorded and communicated the emerging crisis, then helped build community-owned flood intelligence systems designed to function when official ones did not.

What is also striking is who led much of that response. Research authored by UCRH researchers Dr Rebecca McNaught, Dr Jo Longman and Emma Pittaway, alongside Loriana Bethune from Gender and Disaster Australia and Dominica Meade from the University of Melbourne, makes visible the significant and enduring contribution women made to health, wellbeing and recovery across the Northern Rivers, often through collaborative, local and relational forms of leadership.

Four years after the floods, grassroots resilience groups across the region are still working to build capacity, share resources, reduce burnout, advocate for communities and connect local groups into a broader regional movement.

This is not heroism performed by people with military training or tactical equipment. It is care, coordination, distributed leadership, local knowledge and relational intelligence. Individual preparedness still mattered. Boats, radios, generators, fuel, food, tools, first aid skills and practical competence all mattered. But when disruption lasted longer than supplies, when needs exceeded individual household capacity, when recovery required coordination, what mattered most was social infrastructure.

A systematic review of research on social capital and disaster resilience found that social capital supports resilience across disaster phases through social learning, collective action, preparedness, information sharing and civic responsibility. Put simply, communities do better when people know each other, trust each other, learn together, act together and feel responsible for more than their own household.

Daniel Aldrich’s work on post-disaster recovery makes the same point from a comparative perspective. Looking across disasters including the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, Aldrich argues that recovery outcomes cannot be explained only by the scale of physical damage, levels of wealth or the amount of external aid. What often distinguishes places that recover from places that stagnate is the depth of their social capital: the trust, networks and relationships that allow people to share information, mobilise resources, coordinate action and keep people from leaving the area altogether.

The most resilient household is not necessarily the most heavily stocked one. It is the household most capable of sustaining itself while remaining embedded in a community that can adapt.

What genuine resilience literacy looks like

Genuine resilience literacy is not a list of things to stockpile. It is a way of thinking and acting that integrates several capacities that the prepper model largely leaves out and that the community resilience approach, at its best, develops deliberately.

It begins with risk literacy — the honest, evidence-based assessment of what hazards are actually relevant to where you live, how likely they are, how they are changing as the climate shifts, and how they interact with each other under compounding conditions. This means engaging with forecasting and early warning systems. It means understanding what seasonal outlooks, river gauges, fire danger ratings, heat warnings, climate projections and local knowledge are telling you, and acting before disruption rather than only after it arrives.

It requires systems thinking — the capacity to see your household, your community and your region as interconnected systems whose vulnerabilities and strengths are not independent of each other. The question is never just “what happens if the power goes out?” It is “what happens if the power goes out during a heatwave, while the roads are closed, while telecommunications are unreliable, while the local food supply is already under pressure, while older people are isolated, while the health system is strained, and while people are already financially stressed?”

It requires deliberate investment in social capital — the relationships, networks and trust that the research consistently identifies as the most important determinant of how communities perform under pressure. Social capital is not built during a crisis. It is built in the years before one arrives, through the ordinary acts of showing up: the community garden, the neighbourhood network, the local food swap, the farmers market, the mutual aid group. These are not peripheral activities for people with spare time. They are the infrastructure of resilience, and they are built or neglected in ordinary times.

Alongside social capital sits emotional intelligence — the capacity to stay present with people who are struggling, to manage your own fear without projecting it onto others, to navigate conflict and grief under pressure rather than being undone by them. Sustained disruption does not only test practical capability. It tests the quality of human relationships and the emotional resources people bring to them. Communities that have developed emotional literacy — where people know how to ask for help, how to offer it without diminishing others, and how to maintain trust when conditions are hard — demonstrate measurably better outcomes under crisis conditions than those that haven’t. This is rarely discussed in preparedness circles but is consistently supported by the evidence.

And it requires something that neither the prepper nor the conventional emergency management conversation talks about enough: an entrepreneurial orientation toward disruption. Disruption is not only a threat to be managed. It is also a condition that creates genuine opportunities — for new ways of producing and distributing food, for local energy solutions, for organising care, sharing tools, building local services, using technology, strengthening neighbourhoods and creating livelihoods that make communities less dependent on fragile centralised systems. The communities and organisations that navigate disruption best are not only those that have prepared to absorb it but those that have developed the capacity to adapt creatively within it — to find new solutions, build new models and create value from conditions that others experience only as loss.

What this means in practice

My household grows food, has backup power, stores water, maintains communication redundancy and teaches practical skills to our children. These things matter and I would not give them up.

But they are not the end of the story. They are the foundation — the oxygen mask you put on yourself before helping the person next to you. You cannot contribute meaningfully to your community’s resilience from a position of depletion. A household that is genuinely prepared — that has food, water, power and practical capability — is a household that has something to offer when things get hard. That is why individual preparedness matters. Not as a substitute for community investment but as its precondition.

So, build the skills. Grow some food. Store some reserves. Develop backup power and communication capacity. Understand the hazards relevant to where you live and track how they are changing. Develop the practical knowledge that reduces your household’s dependence on systems that can fail.

And then — more importantly — turn outward. At the household level, prepare enough that you are less likely to become immediately dependent on others during a disruption. At the street level, know your neighbours. Learn who may need help, who has skills, who has equipment, who has mobility issues, who lives alone, who has medical needs and who is likely to notice trouble early. At the community level, support food networks, community gardens, repair groups, neighbourhood centres, local producers, resilience groups, recovery hubs, radio networks, preparedness workshops and informal systems of care. At the regional level, connect grassroots work with councils, emergency services, health systems, researchers, funders and advocacy networks, so that local intelligence can shape formal systems rather than merely compensate for their failures.

Understand food security not only as what you have stored, but as what your community can access through growing, preserving, exchange, local production, distribution and trust. Understand safety not only as what you can defend, but as what your community can notice, prevent, de-escalate and coordinate. Understand preparedness not only as what protects you, but as what makes you useful.

Not because it feels virtuous, but because the logic is simple: I can only be safe if my neighbours are safe. They can only be safe if their neighbours are safe. Resilience is not something you achieve alone. It is something communities build together — or don’t build at all.

The answer most analysis reaches for is that his base has been deceived, or that something has gone wrong with the American mind, but neither explanation holds up against the durability of what we are watching, and both underestimate the craft of what Trump has actually built.
What he has built, sustained now across a decade of political life, is a story of unusual coherence and emotional precision: that the elites have betrayed you, that you have been forgotten by the institutions meant to serve you, that he alone sees you, and that he will punish those responsible on your behalf.

The wound that story speaks to is real, which is why dismissing it as manipulation misses the point — wages for those without a college degree have stagnated for forty years, manufacturing communities have hollowed out without being rebuilt, and the institutions that promised competence delivered the Iraq war, the financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and a pandemic response that looked from many kitchen tables like incompetence dressed up as expertise.

What Trump's storytelling does, with considerable skill, is take that genuine dispossession and name a culprit for it — immigrants, coastal elites, the deep state, woke ideology — that is emotionally satisfying and politically useful, but that is not the actual cause. The actual causes are larger and more diffuse and harder to face: globalisation, the financialisation of the economy, automation, the slow erosion of social infrastructure, and the climate disruption now arriving uninvited at the edges of every system. None of these are enemies a politician can promise to punish, which is precisely why the substitute story has been, for so many, worth believing.

The story holds because a great many people benefit from its holding. Legislators whose careers now depend on his endorsement, donors collecting on regulatory and tax positioning, judicial appointees building decade-long legacies, a media economy that monetises his presence on every side of the argument, and the operators, lawyers, and commentators who have become wealthy and prominent in his orbit — each of them has reasons to keep the narrative intact, and between them they form an ecosystem that the constitutional architecture was never designed to constrain.

The framers assumed that officeholders would jealously defend the institutional power of their own branch against encroachment, and that assumption has failed in our time, because party identity and personal political survival now outrank institutional identity for most of those involved. Once that flips, the checks stop checking, not through any dramatic collapse but through the slow alignment of incentives around the figure whose story keeps the coalition fed.

The same structural pattern, of a reassuring story protecting people from a harder truth while those who benefit most from the story keep it in circulation, sits underneath the climate conversation around the planet, where the comforting narrative that things will be fine, that the economy still needs coal, that adaptation is alarmism, has been kept alive by interests that profit from its survival, while the floods and fires arrive on the doorsteps of the people who most believed the reassurance and who have the fewest resources to recover. The believers, in both cases, pay first.

This is what makes the conference that ended in Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, this week, more significant than its modest media coverage suggests. Fifty-six countries met for two days to do something the United Nations climate process has not been able to do in three decades of trying, which is to talk specifically and concretely about phasing out the production of coal, oil, and gas, rather than only managing the emissions that result from burning them.

The conversation happened outside the UN consensus architecture because inside that architecture fossil fuel producing states have for years blocked any serious language on production, and a smaller group of countries, frustrated with thirty years of treating symptoms while the cause expanded, decided the captured room was no longer worth waiting in and built a different one. France published its national phase-out roadmap during the talks. Tuvalu and Ireland will co-host the next round in 2027. Australia attended, while continuing to expand the very industry under discussion, which is its own kind of story worth examining another day. The United States was not invited.

What Santa Marta represents, beyond any specific commitment that did or did not emerge from it, is the structural inverse of the Trump political pattern this post has been describing — a coalition of the willing acting on the harder truth, around a system that had been captured by those who benefit from the easier story. Both patterns are operating at the same time, in different rooms, with different people paying the cost of each. Which one will prevail?

There is something almost no one in the field of crisis management says out loud.

Most crisis practitioners — including me — have built professional identities around being the person who knows what to do when things go wrong. That identity is not false, but it is incomplete. Because underneath the training, the experience, and the professional composure, there are moments where the mind, instead of rising to meet the situation, goes quiet. The clarity of action that should be there simply isn’t. My mind is not panicked, not racing. Just blank.

Sometimes a crisis happens and it requires an immediate response, but I don’t know what to do.

I freeze.

(Picture by Getty Images)

I share this because I think it matters that someone who works in this field names it honestly. Not because it is comfortable — it isn’t — but because the silence around it is part of the problem.

I have been in enough of those moments to know they are more common than anyone in this field admits. In my experience, how leaders think they will respond in a crisis and how they actually respond are rarely the same thing, and this is not discussed often. It stays unexamined partly because naming it feels dangerous. If I freeze, what does that say about me? If I go blank, am I fit to lead?

These are the wrong questions.

Our crisis response is not a verdict on our character. It is a pattern our nervous system learned, based on everything that has happened to us. And until we name these patterns honestly — in ourselves and with the people we work alongside — we cannot do much about them.

I have spent decades working in international disaster and conflict settings. I respond to fires as an active firefighter. I have delivered crisis capability workshops across Australia to leaders in organisations of every kind and supported organisations through all sorts of crises. But sometimes, under genuine pressure, my mind goes blank. If that is true for me, I am reasonably confident it is true for most of the people reading this.

This piece is about that recognition, what the science says about why it happens, and — most practically — what you can do about it when it matters.

What actually happens

When a genuine threat registers — a fire, a flood, a reputational crisis, a conversation that suddenly turns confrontational — the brain’s threat detection system activates before the conscious mind has fully caught up.

The amygdala fires. Stress hormones flood the body. Attention narrows sharply to the perceived threat. Working memory degrades. Time distorts. Cognitive biases that are manageable under normal conditions — confirmation bias, action bias, the tendency to lock onto the first plausible explanation — all intensify. The result is a version of yourself that is simultaneously more activated and less capable than your normal operating state.

People respond to the same threatening situation in radically different ways. These reflect patterns the nervous system has learned, based on history, training, accumulated load, and the specific conditions of the moment. Understanding those patterns — in yourself and in the people around you — is one of the most practically important things a leader can do.

Five responses are worth understanding.

• Fight is the confrontational response — the impulse to push back, assert, escalate. Under pressure it can look like decisiveness. It can also produce aggression, premature closure and decisions made before the situation is understood.

• Flight is the withdrawal response — the impulse to escape, avoid or defer. It can look like prudent caution. It can also produce delay, abdication and the chronic postponement of decisions that need to be made.

• Freeze is the blank mind. The system going offline when active response feels unavailable. Not passivity — protection. And more common among experienced leaders than anyone admits.

• Fawn is the appeasement response, and the most self-concealing of the five. It uses the tools of connection — empathy, attentiveness, agreement — in the service of managing threat rather than genuine relation. From the outside it looks like your best qualities. From the inside it is driven by fear. The leader who over-consults, over-explains and over-accommodates during a crisis may not be being collaborative. They may be fawning — and the decisions that emerge from that state tend to reflect what reduces social discomfort rather than what the situation actually needs.

• Flow is the response people want. The state of absorbed, competent action where deliberation disappears and performance feels almost effortless. It is not luck. It has preconditions, and some of them are trainable. We will return to this.

Your crisis response is not your character. It is a pattern your nervous system learned. And because it is learned, it can be understood, interrupted and — with the right practice — changed. But only if you know honestly what your pattern is.

Another thing that science tells us: experience helps, but not unconditionally. The psychologist Gary Klein spent decades studying how experts — firefighters, military commanders, intensive care nurses — actually make decisions under pressure, and his finding was counterintuitive. Experts don’t deliberate more carefully than novices. They deliberate less. They recognise the situation as familiar, simulate a course of action, and if it fits, they act. This is pattern recognition built through genuine exposure and reflection — not intuition as guesswork, but the nervous system drawing on a library of situations it has encountered before.

The problem is that pattern recognition fails in genuinely novel situations. When the situation doesn’t match anything previously encountered, the system reaches for its library and finds nothing. The blank mind arrives precisely at that point. Novel crises, compounding pressures, situations that exceed previous experience — these are exactly where experienced practitioners are most vulnerable, because they have built confidence in their pattern recognition and then discover it isn’t available.

This is also why crisis response can change across a career. The practitioner who acted instinctively at thirty and freezes at forty-five is not weaker. Cumulative exposure changes the nervous system. Role complexity multiplies the possible right answers while removing the practiced pathway to any of them. And sometimes what looked like confident instinctive action in earlier years was partly the product of emotional suppression — a capacity to disconnect from the full weight of what a crisis means for the people in it — that, as experience and emotional integration develop, becomes less available. Knowing this is part of knowing your pattern.

Know your pattern

Self-knowledge is the foundation of everything that follows. Not because different responses require entirely different techniques, but because knowing which response is active in you — in this moment, under this kind of pressure — is what allows you to recognise it quickly and interrupt it before it runs the show.

A few honest questions are then worth genuinely pondering. Under real pressure — not managed inconvenience, but actual stakes — do you tend to go blank? Do you tend to become reactive, confrontational, or sharp in ways you later regret? Do you find yourself over-explaining, over-accommodating, agreeing with people when you don’t actually agree? Do you withdraw, defer, or find reasons to delay?

Most leaders have had enough genuine pressure to know, at some level, which of these tends to show up. What is less common is honest reflection on it — because the professional context makes self-examination feel risky, and because in the moment, the response always feels justified. The freeze feels like careful consideration. The fawn feels like good leadership. The fight feels like decisiveness. Naming what is actually happening, to yourself and to others, is harder than it sounds but really valuable.

One of the primary purposes of realistic scenario-based training is to create the conditions for that self-knowledge to develop safely — before the real crisis arrives. What you discover in a simulation is far less costly than what you discover for the first time in the field.

How to decide under pressure

The following five steps are not a linear process — they are a loop you will cycle through repeatedly as a crisis unfolds and conditions change. Their value is their simplicity — simple enough to remain available when deliberate cognition is most compromised, practiced enough to activate before the blank mind has a chance to settle in.

• Step one: Regulate

Before any decision is possible, the nervous system needs a moment of reset. The instinct under pressure is to speed up. That is when mistakes compound.

A deliberate pause of a few seconds is enough. The STOP technique formalises this: Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed. But the breath is worth doing properly. Take one or two slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale — this is not symbolic. A longer exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, directly dampening the stress response. While you breathe, relax your shoulders and unclench your jaw. These small physical acts are direct signals to the nervous system that the immediate threat is survivable, and they restore enough cognitive function to make the next step possible.

Managing your own state is not a soft concern. Your breathing, your tone of voice, your visible composure — or lack of it — directly shapes how the people around you respond. Regulating yourself is regulating the room.

• Step two: Orient

Once regulated enough to think, the next move is not to decide but to orient.

There is one sentence worth internalising before the crisis arrives rather than trying to construct during it: Protect people, stabilise the situation, then solve the problem.

It forces an immediate hierarchy. Everything will feel urgent but most of it isn’t. This sentence tells you what order to move in when everything is demanding attention simultaneously — whether the crisis is a fire, a flood, a cyber attack, a reputational emergency or an internal organisational breakdown. It is simple enough to survive the cognitive conditions that genuine pressure produces.

From that anchor, ask two questions: what is the most important outcome right now, and what do I know versus what am I assuming? Then actively check the story your brain has already constructed. Under stress, the mind locks onto an explanation quickly and defends it. A single question — what if we’re wrong about what’s happening? — is often enough to keep that story provisional rather than fixed. You don’t need a full analysis. You need just enough scepticism to avoid committing blindly to a flawed picture.

• Step three: Decide

Make the next decision, not the perfect one.

You will not have enough information. Waiting for certainty is often the real risk. Shift the standard — not is this the right decision, but is this a reasonable next step given what I know? If the action is low risk and reversible, act.

Then verbalise the decision — say it out loud, even briefly: “based on what we know, we are going to do this”. Verbalising does two things: it clarifies your own thinking, and it allows others to challenge or refine it immediately. Silent decision-making under pressure increases error rates. The act of articulating a decision, even imperfectly, is itself a quality-control mechanism.

• Step four: Communicate

A decision made but not transmitted is not a decision — it is a thought. Communication under pressure degrades fast, which means the standards that work in normal conditions are insufficient.

Keep it short, concrete and repeatable: what is happening, what we are doing, what people need to do next. If people are confused, your decision will not translate into action regardless of how good it was.

Use your team and do not become the bottleneck. A common failure mode under pressure is over-centralisation — leaders absorbing all decisions because the stakes feel too high to delegate. Assign clear roles. Delegate decisions where possible. Your job is not to do everything. It is to maintain direction and coherence while others execute.

• Step five: Adapt

Every decision in a crisis has a short shelf life.

The situation is moving. Your initial assessment will be partially wrong. Build in a rhythm: act, check what changed, adjust. You are managing a moving system, not executing a fixed plan. The leaders who perform best under sustained pressure are not those who make the best initial decision, but those who update fastest as reality reveals itself.

Watch for the traps that slow adaptation: pushing ahead when the plan has stopped fitting, defending an assessment you have publicly committed to, filtering out information that contradicts your current picture. Each of these is a predictable failure mode. Recognising them in yourself — even briefly, even imperfectly — is often enough to interrupt them.

Flow as the destination

Everything described above is in service of “flow”, a state most leaders have experienced at least briefly — and that the research suggests is more accessible than most people assume, though never guaranteed.

Flow in a crisis is not calmness in the usual sense, but a functional engagement under pressure. You are still physiologically activated — the stress hormones are still present, the heart rate is still elevated. The difference is that the activation is channelled into focused action rather than scattered or paralysed response. You are not calm. You are present, clear and moving.

That shift depends on two things: preparation, so the situation feels recognisable enough that the nervous system doesn’t treat it as catastrophic; and regulation combined with structure in the moment, so you can act despite incomplete information. The five steps above are designed to provide exactly that — a practiced structure that reduces the cognitive load of deciding how to respond, freeing capacity for the response itself.

The research identifies three preconditions for flow: a challenge-skill balance where the demands feel matched to your ability, clear goals, and unambiguous feedback about whether your actions are working. Training builds the challenge-skill balance by making high-pressure conditions feel familiar rather than overwhelming. The go-to sentence (Protect people, stabilise the situation, then solve the problem) provides the clear goal. Staying attentive to what the situation is telling you — actively seeking feedback rather than waiting to receive it — provides the third.

Importantly, training for flow does not eliminate freeze, fight, flight or fawn. Those responses are part of how the nervous system works and they will show up. What consistent practice does is shorten their duration — you recognise the response faster, interrupt it sooner, and return to effective action more quickly. In real crises, that is what actually matters. Not the absence of the automatic response, but the speed with which you regain control of it.

You are not aiming to be right. You are aiming to stay effective as the situation evolves. With enough practice, the five steps stop feeling like a checklist and start feeling like second nature. And in the best moments — when preparation, structure and presence align — something closer to flow becomes possible.

The blank mind is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of knowing what to do about it.

What would you eat?

Here is a question worth sitting with before reading further: if supermarket shelves in your city became unreliable for a month — not empty, not catastrophic, just genuinely unreliable in the way that recent events have made plausible — what would you actually eat?

Most people avoid answering this honestly. The pantry holds perhaps a week of real meals, less if you exclude things that require fresh ingredients you no longer have. The cooking knowledge assumes a functioning supermarket. The local relationships — with producers, with neighbours who grow things, with anyone who fishes or forages or preserves — are thin or nonexistent. The gap between how capable most Australians feel in their professional and financial lives, and how exposed they are in this one domain, is striking once you notice it.

Before you read further, it is worth knowing that one in three Australian households — 3.5 million — experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months, according to the Foodbank Hunger Report 2025, with one in five households earning over $91,000 also affected. Nearly seven in ten single-parent households are now food insecure, and a similar proportion of households containing someone with a disability or health issue. Foodbank Reports Food insecurity in Australia is not a fringe problem waiting to arrive. It is a mainstream reality, already present, already worsening, and positioned to deepen considerably as the pressures now converging on food systems take hold.

This piece is about that reality, what is driving it, what genuine food security actually requires, and what each of us can do about it.

(Picture by Getty Images)

What the Northern Rivers showed us

One of the most disaster-tested food system in Australia over the past decade is probably the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Bushfires in 2019. Two catastrophic floods in 2022, the second arriving a month after the first. COVID layered across all of it. A cost of living crisis settling in beneath. I co-authored a food security scoping study for this region in 2023, and a companion piece published in The Conversation. I have also delivered food security workshops across NSW and Queensland. What the research documented, and what I encountered consistently in those workshops, was not what most people expect when they think about food insecurity in a region that produces abundant food.

The Northern Rivers grows beef, macadamias, avocados, blueberries, dairy, sugarcane, rice and more. By any national accounting it is food-productive. After the February 2022 floods, the major supermarkets in Lismore were closed for over four months. Supply routes connecting the region to Brisbane’s Rocklea markets and to distribution centres in Sydney were severed or severely compromised. Fresh food disappeared from shelves within days. A region that looked food-secure on paper proved acutely vulnerable the moment the supply chains linking it to the national distribution system were disrupted — because those were, in practice, the only supply chains most people’s daily lives depended on.

The underlying problem is not unique to the Northern Rivers. Australia’s food system is largely structured as a linear supply chain: food grown in a region is trucked out to centralised distribution, then trucked back in to local supermarkets. It is efficient under stable conditions and fragile under disruption, because cutting any point in the chain cuts access to food for the communities at the end of it. Making food systems genuinely resilient requires thinking of food as a local system rather than a linear supply chain — building the regional circular economies, food hubs and shorter distribution pathways that allow communities to feed themselves from what is grown nearby when the national system becomes unreliable.

What held in the Northern Rivers during the 2022 floods was not infrastructure — most of that failed or was overwhelmed. What held was relationships: the farmers market managers who found alternative venues and pivoted their operations within days; the resident who started cooking meals in her home kitchen for hospital staff and displaced families, eventually producing 1,400 meals a week from donated produce for ten months; the networks between local producers that kept fresh food moving when nothing else was. Local food actors consistently demonstrated greater adaptive capacity than large supermarket chains under disaster conditions, not because they were better resourced, but because they were more connected, more flexible, and more embedded in the communities they served.

But the research also found something harder to make sense of. Even in the Northern Rivers, with its strong local food culture and its abundance of production, most households had no meaningful alternative to the supermarket system when it failed. Access — physical, financial, practical — remained concentrated in the same channels the disaster had disrupted. Local production existed. The connections between that production and most households did not. This pattern has appeared elsewhere too: in the Pilbara after Cyclone Ilsa cut roads and broke bridges, and in South Australia when floods severed the Trans-Australian railway that carries the vast majority of Western Australia’s food supply. It is a structural feature of how Australia feeds itself.

What is converging now

Those structural vulnerabilities are now being tested by pressures that did not exist when the Northern Rivers research was conducted.

The conflict around the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one in five barrels of globally traded oil passes — has already moved through energy markets into freight costs and from there into the cost of almost everything that is manufactured, transported or grown at scale. Urea, the synthetic fertiliser that most of the world’s staple crops depend on and that is produced from the same natural gas supplies the conflict has disrupted, has seen prices double since February and double again. Australia imports a significant share of its fertiliser requirements, which means global price shifts flow directly into the economics of domestic farming. El Niño conditions are developing simultaneously, bringing reduced rainfall and higher temperatures across key agricultural regions, tightening the same systems already under input cost pressure.

These are not distant or abstract risks. They are active pressures already moving through the food systems that supply Australian supermarkets, arriving into a system the Northern Rivers research found to be optimised for efficiency rather than resilience, dependent on long supply chains with limited redundancy, and carrying far less slack than most consumers assume.

Australia is developing a national food security strategy — Feeding Australia — with $3.5 million committed in the 2025-26 Budget and a consultation process that closed in September 2025. This is encouraging and overdue. The discussion paper’s stated priorities centre on resilient supply chains, productivity, innovation and economic growth. These are important. What is less prominent in the current framing is community resilience, household food capability, and the local food system infrastructure — the food hubs, the regional circular economies, the distribution networks connecting local production to local households — that the Northern Rivers research found to be the most critical gap. A food security strategy that focuses primarily on national supply chain efficiency will perform well under normal conditions and leave communities exposed under the compounding disruptions that are now becoming more frequent. The consultation has closed, but the strategy is still being shaped. It is worth knowing it exists, and worth understanding what it includes and excludes.

My household

My family is further along this than most urban Australian households, and yet, genuinely not far enough.

Over several years my wife has led our household’s food security efforts with real skill and sustained commitment. She has completed permaculture training, attended courses in food growing, and delivered food preservation and fermentation workshops to others in our community. She has built a productive garden on our suburban block — under 800 square metres, not ideally positioned, and currently producing a range that would surprise most people: silverbeet, kale, bok choy, rocket, multiple varieties of lettuce and brassica, climbing beans, bush beans, snow peas, sweet potato, taro, cassava, turmeric, ginger, garlic, avocado, mango, citrus, lychee, banana, pineapple, passionfruit, blueberries, and more roots, herbs and climbing vegetables than I can easily list. We have chickens. As a family we fish. We have been seriously considering aquaponics — the closed-loop system where fish waste nutrients feed plants and the plants filter the water for the fish — as a next step. We have genuine connections with other local food growers.

My wife recently inventoried what was growing and noted, with the kind of clear-eyed honesty that characterises how she approaches all of this, that it still was not close to making us food secure. She is right, and that observation is worth pausing on. A suburban block producing that range and depth of food — representing years of deliberate skill-building, genuine knowledge, sustained effort and real community connection — still leaves us substantially dependent on supermarkets for the calories and variety a household actually requires. If that much effort, knowledge and relationship-building is still not sufficient for food security, the scale of what genuine food security requires becomes clearer.

And yet, under the pressure of parenthood and the exhaustion of busy lives, even we have drifted back toward greater supermarket reliance than we would like. The capability is there. The time and energy to fully deploy it is not always. That drift — not from ignorance but from competing pressures — is, I suspect, the most common story among households with some food awareness. It is also the story that matters most for thinking about what food security actually requires, because it shows that knowledge and intention alone are not sufficient. The conditions that allow people to maintain food practices need to exist and be protected — in household routines, in community infrastructure, and in policy that treats food capability as something worth investing in rather than something individuals are expected to manage alone.

Food security is about access and relationships

The standard food security conversation tends to focus on supply chains, strategic reserves and emergency logistics. These matter. But the research I helped produce in the Northern Rivers, and the experience of watching communities respond to compounding disasters, pointed consistently toward something this framing underweights.

Food security is not primarily a storage problem or a supply chain problem. It is, in equal measure, an access problem and a relationship problem.

Access means that food is available, affordable, physically reachable and culturally appropriate for all members of a community — not just those with the financial resources, transport, time and knowledge to navigate a complex food system effectively. The Northern Rivers research found that even when local food production existed and was functioning, many low-income households, households without reliable transport, and households in more isolated communities could not readily reach it. The distribution infrastructure connecting local production to local consumption — the hubs, the cold storage, the logistics, the shortened supply chains — was largely absent. Rebuilding food system resilience without addressing access is a project that benefits the already advantaged and leaves everyone else more exposed, which is precisely the wrong outcome at a moment when food insecurity is already concentrated among the most vulnerable.

Relationships are the other half of the picture. The households and communities that held together under compounding pressure were those with the most active connections: with local producers, with neighbours who grew or preserved or cooked, with organisations embedded in local food networks that could adapt quickly when normal channels failed, with enough practical knowledge to do something useful when the familiar systems became unreliable. Food security built on relationships is qualitatively different from food security built on storage — it is adaptive rather than static, and it tends to strengthen under pressure rather than deplete.

Both dimensions require deliberate investment before they are needed, because neither can be built quickly in a crisis.

What you can actually do

None of this requires a lifestyle overhaul or a move to the country. It requires a series of deliberate choices, made over time, that each reduce dependence and build something that compounds.

The most immediate step is diversifying where your food comes from. A pantry, fridge and freezer stocked with two weeks of real staples — dried legumes, grains, canned fish, oats, rice, cooking oils, and preserved or dried vegetables — provides genuine buffer without requiring much space or expense. Alongside that, finding your local farmers market and using it regularly enough that the relationship becomes real is one of the highest-leverage things a household can do. You are not just buying food; you are building a connection to local production that will matter if the supermarket system becomes unreliable.

Growing food that is relevant in your local climate — even a little — changes your relationship with it in ways that are hard to predict in advance. A few vegetable beds, some herbs, a fruit tree, a handful of chickens if your council permits them: none of these will make you food self-sufficient, but all of them develop knowledge, attentiveness and connection to seasonal rhythms that a purely supermarket-dependent household simply does not have. Learning to preserve and ferment — to extend the life of seasonal produce, to reduce waste, to stock a pantry with things you made rather than bought — is a skill set that takes modest time to develop and pays sustained dividends.

Fishing, foraging and hunting are worth considering if they suit your circumstances and location. They connect you to food sources entirely outside the commercial supply chain, develop practical skills, and tend to embed you in local networks of people who know the same things.

At the community level, joining a food swap, a community garden or a local agriculture initiative builds the social infrastructure that the Northern Rivers research found to be the most effective food security asset of all. These are not activities for people with extra time on their hands. They are the connective tissue of a more resilient community, and they are built in ordinary times, before the pressure arrives.

Water is worth a separate note. In times of crisis, each person requires roughly four to five litres per day for drinking, cooking and hygiene, which means a two-week supply for a household of four is around 280 litres. A water tank, a collection system, means to filter and sterilise, or at minimum a clear plan for where clean water comes from if the tap becomes unreliable is as important as the food itself.

None of these steps are sufficient on its own. Together, and built gradually over time, they create the kind of layered resilience that makes households and communities genuinely less exposed — not invulnerable, but meaningfully better positioned than those who have done nothing.

What systems need to change

Individual and community action matters, and it is insufficient on its own. The research is unambiguous on this: the households and communities most exposed to food insecurity are not those who have failed to prepare — they are those for whom the structural conditions that make preparation possible simply do not exist. Genuine food security requires systemic change at government and business level, and it requires people who understand what is at stake to advocate for it.

The most important shift governments can make is to treat food as a system rather than a supply chain. Australia’s national food security strategy incorporates recommendations to improve productivity, resilience and climate adaptation, but experts analysing submissions to the federal inquiry found key issues left unaddressed, including the structural drivers of food insecurity such as poverty and housing, and the concentration of market power in the supermarket sector. A strategy that focuses on agricultural productivity and supply chain efficiency will improve performance under normal conditions without addressing the fragility that disaster after disaster has exposed. Regional food plans — developed with genuine community participation, connecting local production to local consumption through food hubs, shortened distribution networks and accessible retail channels — are the infrastructure gap that most needs filling. The 2023 federal parliamentary inquiry into food security drew 188 submissions from across the food system and produced 35 recommendations to boost the productivity, resilience and security of Australia’s food system. Among them were measures to support local food systems and community food initiatives. As of early 2026, the federal government has not formally responded to those 35 recommendations, despite the publication of the Feeding Australia discussion paper in August 2025. The gap between the quality of the evidence and the pace of the policy response is itself part of the problem.

Protecting arable land from urban development is a related and urgent priority. Across Australia, high-quality agricultural land is being approved for residential and commercial development at a rate that is difficult to reverse and impossible to recover from. Local food system initiatives — including community-supported agriculture, food hubs and food policy groups — improve food quality, dietary diversity, social connectedness and local economies, and have demonstrated success internationally in countries including Canada, the UK and Belgium. These initiatives require land, infrastructure and sustained government support to function at the scale that matters. They also require councils and state governments to prioritise food production land in planning decisions rather than treating it as a residual category after housing and commercial development have been accommodated.

For businesses — particularly in food retail, logistics and agriculture — the systemic opportunity is diversification away from single-channel dependence. The supermarket duopoly that dominates Australian food retail has driven down costs but driven out the diversity and redundancy that resilient food systems require. Supporting local and regional producers, investing in shorter supply chains, and building genuine relationships with communities rather than treating them as markets to be served are not just ethical positions. They are commercial risk management in an environment where supply chain disruption is becoming more frequent and more severe.

At every level, the underlying ask is the same: to govern and operate for resilience rather than efficiency, accepting that resilience carries costs that are invisible in normal times and essential in disrupted ones. The evidence from the Northern Rivers, and from every comparable study of food systems under stress, is that those costs are far lower than the costs of not paying them.

For individuals, the practical form of systemic engagement is advocacy — knowing that your local, regional, state and national strategy are being developed, understanding what they emphasise and what they currently underweight, and making those views known to local councillors, state representatives and federal members. Food system decisions are made by governments that hear mostly from industry. They hear almost nothing from the households and communities who will live with the consequences.

The question again

So — what would you eat?

The question is not really about food. It is about what kind of relationship you have with the systems that sustain you — whether you participate in them or simply consume what they produce, whether you have built any capacity to adapt when they become unreliable, whether you know anyone who grows or catches or preserves things, whether you could feed your household for a week without a functioning supermarket and whether that week would be nourishing or desperate.

My household is further along than most, and genuinely not far enough. The research suggests that most Australian households are not far along at all — and for one in three, the question of what they will eat is not hypothetical but immediate, present, and already painful. Compounding pressure will not create food insecurity in Australia. It will deepen and widen an insecurity that is already here, already affecting households across every income level, and that our food systems — optimised for efficiency, dependent on long supply chains, and largely disconnected from the communities they serve — are not well structured to address.

The question is worth answering honestly. And then, while there is still time to act on the answer, worth doing something about it — at the level of your own household, your community, and the policy conversations that are shaping Australia’s food future right now.

There is a chair in the corner of my office that has no desk near it, no screen facing it, and nothing within easy reach. I sit in it several times a day — sometimes for two minutes, sometimes for ten — with no phone, no notebook, no agenda. I don’t meditate. I don’t try to solve anything or arrive anywhere in particular. I just sit, and let whatever is happening in my mind happen without direction or interference.

This is where most of my best ideas come from.

I mention this as someone who spent years as a university lecturer teaching students how to think — critical thinking, critical literacy, creative thinking, awareness of cognitive bias, the careful evaluation of evidence and argument, the study of various references and sources, etc. I have not abandoned any of that. Those skills matter more now, in an era of accelerating misinformation and disinformation, than they ever have. But I have come to understand something that my academic training did not prepare me for: that the quality of thinking depends, in ways that are not immediately obvious, on the quality of not thinking. The chair is not a break from the work. It is part of the work — and a very important one at that.

What your brain does when you leave it alone

(Picture by Kelly Sikema)

For most of the history of neuroscience, the brain at rest was considered the brain off duty. Resting data was collected primarily as a baseline — something to compare against the real activity happening when people were solving problems or paying attention to tasks. The assumption, rarely examined, was that a brain not directed at anything was a brain doing nothing useful.

That assumption turned out to be wrong in a way that reframes almost everything that follows from it.

When you stop directing your attention at a specific task, a network of brain regions becomes significantly more active, not less. Researchers eventually named it the default mode network — though for years before that, when they first noticed it activating during rest, they called it the task-negative network, which tells you something about how deeply the assumption of productive busyness was embedded in the field. Subsequent research has established that this network is central to some of the brain’s most consequential work: creative association, the generation of original ideas, memory consolidation, self-reflection, and the construction of mental narratives about the future. It is, in a meaningful sense, where insight lives.

The relationship between the default mode network and creativity is now sufficiently established that researchers describe highly creative people not as those who think harder or faster, but as those whose brains switch more fluidly between directed thinking and open, unstructured mind-wandering.

Originality does not surface under pressure or effort. It surfaces in the gaps — in the chair, on the walk, in the shower, in the middle of a conversation you weren’t trying to have. The brain needs those gaps the way the body needs sleep: not as absence, but as a different and necessary kind of activity.

This is what my non-thinking chair is for. Not rest in the passive sense, but the active, generative idleness that directed attention cannot replicate and that most of us have systematically eliminated from our days.

Niksen — the Dutch art of doing nothing

The Dutch have a word for what I do in my chair, though I arrived at the practice independently and only encountered the concept later. Niksen — derived from the Dutch word niks, meaning nothing — refers to doing nothing deliberately, or at least doing something with no purpose or outcome attached to it. Looking out a window. Sitting with a cup of tea and no particular thoughts. Letting the mind wander without trying to steer it anywhere.

In Dutch, the word was historically used as a mild pejorative. Its lexical cousin niksnut roughly translates as a layabout, someone who contributes nothing — which tells you something about how deeply even Dutch culture, for all its reputation for balance, was shaped by the same productivity bias that afflicts most of the modern world. In recent years, as research on burnout, stress and the neuroscience of rest has accumulated, the concept has been reframed. Niksen is not laziness. It is, as researchers are increasingly describing it, a form of cognitive maintenance — the mental equivalent of allowing soil to lie fallow so that it can recover its capacity to produce.

The formal research base specifically on niksen is still developing — the concept is recent enough and amorphous enough that dedicated studies are limited. What exists is a substantial body of evidence on rest, mind-wandering and unstructured mental time more broadly, which points consistently in the same direction: deliberate idleness reduces cortisol, restores cognitive resources, promotes neural plasticity, and creates the conditions in which the default mode network can do the work described above. A coaching study in the Netherlands found that people who practised niksen regularly reported decreased stress and increased happiness compared to those who did not.

It is worth distinguishing niksen from mindfulness, because they are often conflated and are actually quite different in their mechanisms. Mindfulness asks you to be present — fully aware of what is happening in the moment, attentive to sensation, thought and feeling as they arise. Niksen asks something closer to the opposite: to be absent, unaware, unattentive, to let the mind go where it goes without observation or guidance. Both have genuine value. Neither is a substitute for the other.

The activities many people find most restorative — surfing, running, gardening, crafting, listening to music, losing yourself in a novel — share something with both niksen and with each other: they suspend the ruminative, circling, self-referential thinking that exhausts us, whether through deliberate emptiness or through absorption so complete that everything else falls away. Most people already have some version of this practice in their lives. The problem is that they haven’t recognised it as one, and so haven’t protected or prioritised it — and something is now actively working to displace it. The difference with niqsen is that these activities still require something of you — a wave to catch, a page to turn, a rhythm to follow — whereas sitting idle requires nothing at all, which is precisely what makes it harder and, for the brain, differently valuable.

The thing that is eroding all of this

Here is the experience I suspect most people reading this will recognise: you are sitting somewhere, not doing anything in particular, and within a few seconds — rarely more — your hand moves toward your phone. Not because there is something specific you need to check or because you are expecting an important message. Simply because the stillness produced a faint discomfort, and the phone is the fastest available way to resolve it.

This reflex is not trivial. Researchers have a name for the underlying condition: rest intolerance — a psychological state characterised by negative feelings during unoccupied time, accompanied by an inability to simply be still without the intrusion of anxious or ruminative thinking. The smartphone has become the primary escape route from that discomfort, which means the discomfort itself is never examined, never resolved, simply bypassed — repeatedly, automatically, dozens of times each day. Some data suggests people check their phones an average of 58 times daily. In Australia, three in four people check social media before getting out of bed in the morning, and four in five check it again before going to sleep at night.

The neurological consequence is direct. The default mode network requires unstructured, screen-free time to activate properly. Every interruption — every check, scroll, brief diversion into a notification — displaces the mental conditions that creative and restorative thinking depend on. The brain that is perpetually available to external stimulation is a brain that never quite reaches the state where its most generative work happens. The insights don’t come. The restoration doesn’t occur. The capacity for stillness, unpractised, gradually atrophies.

What is being lost is not just productivity in any narrow sense. It is the capacity to dream, to imagine, to follow a thought somewhere unexpected, to be bored in the fertile way that boredom — properly tolerated — has always functioned. Children who are never allowed to be bored don’t learn to inhabit their own minds. Adults who fill every gap with a screen are in the same position, and the consequences accumulate in ways that are slow to become visible and hard to reverse.

Two minutes is enough

The most common response when people encounter ideas like these is a version of: I understand the value, but I don’t have the time or the headspace or the energy for it. This response, while understandable, misreads what the practice actually requires.

You do not need twenty minutes of morning meditation. You do not need silence, a retreat, a dedicated wellness routine, or any particular state of mind before you begin. You need a chair — or a bench, or a patch of grass, or a spot by a window — and the willingness to sit in mild discomfort for two minutes without reaching for your phone.That is the entire practice, at its most basic. The discomfort is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is the practice — the moment of choosing to remain still rather than escape into stimulation, which over time rebuilds the capacity for exactly the kind of unstructured mental time the brain needs.

The value compounds across a day rather than arriving in a single dedicated block. Two minutes between meetings. Five minutes after lunch. A few minutes in the car before going inside. None of these require time you don’t have. They require only the decision not to fill the available gaps with something else — which is, it turns out, a harder decision than it sounds, because the pull toward filling them is now very strong and very well-designed.

My chair is there because I made it a fixed point — a physical location that holds the intention when my own willpower doesn’t. Walking past it is a reminder. Sitting in it is almost automatic now, in the way that any repeated practice eventually becomes. The ideas that have emerged from it, including the one that led to this article, have been worth considerably more than the time they required.

Non-thinking enriches thinking

I want to be careful not to oversell this, because that would undermine the point. The chair is not magic. Niksen is not a productivity hack. The default mode network does not reliably deliver brilliant insights on demand. What it does, given the conditions it needs, is work — quietly, below the surface, on the problems and questions and connections that directed attention has been circling without resolving.

The critical thinking I spent years developing and teaching has not been replaced by any of this. The analytical tools, the habits of rigorous evaluation, the awareness of bias and the discipline of evidence — these remain essential, and in the current information environment, more essential than ever (actually you can read a piece I wrote about this here). What non-thinking adds is not a replacement for any of that but a layer beneath it: space for originality to surface, depth that effortful thinking alone cannot reach, and a quality of restoration that makes the directed thinking, when it returns, sharper and more generative than it would otherwise be.

The two practices need each other. The thinking person who never stops thinking is not thinking as well as they could. The chair is where I discovered that — and where, every day, I am still discovering it.

Sitting idle, doing nothing, just feels good. Not optimised, not intentional, not productive in any way that would satisfy a performance review — just good, in the ordinary human sense of the word. In times when everyone is too busy and has too little headspace, choosing to do nothing is its own quiet act of resistance. And it just so happens to be among the most generative things you can do with your time — but only if you allow it to achieve nothing at all.

So here you go, for whatever it is worth from someone who used to teach critical thinking for a living: you have permission to do nothing. Guilt-free. The brain will thank you later, in its own time, in its own way.

Imagine it is October 2026 and the world is in a worse place than it currently is: the Iran ceasefire that held through April has fractured; a second round of strikes has closed the Strait of Hormuz again just as El Niño begins delivering its worst drought conditions in two decades across South and Southeast Asia; urea prices that had already doubled since February have doubled again, leading to agriculture disruptions and food shortages (urea is the synthetic fertiliser that most of the world’s staple crops depend on). In Australia, the gaps on supermarket shelves that most people had only ever seen in footage from somewhere else start appearing in capital cities. The federal government announces emergency import arrangements.

This is one version of the next twelve months. Not a prediction. A possibility assembled from conditions already in motion, which is a different and more troubling thing.

On 1 April, Prime Minister Albanese delivered a rare national address — the kind previously reserved for the Global Financial Crisis and COVID — telling Australians that the months ahead “may not be easy” and urging them to conserve fuel. It was measured, carefully worded. In its restraint, it was more alarming than most people seemed to register.

(Picture by Mick Tsikas/AAPIMAGE)

The question his address carefully did not answer is the one this piece wants to sit with: how bad could it actually get in the coming 12 months?

The answer depends on two variables that are often collapsed into one: the severity of the shocks themselves, and the condition of the systems asked to absorb them. A given disruption can remain manageable in one context and become cascading failure in another. The difference lies in resilience — in margins, buffers, redundancy, trust, and the capacity to adapt under pressure.

The stressors are real, and they are converging

Roughly a fifth of global oil supply moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Any prolonged disruption there is not only an energy problem. Modern agriculture depends on synthetic fertiliser, and synthetic fertiliser depends heavily on natural gas. When gas flows tighten and fertiliser prices spike, the problem moves upstream of supermarket shelves and into planting decisions, crop yields and future food prices. Add the possibility of a strong El Niño driving drought across grain-producing regions and lifting the price of rice, sugar and food oils, and the issue is no longer a single shock. It is multiple shocks landing on the same system at once.

Yet the food system was already fragile. It has been optimised for efficiency rather than resilience: just-in-time logistics, concentrated processing, dependence on a narrow range of suppliers and inputs. Those arrangements make food cheaper in stable conditions. Under stress, they become channels through which disruption spreads.

None of these stressors are running in sequence. They are running simultaneously, each reducing the margin available to absorb the others.

The brittleness underneath

Whether those stressors produce manageable disruption or something more serious depends entirely on what they land on. And the systems they are landing on are, in several important respects, more fragile than they appear.

Financial systems are carrying sovereign debt loads that leave many governments with less room to respond than they had in previous crises. The familiar shock absorbers — fiscal stimulus, cheap money, coordinated international action — are less available than they once were. Meanwhile, the multilateral architecture that historically helped turn crises into managed disruptions — the UN, IMF, WTO, World Bank etc — is operating on a weaker political substrate. Strategic rivalry, sanctions, trade fragmentation and declining trust have all eroded the machinery of collective response. If the next serious crisis requires coordination, it will arrive at a moment when the table around which that coordination would happen is more fractured than at any point in decades.

There is also a quieter erosion beneath the visible one. Anxiety around economic insecurity and AI-driven job disruption is already weakening confidence inside organisations and households. That does not need to produce mass unemployment to matter, but only to create enough unaddressed anxiety at the workplace level to erode the trust and civic participation that resilient societies draw on during crises. Forty percent of workers globally now report concern about AI-driven job loss. Sixty-two percent say their leaders are underestimating the psychological impact. This is a real-time erosion of institutional trust happening in workplaces everywhere, quietly, underneath the larger disruptions.

Then there is the brittleness hardest to quantify and most consequential: the erosion of the shared systems that allow people to respond collectively at all. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that people globally no longer share the same information sources, authorities, or even the basic validity of disagreement itself. The Global Peace Index reports that indicators of social fragility are at their highest levels since the end of World War II — and the mechanisms societies normally use to absorb shocks are operating on a weaker substrate than at any point in recent memory. In Australia, only 33 per cent of adults believe the federal government can be trusted to do the right thing by the Australian people all or most of the time, down from 44 per cent in 2021. This is worth noting because societies do not absorb crises through infrastructure alone. They absorb them through trust, through participation, through the everyday belief that collective life is still broadly workable. When that belief has already begun to fray, larger disruptions hit harder.

There is a compounding factor that material analysis tends to undercount: the capacity to make good decisions deteriorates precisely when good decisions matter most. Under sustained pressure, the information environment degrades alongside everything else — misinformation spreads more easily, authoritative sources are trusted less, and the shared factual ground that collective response depends on becomes contested. In disaster and conflict settings, the collapse of reliable information is itself one of the primary amplifiers of harm, turning manageable disruption into cascading failure by preventing the coordinated responses that would otherwise slow it (I’ve explored how to navigating uncertainty and misinformation in another piece).

In Australia, this brittleness is not abstract. In April 2025, before the current conflict began, thirty-five percent of Australian adults already described it as difficult or very difficult to get by on their current income — the highest figure since 2012. One in seven Australians — 3.7 million people — are currently living below the poverty line. One in four low-income renters is spending more than half their income on rent. One in three households is already experiencing food insecurity: the Foodbank Hunger Report 2025 found 3.5 million households regularly facing the question of what, if anything, goes on the table at the next meal, with sixty-one percent of those severely affected — compromising on nutrition, skipping meals, or going entire days without eating. Forty-one percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households report food insecurity. Australia may produce more food than it consumes, but that does not make households immune to disruptions in fertiliser, freight, packaging, fuel, pricing and distribution.

The brittleness of Australian business is no less real. Over 7,400 companies entered external administration by the end of 2024, a 47 per cent increase on the previous year. Projections suggest up to 14,000 companies could enter external administration in the current financial year — the highest since records began. These are not marginal or poorly run enterprises disappearing from the fringes. Small and medium businesses account for the overwhelming majority of insolvencies, with 83 per cent holding assets of $100,000 or less and 82 per cent employing fewer than 20 staff — the businesses that form the connective tissue of local economies, employ neighbours, and anchor regional communities. Beneath the insolvency figures sits a wider fragility: nearly 80 per cent of Australian small and medium businesses reported cash flow impacts over the past year, and between 15 and 27 per cent hold minimal or no cash buffer at all, well short of the three to six months of operating expenses that financial advisers consider a basic threshold of resilience. A business carrying no buffer does not need a severe shock to fail. It needs one more thing to move against it — a delayed payment, a cost increase, a week of lost revenue — at a moment when it has nothing left to absorb it with.

This is what stress looks like before a major external shock arrives. A system carrying this much pre-existing strain does not need an extreme trigger to tip into serious difficulty — it needs only a moderately bad shock arriving at the wrong moment, into a population with depleted capacity to absorb it.

The confluence of risks

The first danger in such a moment is disorientation.

Modern societies depend on a background promise that essentials will remain available and that authorities broadly understand the scale of the problem. Once that promise begins to wobble, behaviour changes quickly. Households buy more than they need. Businesses protect stock. Farmers delay decisions. Freight operators become selective about which routes and cargo they will take on. Governments reach for emergency powers while trying to avoid the language of emergency. Trust, once unsettled, becomes part of the supply-chain problem.

The danger is a confluence of pressures that prevents the usual recovery mechanisms from activating. The scenario becomes less cinematic than cumulative. Every system you reach for to stabilise one problem is already under strain from something else. A medium-sized logistics or construction business with margins already compressed by energy costs, delayed supplies and insurance increases does not need a spectacular crisis to fail. Multiply that across the hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses that form the connective tissue of the Australian economy, and the fragility becomes visible at scale.

Australia often speaks as though distance protects us. In some respects, it does. In others, it magnifies dependence. We remain tied to global flows of fuel, fertiliser, chemicals, finance, medicines, shipping and public trust. Wealth does not exempt a country from material constraints. It changes how those constraints arrive and who absorbs them first.

And they would not be absorbed evenly. Those with savings, storage space, secure housing, flexible work and strong local ties would cope very differently from those already living week to week. The first impacts would be felt hardest by people spending most of their income on food, rent, transport and energy; by people with chronic illness or disability; by carers; by regional communities; by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households already facing higher food insecurity; and by those for whom one interrupted week is enough to destabilise an entire month. Scarcity is never only about goods. It is about unequal exposure.

So how worried should we be?

More than the dominant social mood currently reflects.

The honest answer is still that we do not know how bad it will get. That uncertainty is real, and it is part of the problem. The conditions that would produce serious but manageable disruption and the conditions that would produce something more severe are not yet clearly distinguishable from where we stand. What can be said is that the stressors are concurrent, the brittleness is real, the buffers are thinner than most people assume, and the systems meant to cushion shocks are weaker than they appear.

What makes compounding disruption genuinely different from a single severe shock is not only how systems fail but how — and whether — they recover. Systems that degrade together do not recover together, and the sequence of recovery matters as much as the original disruption did. Some businesses that close during a compounding event would have survived a single pressure with room to spare; they do not reopen when conditions improve. Some households that exhaust their reserves and social capital during a prolonged squeeze do not rebuild them on the same timeline as the economy. Preparing for compounding pressure is not preparing to endure a difficult period and return to what came before. It may be preparing for a new baseline.

That does not justify panic, but it does rule out passivity.

The most protective response — at every level — is to build genuine resilience before it is needed: financial reserves where possible, redundancy in critical dependencies, and above all the social infrastructure that evidence consistently shows matters most when systems fail. Knowing your neighbours well enough to ask for help and to offer it. Having honest conversations with family and friends about what you would each do if things became significantly harder. Belonging to networks — a street, a faith community, a sporting club, a local resilience group — where reciprocal support is already normal rather than something that has to be invented under pressure.

People who face acute uncertainty inside a web of relationships they trust fare measurably better — in health outcomes, in decision quality, in the capacity to keep functioning — than those facing the same conditions in isolation. The social fabric is not soft infrastructure. In a period of converging disruptions, it is the infrastructure that holds everything else up.

Because the deepest challenge here is cultural. Can we learn to discuss deterioration without denial and without melodrama? Can we admit that advanced societies are not immune to shortages, only less accustomed to them? Can we stop treating fragility as somebody else’s story?

How bad could it get? Bad enough that many Australians would experience, perhaps for the first time, a loss of confidence in the everyday systems that organise life. Bad enough that inequality would sharpen quickly into visible harm. Bad enough that communities with strong local ties would cope far better than those without them.

That still falls short of total collapse. Reality is usually less cinematic and more uneven than that. Systems stagger, improvise, partially recover, then degrade again. Some institutions fail. Others surprise us. People behave selfishly and generously, often in the same week. A country can remain recognisably itself while becoming harsher, more brittle and less governable. Perhaps that is the more realistic concern: not one spectacular disaster, but a cumulative thinning of reliability — fewer buffers, higher costs, longer delays, rougher politics, more frequent emergencies, and more households living close to the edge.

A society can absorb a great deal of damage before it names what is happening. It can live for years in a state of managed unravelling.

The useful question is no longer whether such a future is possible, but whether we will keep waiting for certainty before preparing for what is already plausible.

When presence changes the room

Last week, I wrote about the limits of AI in moments that require human judgement, moral seriousness and real-time orientation. This piece continues that line of thought from the other side. If AI reveals something about the limits of simulated understanding, effective presence points to one of the human capacities that matters most beyond those limits.

More than presence

Effective presence is more than being physically present. It is more than paying attention. It is more than using the right interpersonal techniques. It is the capacity to be genuinely with someone in a way they can actually feel. In difficult moments, that quality can change what becomes possible.

Presence and effective presence are not quite the same thing. Presence can simply mean being there: in the room, attentive, composed, aware. Effective presence goes further. It is presence that has consequence. It helps another person feel met. It steadies a difficult moment. It creates the conditions for clearer thinking, deeper trust, or wiser action.

Someone can be calm, skilled and outwardly attentive, while still being effectively absent. We have all encountered this. A person says the right things, asks the right questions, performs the expected behaviours, yet something essential is missing. You do not feel encountered. You feel managed, processed, or handled.

That is why effective presence is distinct from charisma, polish or professional competence. It is not a performance. It is creating spaciousness between people for a bond to emerge.

(credit: Simon Wilkes)

The dimensions of effective presence

One reason this is difficult to name is that it operates on several levels at once.

The first is attentional presence. This is the most commonly discussed form. Are you actually listening, or merely waiting for your turn to speak? Are you here with the person or the group, or quietly composing your next intervention? Yet even this is often reduced to technique: eye contact, reflective phrasing, putting the phone away. Those things may help, but they are not the heart of it. Without a deeper orientation, they quickly feel hollow.

The second is relational presence. This goes deeper. It is whether the other person feels they are being encountered as a person rather than as a role, a problem, or an audience. This matters enormously in leadership, crisis, facilitation and care. People can often tell the difference between being genuinely met and being professionally processed.

The third is what might be called embodied or existential presence. This is harder to describe, but recognisable in practice. It is whether you are actually inhabiting the moment, or managing it from some slight internal distance. A great deal of professional life trains the second. It produces people who are competent, articulate and highly functional, but slightly elsewhere, always monitoring, always managing, never quite surrendered to the reality of the moment.

These dimensions overlap, but together they point to something important: effective presence is not just about where your attention goes. It is about how fully you are here.

Why it matters

In situations of uncertainty, distress or conflict, people often need more than information, instruction or procedural competence. They need to feel that someone is genuinely with them.

This matters in obvious places such as emergency response, care, mediation and leadership under pressure. But it also matters in many ordinary settings: workplaces, classrooms, meetings, families, communities. In each of these, the quality of human presence affects what can be said, what can be heard, and how much reality people can bear together.

I have become more aware that some of the contexts in which I am most able to embody effective presence are when I am facilitating workshops, holding difficult conversations, or delivering training and lectures. In those settings, the task is not simply to communicate content or move through a process but to also help create a kind of collective presence in the room: a shared attentiveness and seriousness that allows people to become more fully present to one another and to the topic itself.

At its best, this feels less like performing in front of a group and more like helping to create the conditions for something real to happen. People listen differently. They speak with greater honesty. The room becomes less fragmented and more capable of depth. In that sense, effective presence is not only individual. A facilitator or leader can sometimes help a group become more present as a group.

The paradox of effectiveness

There is a tension here worth noting. Presence and effectiveness can pull against each other.

A facilitator who is too attached to the outcome may lose the quality of attention that would actually help the group get there. A leader focused on solving the problem may stop genuinely meeting the people involved in it. A professional trained to manage difficult situations may become so focused on doing the role well that they cease to inhabit the encounter fully.

This is one of the paradoxes of human interaction: some of the most effective moments arise when we loosen our grip on effectiveness as immediate control. In difficult conversations especially, movement often comes from being willing to stay with uncertainty rather than force resolution too quickly.

That does not mean abandoning structure, purpose or skill. It means recognising that some forms of effectiveness are indirect. They arise through the quality of presence we bring to the moment.

How it is cultivated

Effective presence cannot be faked, but it can be cultivated.

The first step is often to notice how often we have already left the moment. We drift into planning, impression management, anxiety, self-monitoring, quiet attempts to control where the interaction is going or simply absent-minded. Much of the discipline of presence lies in recognising these habitual forms of absence and returning to the unfolding situation, moment by moment.

It also requires a shift in how we understand attention. Attention is not just a set of behaviours. It is a kind of receptivity. It involves allowing another person or situation to genuinely register, rather than merely scanning it for cues, opportunities or problems to solve.

There is also an embodied dimension. It is harder to remain genuinely available when one is rushed, defended, overloaded or internally chaotic. Meeting one’s own needs in the moment or accepting whatever situation just as it is, allows to let go of distractions. Practices that help us return to the body, regulate ourselves, and tolerate uncertainty can matter greatly here - or sometimes just making sure we’re not that hungry that we will need to rush for a meal! For different people this may involve meditation, reflective practice, supervision, time in nature, breath work, therapy, journalling, or simply learning to slow down enough to notice what is actually happening.

Most importantly, effective presence grows when we learn to encounter others less as functions and more as persons. That sounds simple, but it is not. Much of modern professional life encourages us to categorise quickly, respond efficiently and remain subtly instrumental (isn’t one of the first question we ask a stranger “what do you do do?”). Effective presence asks more of us. It asks us to meet another human being without reducing them too quickly to a type, a task, or a problem.

An old insight, repeatedly rediscovered

This capacity appears across many traditions under different names. Nursing and palliative care speak of “being with”. Otto Scharmer writes of “presencing”. Zen points towards something similar in the idea of beginner’s mind, which involves meeting the moment with openness, receptivity and less reliance on fixed assumptions. Good therapists know that the therapeutic relationship depends on more than technique alone.

These traditions differ, but they are circling the same insight: the quality of our presence matters, and it matters in ways that are often deeper than our culture knows how to measure.

Sense-checking

Describing effective presence precisely is difficult. It is not only an idea or a skill. It is more like a felt spaciousness in the moment, a quality of contact that can be hard to define but easy to recognise when it is there.

So I am sense-checking here. How does this resonate with you?

Read more about my work here: www.jeanrenouf.com

When the task changes

A few days ago I responded to a building fire at two o’clock in the morning. Eighteen firefighters were on scene, and we worked through the night until the fire was extinguished. Unfortunately by then the building was gone. The owner was standing outside in the dark. A woman in her seventies, physically composed but clearly disoriented in the way people often are when something irreversible has just happened and the implications have not yet fully registered.

From an operational perspective, everything that could be done had been done.

I then walked over, introduced myself, and asked her name. We spoke for a few minutes and I learnt that it was her birthday, and that detail landed with a certain weight. She then said, almost in passing, that the burning down was perhaps a form of renewal. I was deeply touched by such a perspective. As we spoke, her breathing slowed and her attention seemed to settle, not in the sense that anything was resolved, but in the sense that the moment became more stable and inhabitable, with a slight shift from disorientation towards something she could begin to take in.

That interaction did not change the outcome. The house was still gone. But it changed the situation in a way that felt more significant than anything else I did that night.

Experiences like this are not unusual in disaster work, but they are instructive, because they make visible a shift that is otherwise easy to miss. When systems are functioning, the task is largely technical, and competence is measured by the ability to apply the right procedure at the right time. When those systems fail or are exceeded, the task becomes less about intervention and more about orientation — about recognising what is actually happening, in context, and responding in a way that fits the situation as it is rather than as it is assumed to be.

I have been thinking about this in parallel with my use of AI.

(this picture is not from the actual incident)

Representation and orientation

I rely on it regularly for writing, research, structuring ideas, or creating images, and in many contexts it is genuinely useful, particularly where the problem is well-defined and the parameters are clear. Over time, however, a limitation becomes apparent, which is not so much about accuracy as about orientation. AI can produce responses that are coherent and relevant to the prompt, but it does so by operating on representations of a situation rather than being situated within it, which means that it can generate plausible answers without registering what is actually at stake.

In stable conditions, this distinction has limited consequences. Where feedback loops are clear and problems are bounded, this form of ‘intelligence’ performs well and can be (somewhat) relied upon.

It becomes more consequential under different conditions, particularly where the situation itself is still forming, where multiple dynamics are interacting, or where people are trying to make sense of something that has just disrupted their assumptions. In those moments, the task is not to generate answers, but to remain oriented to what is unfolding, which requires a form of attention that is both perceptual and relational, and which cannot be reduced to pattern recognition or response generation. It involves registering subtle shifts in context, emotion, and meaning as they emerge, and adjusting one’s response accordingly, something still profoundly human. Whether AI systems will eventually replicate that capacity in any meaningful sense remains genuinely open. For now, the gap is real and consequential.

The context we are moving into makes this distinction nonetheless very relevant. Climate disruption is increasing the frequency of events that do not fit established expectations, and these events rarely occur in isolation; they overlap, interact, and evolve while responses are still underway. At the same time, geopolitical and economic conditions are becoming less predictable, which further reduces the reliability of inherited frameworks. AI is part of this landscape. It accelerates the production of information and the pace of decision-making, but it also increases the volume of signals that need to be interpreted and can obscure the underlying dynamics that matter. Under these conditions, the difficulty is not simply technical. It becomes harder to read situations, to distinguish signal from noise, and to respond in ways that are grounded rather than reactive.

This is where the limitation becomes visible. AI can assist with processing and generating responses, but it cannot determine what matters in a situation where meaning is still emerging, nor can it stand in relation to another person whose world has just shifted and respond in a way that stabilises that moment.

The woman standing outside the remaining of her house did not require analysis or interpretation. What mattered was that someone noticed her, recognised her as a person in that moment, and remained present long enough for the situation to settle slightly.

What this means for leadership under disruption

I have watched leaders lose situations not because they lacked information or capability, but because they could not stay oriented when the situation stopped resembling anything familiar. The response fragments — sometimes gradually, sometimes dramatically — as people begin managing their own disorientation rather than the situation in front of them. What holds a response together in those moments is rarely technical. It is the capacity to remain present to what is actually unfolding, and to hold enough stability for others to begin making sense of it too.

For people in leadership roles, this has practical implications. In disrupted conditions, the expectation that leaders will provide clear answers becomes less realistic and, at times, counterproductive. What becomes more important is the capacity to stay oriented, to recognise when situations exceed existing frameworks, and to hold enough stability for others to begin making sense of what is unfolding. These are not capabilities most organisations explicitly develop, but they are often what determines whether a response holds or fragments under pressure.

* * *

The question is whether we are treating that capacity as incidental, or recognising it as something that will increasingly sit at the centre of how we respond when things stop working as expected. At present, most systems assume it will be there without explicitly cultivating it.

That night, the most important thing I did was walk over, ask a woman her name, and stay with her for a few minutes while the reality of what had happened began to take shape. Nothing about that scales easily, and it is not something that can be optimised in the usual sense, but it remains central to how people navigate disruption when it occurs.

It however points towards a form of effective presence in leadership that is not typically defined or developed explicitly, and which I will examine in more detail in a subsequent piece.

Over the past few years, many of the leaders I work with have asked a similar question. A geopolitical crisis appears in the news, markets react, supply chains shift, and uncertainty increases, yet for organisations operating in relatively stable countries such as Australia it is often unclear how seriously these events should be taken or what they might mean in practice. The current conflict involving Iran has prompted this conversation again. While the immediate focus is understandably on the geopolitical dimension of the war, the situation also raises a broader question about how global shocks propagate through interconnected systems and eventually affect organisations that initially seem far removed from the crisis itself.

Crises are still commonly discussed as if they were isolated events. A war unfolds in one region, a pandemic spreads across borders, a financial disruption affects markets, or a disaster damages a particular community. Yet recent experience increasingly suggests that many modern disruptions behave less like discrete incidents and more like system shocks. Because global systems are tightly interconnected, disturbances rarely remain confined to their point of origin. Instead, they move across energy markets, supply chains, health systems, political relationships, and the everyday functioning of organisations and communities.

COVID provided a clear illustration of this dynamic. What began as a public health emergency quickly affected global logistics, labour markets, government policy, economic stability, and the psychological environment in which people lived and worked. The lesson was not simply that a pandemic could disrupt societies, but that disruptions can propagate rapidly through the complex networks that underpin modern life.

The war in Iran illustrates a similar pattern. Although it is fundamentally a geopolitical conflict, its implications extend into multiple systems that shape economic and organisational stability. One of the most immediate ripple effects concerns energy markets. Tensions affecting major oil and gas producing regions can influence global energy prices, which in turn affect transport costs, food prices, and the broader cost of living. Organisations dependent on logistics, travel, or energy-intensive production already experience these pressures indirectly through higher operating costs and increased economic uncertainty.

Supply chains represent another pathway through which system shocks propagate. Rising insurance costs, transport disruption, or instability affecting shipping routes can alter the flow of goods and materials across international markets. Businesses that rely on predictable delivery schedules may encounter delays, shortages, or increased costs. These disruptions rarely appear dramatic in isolation, yet their cumulative effect can alter planning horizons and operational decisions across industries.

Even sectors that appear unrelated to geopolitical tensions can feel indirect consequences. One example concerns helium, a critical resource used in MRI machines for medical imaging. Much of the world’s helium supply is produced as a by-product of natural gas extraction, including in parts of the Middle East connected to global shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz. When conflict disrupts energy production or threatens maritime transport through the strait, the export of gas and associated by-products such as helium can be affected. Over time, these disruptions may constrain the availability of MRI capacity in some health systems, potentially delaying certain diagnostic screenings and creating downstream implications for public health.

At the geopolitical level, conflicts also influence the strategic calculations of other governments observing the situation. For example, a prolonged crisis in the Middle East may reshape energy markets in ways that benefit major producers such as Russia, strengthening its revenues and potentially reinforcing its capacity to sustain the war in Ukraine. At the same time, the diversion of diplomatic attention and military resources toward the Middle East may alter how other powers interpret the balance of global priorities. China, for instance, may reassess the strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific, including the degree to which international responses to territorial disputes might constrain or enable its actions regarding Taiwan. None of these developments can be predicted with certainty, yet they illustrate how geopolitical conflicts can generate ripple effects across the wider international system.

For organisations, the consequences of system shocks extend beyond markets and political developments. They also shape the psychological climate in which people work. When crises accumulate over time, whether through pandemics, climate disasters, geopolitical tensions, or economic instability, individuals often experience a growing sense of uncertainty and fatigue. Disinformation and competing narratives can further complicate people’s attempts to interpret events, while the constant flow of global news contributes to what might be described as a form of collective cognitive load.

Inside organisations, this cognitive environment can have subtle but real consequences. Teams may find it harder to maintain focus, attention may become fragmented, and employees may carry a background sense of instability about the wider environment in which they are working. Even when a crisis appears geographically distant, the atmosphere it creates can still influence how people interpret risk, security, and the future.

One of the challenges for leadership in these circumstances is the tendency to treat global disruptions as distant events that do not require organisational attention. In relatively stable societies such as Australia, geopolitical conflicts can sometimes appear remote from everyday operations. Yet the interconnected nature of modern systems means that global shocks often reach organisations indirectly through economic pressures, operational disruptions, or changes in the broader environment.

This is where sensemaking becomes an important leadership function. Sensemaking involves helping people interpret complex and uncertain situations. It does not require leaders to predict the future or provide definitive answers. Rather, it involves acknowledging uncertainty, situating events within a broader context, and helping teams understand how external developments may relate to their work and organisational environment.

In the absence of this shared interpretation, individuals often attempt to make sense of events on their own through fragmented information sources, which can increase confusion and speculation. Leaders who engage in sensemaking help stabilise their organisations by providing context and clarity, even when the full implications of a situation remain uncertain.

Responding to system shocks therefore requires more than crisis response plans. It calls for a broader leadership mindset oriented toward resilience. Resilience, in this context, is not simply the capacity to recover from disruption, but the ability to operate effectively in environments where disruptions are likely to regularly occur and interact with one another.

Several practical implications follow from this perspective.

First, leaders increasingly need to interpret events systemically rather than in isolation. Understanding how shocks propagate through interconnected systems helps organisations recognise potential ripple effects before they become operational problems.

Second, organisations must remain attentive to the human dimension of cascading disruptions. Recognising the cognitive and emotional pressures associated with persistent uncertainty can help leaders support their teams through clear communication and realistic expectations.

Third, resilience needs to be embedded in organisational thinking and design. This includes examining supply chain dependencies, operational flexibility, and decision-making processes in environments where stability cannot be assumed anymore.

Global disruptions will continue to occur, whether through geopolitical conflicts, climate events, economic instability, or technological change. In a tightly interconnected world, these shocks will increasingly interact with one another and produce ripple effects that reach far beyond their original context.

For many organisations, the effects of these disruptions appear gradually rather than dramatically. They emerge through rising costs, shifting markets, distracted teams, or the quiet uncertainty that accompanies an unpredictable environment. The question worth asking is therefore not only what is happening in the world, but where the ripple effects may already be appearing within our own organisations and communities, and where greater awareness, clearer communication, or stronger support might already be needed today.

Over the past year, I have occasionally found myself thinking about where the world might be heading over the next decade. The return of Donald Trump to the White House, combined with accelerating geopolitical tensions and the deepening climate crisis, has created a sense that several major systems are shifting at once. None of this is entirely new, yet the pace and interaction of these developments make the coming years feel unusually uncertain.

Trying to imagine the next ten years is obviously speculative. Forecasts are often wrong, and the future rarely unfolds in a straight line. Still, it can be useful to step back and consider the broad dynamics shaping the global environment in which organisations, communities, and governments operate.

Several trends seem particularly important.

Economic uncertainty and structural shifts

In the short term, policies such as tax cuts and deregulation could give the US economy a temporary boost. Yet the longer-term outlook appears more complicated. Rising public debt, growing trade tensions, and structural shifts in global supply chains could create new forms of instability. Trade between the United States and China has already begun to fragment, and further decoupling would likely raise costs for consumers and businesses alike.

At the same time, automation and artificial intelligence are reshaping labour markets, often in ways that deepen existing inequalities. In many advanced economies, wealth continues to concentrate at the top while working-class communities face economic pressures and job displacement. These trends raise broader questions about the future of the dollar’s global dominance and the stability of the economic system that has underpinned globalisation for decades.

Political polarisation and social tension

Another defining feature of the current moment is the intensity of political polarisation, particularly in the United States. Cultural and ideological divisions appear deeper than at any time in recent decades. Debates around voting rights, the courts, and federal authority have the potential to reshape the balance of power within American institutions.

Some analysts have even begun discussing scenarios in which certain US states push for greater autonomy or pursue alternative political arrangements. Whether such developments materialise or not, the level of internal tension suggests that political contestation in the United States may become more volatile in the years ahead.

Because American political culture has such a strong global influence, these divisions are unlikely to remain confined within US borders. The broader “culture war” dynamic increasingly echoes across other countries, with political movements aligning themselves along competing visions of liberal democracy, nationalist populism, or alternative governance models.

Climate pressures intensifying

Alongside these geopolitical and political shifts, the climate crisis continues to deepen. Wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and water scarcity are already affecting communities across the world, including here in Australia.

If major emitters step back from international climate commitments, global mitigation efforts will become even more difficult. Some regions and states may continue to pursue ambitious climate policies, yet without coordinated national and international action, the costs of adaptation are likely to rise sharply and unevenly.

In practical terms, this means increasing pressure on food systems, infrastructure, insurance markets, and public finances.

A changing global order

Perhaps the most significant transformation may occur at the level of global power structures. If the United States reduces its international engagement, other powers will inevitably attempt to fill the space.

Russia and China are already expanding their influence across parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In Europe, concerns persist about whether the European Union could develop a coherent security structure without the long-standing support of the United States. NATO itself may face new strains in such a scenario.

Meanwhile, China’s economic and technological ambitions continue to grow. Initiatives such as the expansion of BRICS+ and the development of alternative financial and trade arrangements suggest that a more multipolar global system may gradually emerge. In such a world, competing political and economic models would coexist rather than being organised around a single dominant order.

Technology, power, and surveillance

Another dimension that is likely to shape the coming decade is the rapid development of artificial intelligence and digital surveillance technologies.

Both governments and corporations now possess unprecedented capabilities to collect and analyse data. These tools have the potential to improve governance, economic productivity, and security. Yet they also raise profound questions about privacy, accountability, and the future of democratic institutions.

Different political systems may adopt these technologies in very different ways. China, for example, has already integrated AI into aspects of governance, economic planning, and national security. The extent to which other countries follow similar paths will significantly influence the relationship between technology and political power in the decades ahead.

Living with uncertainty

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that the coming years could be marked by significant turbulence. Economic shifts, geopolitical rivalries, climate pressures, and technological change are unfolding simultaneously, often reinforcing one another.

It is impossible to know exactly how these trends will evolve. History is full of moments that seemed decisive but later turned out to be transitional. It is also possible that political miscalculations or overreach by powerful actors could accelerate unexpected shifts.

What seems increasingly clear, however, is that uncertainty itself will remain a defining feature of the global environment.

For individuals, organisations, and communities, this raises an important question. Rather than trying to predict every disruption, how can we develop the capacity to navigate them?

One answer lies in strengthening resilience, understood not simply as a response to crisis, but as an ongoing capability grounded in leadership, relationships, and systems. This may take the form of a greater willingness to engage with uncertainty rather than assume stability, stronger local networks, and more robust institutions.

The future is rarely predetermined. Yet the choices societies make about cooperation, governance, and resilience will shape how the coming disruptions unfold.