Energy security is now inseparable from national security. Australia has options, but we’re not taking them

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Just as the war on Iran dents oil production, drives up petrol prices and ricochets around the global economy, Thursday’s fire at the Geelong oil refinery causes even more domestic pain. The disturbing energy vista only heightens the need for a far faster transition to renewables and widespread electrification.

The fragility of fossil fuel supply lines and our reliance on them is now obvious, yet the newly released defence strategy downplays the strategic consequences of Australia’s fossil fuel dependence. The strategy fails to fully recognise how Australia’s expanding coal and gas exports are perpetuating a cycle of fossil fuel addiction, undermining our long-term security and claims to regional leadership.

Australia faces a profoundly altered security environment, shaped by the convergence of climate disruption and risks of nuclear escalation, but the defence strategy by the government flinches from the strategic clarity we urgently need. Focusing on the immediate period and current preoccupations and downplaying bigger threats in the future is poor strategic thinking. In reality, this is not a strategy. Rather, as so often before, it is a short-term tactical response to current events.

Many Pacific and Asian partners have long described climate change as their central security threat. But it has been sidelined by our government, yet again. What is missing is an acceptance that extreme climate impacts, geopolitical tension,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald