Australia should look to Norway for ways to build national resilience
Australia should look to Norway for ways to build national resilience
As Australia identifies national resilience and civil preparedness as key to national defence, it should learn from Norway, which has been living those concepts for decades.
For Norway, preparedness extends well beyond its armed forces. Civilian and military planning is connected. Municipalities and critical sectors prepare for crises, while households are advised to be able to manage for a week if essential services such as electricity, water, telecommunications or payment systems are disrupted.
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy places greater emphasis on national resilience, civil preparedness and a whole-of-nation approach. A parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s preparedness, launched in July, reinforces this. The opportunity is to better align government, industry, institutions and the public within a coherent national framework.
Australia’s geography, history and circumstances differ from Norway’s, but it can study the Norwegian experience and learn from it.
A founding member of NATO, Norway shares a border with Russia along the strategically important Kola Peninsula, home to Russia’s Northern Fleet and much of its sea-based nuclear capability. For Norway, strategic competition is not an occasional crisis but an enduring condition.
Its contemporary preparedness system has not been tested by an attack from a major power. But preparedness is a mindset.
Norway’s total-defence approach makes resilience a shared responsibility across government, industry, local authorities and the public. Citizens are not just recipients of government assistance after a crisis, but participants in preparedness before a crisis happens.
The recommendation that Norwegian households be capable of managing for one week illustrates the point. They build basic preparedness for disruptions caused by extreme weather, pandemics or accidents in the same way as they do for cyberattacks, sabotage or conflict. Whatever the cause of the disruption, the likely consequences are loss of power, communications, transport, supplies and access to essential services.
In this sense, Australians are no strangers to resilience. Bushfires, floods, cyclones and Covid-19 have repeatedly required communities to absorb disruption and look after one another. And yet, there was an extraordinary rush for basic sanitary items during the Covid-19 pandemic. They were hardly strategic commodities, but the episode demonstrated how quickly uncertainty and inadequate information can distort public behaviour and supply.
The public needs better awareness and modest preparation. It should know what to expect and what it can reasonably do before assistance arrives. This also allows government resources to be directed towards those who need them most.
Civil-military planning is part of the solution.
Norway makes that cooperation systematic. Its 2025 Total Preparedness White Paper provides for preparedness councils at municipal, regional and critical-sector levels, bringing government, businesses and voluntary organisations together to plan, manage crises and exercise. The Total Defence Year 2026 effort takes this further through a program of civil-military and cross-sector activities. One initiative, Norway Exercises, provides municipalities with crisis and wartime scenarios that can also be used by businesses and voluntary organisations to exercise their own responsibilities. These are practices Australia could adapt to better connect its existing resilience arrangements.
Australia already understands resilience. It now needs to bring those experiences together as part of a broader national approach.
We must also view resilience as not just recovering from disruption but preserving national decision-making capacity during the disruption. Norway will demonstrate this approach in September through Total Defence Exercise 2026.
The exercise will test Norway’s National Preparedness System in a scenario in the country faces the threat of war. This includes testing whether authorities can make effective decisions while protecting the civilian population and maintaining critical societal functions. This reflects Norway’s first National Security Strategy, published in 2025. The strategy identifies preserving national freedom of action, including the ability to make its own decisions in crisis and war, as its most vital security interest.
The challenge now is turning Australia’s national resilience and civil preparedness ambitions into clearly defined responsibilities, reasonable expectations and familiar habits.
Australia’s parliamentary inquiry into preparedness would benefit from studying Norway. Norwegians helped build Australia’s post-war prosperity; their experience may now help strengthen our national resilience.
About Author
