We've got to spend to save our communities

Fine by me, but it's worth noting that the only reason the military has any spare capacity is that it's just about the only part of the Australian government that hasn't been thrown into the hands of consultants or budget cuts. Not even the Morrison government has felt able to award regiments to marginal electorates or fill vacancies among the generals with unsuccessful Liberal candidates and free-market zealots from the Institute of Public Affairs. In the army, and almost nowhere else, we accept that you can't pull together all the expertise you need on the actual day.

We know, too, that in the event of war we'll need a larger army quickly, and we handle that by organising and paying reserves - people who train a couple of times a year and stand ready to step up. That's a model we could certainly use to staff our natural disaster workforce. Relatedly, if we have the money to buy tanks to be used once a century (if that), then we can afford a couple of dozen water-bombing planes for bushfires, even if they won't be used every year.

The Labor Party is proposing assembling some standing infrastructure funding to cope with natural disasters. More specifically, it's proposing actually using some of the hypothetical $200 million a year that the government promised in 2019 but hasn't spent. Labor says it will work with state and local governments on community resilience projects such as flood levees, cyclone shelters, firebreaks, and telecommunications improvements.

If it works closely with local communities this will certainly help, but I do wish it had gone that little bit further and said it would also fund a few public servants who'd have the chance to build experience and guide our adaptations. That is, assuming the public servants listen to the communities who know the answers - even now, at both the state and federal level, the arrogance of the bureaucrats is at an all-time high. We're faced with a full slate of new challenges (and quite a few old challenges, to be fair) that need full-on government intervention, and we can't build resilience without a central core of people who know what they're doing because they were there last time.

The government hasn't spent the disaster recovery money because it doesn't really believe hands-on government is necessary. It sees its role as ensuring government doesn't happen - holding the frontbenches to keep out radicals and hotheads who might want to fetter the invisible hand of the free market. As for the rest, thoughts and prayers.

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Our basic need, as a nation, is to learn the lesson that Mother Nature has been attempting to beat into our thick skulls for the past few years: there are some things that need to be done, whether the private sector can make a profit out of them or not.

As it is, the Commonwealth public service has been cut back, squeezed out and held down for so long that it's going to need jumper cables to restart it. The next government should build on the historical record of the Hawke consensus.

Anthony Albanese, prime minister in waiting, has proposed a jobs summit to bring the industrial players together. I'd branch out. How about a taskforce to draw up a new health plan? Bring public health back into the system, redistribute incentives until we have the skilled and motivated workforce we need. How about taskforces, too, to chart the way out for universities, and the arts? And for technology and communications, now that working from home has reminded us that we should have gone fully fibre way back then?

At the moment we can cope - just - with major problems so long as they're confined to a single sector; but no industry is a totally watertight compartment, and icebergs don't play favourites. We need to tap into the expertise of the people on the ground across all sectors and communities to inform us where the weak points are, the parts of the economy that are going to collapse under us next time the strain comes on.

The community sector knows where the holes in national planning are, because it deals with the people who live under the leaks. One of the sector's duties is to complain. This doesn't endear it to the government, which very much believes in not discussing these kinds of things in front of the voters - but if the government had done what the sector was suggesting before events intervened, it would have come out of the pandemic in much better shape than it has.

Next government, take note.