The Hunger Report 2026 from Foodbank, a hunger-relief organisation, estimates that 3.6 million Australian households experienced food insecurity in the past year. That’s one in three households, and for one in five the experience was severe. Nearly half of all households with children were affected, along with six in 10 single-parent households.
Those numbers should unsettle anyone responsible for Australia’s national security, because they are a measure of how prepared Australians are for the next crisis. For too long we have assumed that a country that produces far more food than it consumes and exports most of what it grows cannot have a food security problem. That assumption is a dangerous fantasy, and in a deteriorating strategic environment it has become a vulnerability we can no longer afford to ignore.
The 2026 National Defence Strategy goes some way towards recognising the risk by making national civil preparedness and national resilience part of national defence. It accepts that keeping essential goods and services flowing to Australians and keeping communities together in a crisis is part of how a nation deters and endures external pressure.
But Foodbank’s figures demonstrate how shaky the foundations already are in Australian homes. Among food-insecure households, 45 percent had drawn on their savings, 29 percent had deferred payments onto credit cards or buy-now-pay-later products, and 65 percent had cut home energy use to make ends meet. These households are already spending the reserves our preparedness planning assumes that they will have in case of emergency.
Emergency management agencies advise Australians to keep at least three days of food and water at home. It is sound advice for a household with money to spare, but it’s close to meaningless for one already choosing between the groceries and the power bill. A food-insecure household with no savings and an empty pantry cannot stockpile its way through a disruption. For those households, resilience means food reaching the supermarket shelf and the food relief agency every week, without fail.
ASPI’s National Food Security Preparedness Green Paper, released in April 2025, described food insecurity as a lingering crisis, warning that hunger breeds the type of discontent that could undermine social cohesion, public trust and even democratic resilience. Social cohesion is exactly what the National Defence Strategy expects civil preparedness to protect, yet its list of inputs to critical preparedness leaves out food.
If the Strategy defines national defence as a coordinated, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach that harnesses all arms of Australia’s national power, then food security is surely the fullest expression of what that approach demands. Whether Australians can eat through a crisis depends on governments and industry working as one food system. That system, working effectively, is national power.
Income support, housing and emergency relief all have a part to play in helping households eat, but none of them can put food on a shelf that a supply disruption has left empty. Keeping that supply moving falls to no single agency, and the answer is not simply to hand the problem to Defence. It is to build up the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the primary agency responsible for food security policy and programs, so it can coordinate the governments, agencies and industries that control fuel, freight, energy and production. Feeding Australia, the first National Food Security Strategy, is the vehicle for that work.
The Defence Strategy gives the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet the lead on national civil preparedness, and Feeding Australia must become the visible food pillar of that effort. Its first job should be to map out how to secure the foundations that keep food reaching households, supermarket shelves and relief agencies when the system comes under pressure. Much of the coordinating machinery already exists through the National Emergency Management Agency and its National Coordination Mechanism, the Food and Grocery Sector Group, and initiatives like the 2025 Exercise Convergence that tested fuel shortages, H5 bird flu and supply disruption.
What has arguably not been made is the connection between those arrangements and the longer and deeper disruption that the National Defence Strategy now asks us to prepare for. Feeding Australia is the opportunity to make that connection. The parliamentary inquiry into national civil preparedness and resilience, announced in July 2026, now also offers the chance to give food a far more visible place in how Australia prepares for crisis.
This year’s fuel and fertiliser shock gave Australia another warning, and it came at a price we could handle. We have the land, the farmers, the institutions and, in Feeding Australia, a plan in the making. What we have yet to show is the resolve to treat the food security of every Australian household as a true measure of national power. We cannot afford to wait for more warnings, because our resilience and our national defence depend on getting this right.
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