During the Optus outage in 2023, Australians joked about not being able to buy a coffee, pay for lunch or order an Uber. Looking back, I think we learnt the wrong lesson. The disruption wasn’t really about payments. It exposed something more fundamental: how dependent our economy has become on digital systems to continue exchanging goods and services.
By economic exchange, I do not simply mean financial transactions. I mean the broader process through which households, businesses and governments obtain and provide goods and services. A farmer ordering fertiliser, a supermarket replenishing its shelves, a hospital receiving medicines and a freight company accepting a delivery contract are all examples. Payment is one step in that process, but only one. Buyers and sellers must communicate, orders must be placed, identities verified, goods moved and payments settled. Economic exchange can therefore fail even when the payment system continues operating.
That distinction crystallised for me during a recent resilience workshop examining disruption to Australia’s food system. I arrived expecting a discussion about farms, freight, processing and logistics. Those vulnerabilities remain real and important. What surprised me was not that agriculture faces some unique cyber vulnerability. Rather, the workshop highlighted that agriculture shares the same dependency as almost every other critical sector: the ability to sustain economic exchange. Studying one sector exposed a dependency common across the economy.
Every critical sector has its own risks. Food security depends on productive farms, transport, energy, water, telecommunications, skilled people and functioning markets. Healthcare, mining, manufacturing and retail have similarly complex risks. Yet they all depend on common enabling systems. Farmers must obtain fertiliser. Freight operators need work and fuel. Manufacturers must source inputs. Supermarkets must replenish stock. Households need food and medicine. None of this depends on money alone. Communications, digital identity, ordering systems, logistics and payments must work together.
This is not an argument that Australia has neglected cybersecurity or payment resilience. Governments, regulators and industry have invested heavily in both. Financial services are rightly recognised as critical infrastructure, and the Reserve Bank is focusing on the resilience of Australia’s payment systems. Those priorities remain essential.
The question is whether we are organising resilience around the way modern systems actually fail.
Much of our thinking remains organised by sector. We have separate arrangements for telecommunications, banking, transport, energy, food security and critical infrastructure. Yet major disruptions rarely remain confined to one domain. They are increasingly continuous, concurrent and cascading. A telecommunications outage can simultaneously interrupt communications, authentication and digital payments. Businesses cannot place orders, suppliers cannot verify customers, freight operators cannot accept work and consumers struggle to obtain essential goods. Payment may be part of the problem, but it’s not the whole problem. Vulnerability emerges through the dependencies connecting systems and sectors.
Australia therefore needs to think more explicitly about economic exchange resilience. Financial resilience asks whether banks and payment systems continue operating safely. Economic exchange resilience asks whether households, businesses and governments can continue obtaining and providing essential goods and services during disruption. Payment enables economic exchange but is only one part of it. Functioning payment systems are little help if communications fail, orders cannot be placed, identities cannot be verified or goods cannot be delivered.
Nor would a single outage bring Australia to a standstill. Banks maintain redundancy, payment providers have contingency arrangements and cash remains an important fallback. The greater concern is the concentration of digital dependencies. Telecommunications, cloud services, digital identity and payment platforms increasingly underpin multiple sectors simultaneously. Concurrent disruption across several of these could create cascading consequences well beyond the financial sector. Responsibility for understanding those interactions, however, remains fragmented across institutions and policy portfolios.
Other countries are examining such dependencies more explicitly. Sweden has developed offline payment arrangements for essential retail purchases during crises. The Netherlands encourages preparation for prolonged electronic-payment disruption. Taiwan’s whole-of-society resilience program tests how governments, businesses and communities continue functioning during complex emergencies. Australia need not copy these approaches, but they demonstrate the value of testing essential national functions rather than individual systems.
A logical next step would be a national desktop exercise focused on maintaining economic exchange during prolonged, cross-sector disruption. It should involve telecommunications providers, banks, supermarkets, fuel distributors, freight operators, healthcare providers, agricultural producers, cloud providers, regulators and emergency-management agencies. The objective would not simply be restoring payments, but identifying which exchanges are essential, where shared dependencies exist, how failures cascade and how essential services could continue under degraded conditions.
The most important lesson I took from an agricultural resilience workshop wasn’t about agriculture. It was that every critical sector ultimately depends on the ability to sustain economic exchange. As Australia becomes increasingly digital, resilience will depend not only on protecting individual sectors but on understanding and exercising the systems connecting them. The next step may not be another sector strategy. It may be ensuring that Australia can continue obtaining and providing what society needs when the digital systems underpinning economic life come under pressure.
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