Granted, future dangers may emerge which could necessitate Australian participation in submarine warfare. It is certainly possible.

However, in a few years Australians and humanity at large will resolve or irreversibly squander their chance to overcome a different kind of threat. The collective consequences of changes to land use, trans-border population movements and climate change will inflict effects - including further pandemics - that will require fresh policy responses from our government.

Yet Australia presently lacks the organisational efficiency found in societies like Singapore, Taiwan or Israel. The Swiss maintain large food stores in anticipation of crises, the Swedes have a civil contingencies agency and the Finns encourage company executives, civil servants and the military to participate in a National Defence Course to educate them in civil and military crisis management.

It seems that without lethally hostile neighbours, Australians have become exceedingly complacent. Nonetheless, ominous transformations are at work and these may well force the federal government's hand.

Before the coronavirus arrived, smoke had barely cleared from bushfires that devastated 8 million hectares, incinerated millions of native creatures, levelled two thousand homes and inflicted suffering on thousands of Australians. Equally disturbing, in a year or two similar events are likely to recur, accompanied by continued desertification of the interior and further cyclone damage to coastal zones.

The federal government's response to this inevitability has been a persistent and bizarre hostility to science so embarrassingly evident that it rivals the wilful ignorance which repeatedly disgraces the Trump White House. There is probably no ready antidote to the anti-intellectualism so rife in Liberal/National Party ranks. Yet one hopes that a change of government could result in improved preparedness devised relatively promptly and at modest cost.

It is time to create a civil defence corps based on universal and compulsory civilian national service. On turning 18, every healthy Australian would participate in 10 months of training in air, sea and land logistics, firefighting, flood rescue and pandemic contingencies.

Training would be updated during three-week refresher courses each year for participants up to the age of 30 in what is likely to prove a rewarding experience.

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The Member for Eden-Monaro is Dr Mike Kelly. His electorate suffered considerably in the recent bushfires. In January and without hyperbole he referred to the need to cope with future disasters by exercising "... the same sort of national mobilisation of will as we required in World War II."

In that light Dr Kelly also promotes a civil defence corps, replete with tax and social welfare benefits. By contrast, recall footage of exhausted and ageing rural fire service members in NSW and Victoria; neighbours struggling to evacuate one another from beaches and lakes in NSW; or emergency services assisting distressed families during and after cyclones in Queensland.

Imagine the strengths of a national civil defence corps proficient in disaster management. Prior to the next pandemic it could transport a million P2 masks to secure mobilisation stores in each state and territory; deploy tens of thousands of 20-year-old citizens trained in fighting the new bushfires; or in navigating small boats during coastal floods; or ferrying trucks laden with water and diesel, tents and rations to the newly homeless.

Visualise these civilians operating communications, clearing ground with earthmoving equipment, evacuating endangered humans and animals and setting up mobile hospitals, kitchens and shelters.

In some of these matters the military retains a necessary but limited and complementary role in aid to the civil power. However, Dr Kelly has raised a plausible response to foreseeable threats. His advice is timely.