The government budget is not a neutral document. We argue that if the government is able to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on defence, it should also be able to spend on climate disaster prevention and adaptation. By Act on Climate Collective Members Kelly Bebendorf and August Wylynko.
The predictability of disasters
Disasters are not a possibility; they are inevitable. In “Australia”, nearly 70% of us have been affected by a disaster. Over the next ten years, the World Economic Forum predicts that extreme weather events, followed by biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are going to be the greatest threat to the global economy.
And yet, at the policy level, disasters are still treated as surprises, with a high price tag. Between 2005 and 2022, 98% of the $24.5 billion in federal funding for disasters was spent on recovery (with 2% on preparedness). This imbalance is not unique to disasters. Across sectors including healthcare, welfare, and disability support, funding is structurally skewed and frequently reduced, focused on crisis management rather than early prevention. Governments spend disproportionately on reactive measures, spending over $1.1 billion each year on youth detention, averaging around $1 million per child. Meanwhile, less than 2% of health spending is on protection, prevention and health promotion, and less than 10% of the government’s ‘drug budget’ is on harm reduction measures. Reactive spending is more expensive, less effective and often too late. So why does this happen time and time again?
Because spending on relief and recovery is the perfect political move. It’s simple, immediate, visible and appears compassionate. Spending on preventative measures doesn’t carry this same weight. It’s quieter, invisible and rarely leads to short term political gains. It’s not just risky for the future of “Australia”, it’s politically risky.
We know preventing disasters would save money in the long term compared to just crisis response, and yet our budgets don’t reflect that.
There is, however, one sector we do spend a ludicrous amount on preemptively.
War.
Spending on war prevention
When the Australian government pledged to support the US in the war on Iran, there was little hesitation to consider whether we could afford to. Indeed, despite the immense cost of war – through the expansion of the military, or the production and supply of weapons – there is rarely a parliamentary debate on whether this is the best way to spend taxpayers’ dollars. Over the next decade, Australia is projected to spend a record $425 billion on defence. Within the context of the most "threatening strategic circumstances since the end of World War II", the goal of becoming “self-reliant” in the military sense is seen as sufficient justification for the highest spending on defence in the country’s history. This is framed as preventative spending.
But this preventative spending mentality shouldn be reserved for the imminent existential crisis Australians face: climate impacts. We understand that spending now reduces future risk and recovery costs and that’s why Australia is reaching nearly $1 trillion on defence spending by 2035. This logic must be applied to natural disasters.
Spending on disaster prevention
Climate disasters, youth justice and social resilience all have one thing in common: overall spending can be reduced through prevention (i.e. it is less costly to spend money in the prevention of a given event than to deal with its consequences). Indeed, in foreign spending, the Australian government seems to have recognised this value. From 2020 to 2025, it has spent $1.3 billion on climate adaptation in the Pacific (i.e. adaptation to the changes that are already occurring due to climate change). Domestically, spending on climate resilience through the Disaster Ready Fund was projected to be $1 billion over five years from 2023 compared to $1.6 billion spent on disaster recovery per year. Some estimates predict this will increase to $39 billion per year by 2050 and cumulative spending on natural disasters will cost $1.2 trillion over the next forty years. Despite the fact that climate disasters in Australia are already occurring more frequently than even a couple of decades ago, the government continues to spend more on disaster response than prevention.
Spending on disaster preparedness and resilience is, in many ways, more complicated than spending on relief or recovery in the wake of a disaster. It requires solutions that respond to community knowledge and demands, and is intersectional and cross-sectoral, covering many different government portfolios, making it potentially more challenging to tackle from a government’s perspective. However, the fact that something is “harder” should not be taken as an excuse not to initiate measures that can prevent lives and livelihoods from being lost. After all, isn’t that the reason for proactive defence spending, too? To avert a potential future risk?
Proactive, preventative measures should be taken as seriously for disasters as they are for defence. We know that inaction will lead to higher future costs for disaster recovery and more broadly increase the cost of living. We can commit $368 billion to submarines but no more than $1 billion over five years for disaster preparedness.
Considering disasters as part of national security
Just as we worry about the consequences of war, we should worry about the consequences of disasters. Climate change will threaten infrastructure, disrupt supply chains, and increase political instability in the Asia-Pacific region. It will also challenge the operational capacity of the defence force, which are currently deployed for disaster response. Climate disaster concerns shouldn’t just be discussed in a climate risk report, or addressed via a standalone Disaster Ready Fund, preparedness should be embedded across all industries and ranked as a national security issue. We worry about the existential threat of war, so we find the money and the political backing. What about the existential threat of climate change?
Resource shortages will lead to conflict. War leads to further resource shortages, both to engage in war and in the disruptions to global supply chains. It’s reinforcing and terrifying. It will not only be an environmental issue, it will become a geopolitical issue.
If we know this, why do we fund one preemptively, but not the other?
The myth of running out of money
One of the arguments against disaster preparedness funding is the financial constraint, that governments cannot afford it. The fear of deficits has been, in part, constructed by governments and institutions to justify underfunding for social services, subsidies on fossil fuels, and bailing out corporations. Simultaneously, it is used to encourage and create support for austerity measures and individual responsibility to spend less.
For sovereign currency issuers, governments like Australia cannot technically run out of money in the way that households, states and local councils can. Inverse to the mainstream rhetoric, some believe that taxing and borrowing are tools to regulate inflation, not necessarily to raise funds for spending. This is why there is always enough money for war - governments can create money, issue debt, and adjust taxation to manage inflation and resource allocation. We fund it, we redirect resources to it, and we limit spending on other sectors due to it. The constraint on activity is not the availability of money but the availability of real resources. If we keep redirecting resources to war, we will be unable to direct it to disasters. If we are going into a recession, we get out of it by spending, not by austerity. Spending on adaptation and preparedness projects are encapsulated in this. Infrastructure, public spaces, healthy ecosystems. The federal government has a responsibility to fund state and local government projects and programs that will better prepare us for a changing climate.
The argument that this will lead to inflation is not unfounded. Inflation increases when demand is higher than supply, and when expectations change. This isn’t solely due to providing more welfare, or investing in public infrastructure, this will happen when we run out of resources due to climate change and continue to exist with the economic growth and consumerism imperative. Governments do face real constraints, not purely financial, but our current narratives obscure this, which leads to underinvestment in climate resilience. This ultimately does not save money, it defers impacts and amplifies costs in the long term.
Beyond our ability to fund, we must fund disaster preparedness. Disaster risk is increasingly a systemic threat to financial stability, requiring financial action. Budget prioritisation reflects the government’s ongoing bias towards disaster recovery and military spending. We argue that the government should be spending substantially more money on climate disaster prevention, adaptation and resilience. The answers are already out there, communities know where their needs lie. What we need now is for the government to take them seriously.
The budget
The budget is not a neutral document: it shows the priorities of the government in providing the best outcomes for “Australians”, or more truthfully, who lobbied the hardest. Historically funding for disaster prevention has been inadequate, while defence has walked about with billions. This further entrenches inequalities and shows that government underinvestment in prevention is not because of financial constraints, but political incentives and misaligned perceptions of risk. Priorities must shift, or at minimum, more spending must be directed towards preparedness. We want to see adaptation, preparedness and community resilience funding a top priority across all departments, at a state and federal level. Will disaster preparedness finally be a priority in this budget?
The idea is this: Rather than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts for people who have lost their homes to flooding like in Lismore or in Katherine, wouldn’t it be cheaper to build houses in locations and in ways that protect them from these disasters in the first place?
It seems that, overall, the issue has less to do with the availability of money than with the unwillingness to see climate disaster resilience and adaptation as an emergency. If we consider spending on war to be about the safety of the people in this nation, then preparing for inevitable climate disasters should, too. Floods, cyclones, heat waves and bushfires, they are all matters of national security, at least if we consider the wellbeing and physical safety of fellow “Australians” as central to the role of the Australian government.
If disasters are inevitable, then failing to prepare for them is not a budget issue - it is a political choice. The government is prepared to spend up to $1 trillion over the next decade on defence while knowing that disasters are going to cost us up to $1.2 trillion by 2050.
If we are willing to spend billions to prevent the possbility of war, then the question is not about whether we can afford to prepare for disasters.
It’s why haven’t we?
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This article is an opinion piece by Collective members and do not reflect the official opinions of Friends of the Earth Australia
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