"The COVID virus has been a case of biology confronting and really shaking the complacency of day-to-day politics with a physical reality of sickness and death on a scale we haven't seen for a very long time," Turnbull told the Policy Exchange audience. "And so the question really is: why do so many people in government and so many people in politics - particularly in the Anglo sphere - not take the scientific evidence on climate change just as seriously?
At the recent G20 Finance Ministers meeting in Riyadh, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire — a staunch advocate of deepening economic integration — posed a question which just a few years ago would have seemed inconceivable:
‘Do we want to still depend at the level of 90 per cent or 95 per cent on the supply chain of China for the automobile industry, for the drug industry, for the aeronautical industry or do we draw the consequences of that situation to build new factories, new productions, and to be more independent and sovereign?
That’s not protectionism — that’s just the necessity of being sovereign and independent from an industrial point of view’
As Australia was swept by panic buying and medical shortages this year, the scenes were eerily familiar for one of the country's most senior military planners.
In a secret meeting only a year earlier, the Defence Department's director of preparedness Cheryl Durrant and a group of Australian industry leaders had predicted a strikingly similar scenario.
"We predicted the unpredictable," says Ms Durrant, who left the department in January.