When the executive branch of a modern capitalist democracy such as Australia tells its population “not to be alarmed” and to “go about your business,” the rational citizen should immediately recognize this as an institutional siren warning of severe, impending trauma.

We have a perfectly instructive historical precedent for this. In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic loomed, the former Prime Minister issued the exact same doctrinal pacifiers: “We are well-prepared,” “go about your business,” and “Australians are well-placed.” What followed, as we all know, was a catastrophic systemic shock, severe lockdowns, and massive price escalations. The rhetoric of the state was deliberately designed to maintain short-term market stability and consumer docility while the political class frantically tried to manage a reality they had entirely failed to prepare for.

Today, Prime Minister Albanese is deploying the exact same playbook, but the context makes his trivializing rhetoric far more sinister.

We must understand the fundamental difference between these two crises. A global pandemic is, essentially, an external biological shock. But the crisis facing Australia today is a conscious, deliberate policy choice. The Australian government has actively chosen to facilitate a disastrous US-Israeli war against Iran by providing the indispensable targeting and intelligence infrastructure at Pine Gap. They have willingly painted a target on the domestic economy to fulfill their role as a sub-imperial client state.

When Albanese brushes over this with the 2020 script—telling you to simply “enjoy your Easter” and catch the bus—it is a glaring indicator that the state knows exactly how devastating the material consequences will be. Australia has less than a month’s supply of diesel. If the Middle Eastern conflict chokes off the maritime supply lines, the Australian agricultural and freight sectors do not merely experience “price increases”—they structurally collapse. You cannot feed a continent with an empty diesel tank.

In 2020, the government asked for calm in the face of an act of nature. In 2026, the government is demanding docility while it actively starves its own nation’s supply chains to service an American war. What the state decries as “panic” is, in this instance, simply a rational, highly justified state of public alarm. If the public truly understood that the government is gambling the very survival of the nation’s economy for the sake of imperial subservience, panic—and massive, organized resistance—would be the only logical response.