A confidential Defence Department report last year predicted many of the shortages and behaviours of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In secret meetings, the Defence Department's director of preparedness Cheryl Durrant and a group of Australian industry leaders predicted a strikingly similar scenario in the event of a global crisis.

Ms Durrant has now ended her 30-year Defence career and spoken to the ABC about the need to prepare for an increasingly unstable world.

“We predicted the unpredictable,” says Ms Durrant.

“We knew the problems, we knew this might be coming, we knew that various things needed to be done.

“If you think of the COVID crisis as a test run, it's really a critical thing for us to learn from this.

“The lesson is; expect the unexpected.”

The report details how Australian essential services would collapse within just three months if a crisis put a halt to global trade with even greater ramifications than COVID-19.

“We saw three main possibilities of that happening: the increasing and escalating effects of climate change and natural disasters; a global power conflict, probably between America and China; and finally a pandemic — one with a much greater death rate than what we're seeing with the COVID crisis,” Ms Durrant said.

“The review looked at the big issues, like if we had to go to war, do we have enough fuel? Do we have enough energy?

“Can the national supply chains and our national infrastructure support Defence in a war or other crisis?”

These questions were put to 17 engineers selected by their industry peak body, Engineers Australia, from sectors including health care, electricity, fuel, water, mining and telecommunications.

“Out of this thought experiment, what the group looked at across each of their sectors was what would this mean for their particular sector,” Engineers Australia CEO Dr Bronwyn Evans said.

“They identified that because we're part of the global supply chain, when the ability for that to continue to function [broke down], you'd start to get shortages, you'd run out of things in areas, for example, like the water supply, like telecommunications.”

The report states; “the workshop delivered the overarching advice that, in the scenario provided, Australia would suffer massive upheaval within one week due to job losses, social unease and [public and industrial] hoarding”.

Ms Durrant said Australian governments could have been better prepared for COVID-19, even if they did not see it coming.

“Our preparedness planning was probably a D-plus or a C-minus, but our response was much better,” she said.

“In order to have that response that is really sharp out of the blocks, we weren't quite there in the first couple of weeks.

“I was bemoaning the fact that even though we'd done the work and had seen what might happen, we hadn't yet been able to get the buy-in to do the further planning and actually act on that information.”

More details are available here.