Paul Davis

Can we stand on our own?

Can we support our economy?

Can we support the social networks, the social fabric of that economy?

So defense is one level of that.

Then you've got infrastructure underneath that.

So if you had cybersecurity, cyber problems, you actually have to be able to support it.

And we've seen these instances occur over the last three to five years in an increasing frequency without our ability to be able to support it.

You mentioned food.

Food is always an interesting one for me because if you look at it, we import 80 percent of our flour.

If there was a crisis tomorrow, and France being where we import our flour from, 80% of our flour does not arrive.

All right, you're saying that we can't have bread and butter, we can have butter but no bread.

Correct.

And that isn't exactly a brilliant thing, but you're right.

We could change the agricultural model to adapt in time.

In time, but we're not taking that long-term perspective.

And even with the current defence budget, we're still only talking up to 2030, rather than thinking of 2040, 2050, 2060.

But we also have to look at countries that are comparable to us.

So Austria is a neutral country, but actually has a sovereign independence and actually builds resilient plans in terms of what is required to support the population, and in defence in particular.

Finland has gone a stage further.

Finland has actually developed it out to the point of whereby they've built a defence industry in order to be able to support it.