The ADF is often seen as one of these important organisations, yet it turns out national security doesn’t always mean what we think it means. We think it’s about ensuring we are safe at home but the ADF has a duty to ensure we are safe from abroad. The recent 2020 Defence Strategy reminds me that while our floods happen, elsewhere the world turns and burns and I need to think about what other responsibilities the ADF is fulfilling right now, in Fiji and in Tonga. It’s also on high alert because of the invasion of Ukraine and what’s happening in the Indo-Pacific region.

“There is,” says one expert, “no automatic role for defence forces to get involved in natural disasters. They have to be directed by government to do so. It is easy to see why people in local communities get frustrated because in some senses it seems unreasonable. But the Defence Force has restrictions. It can’t go in whenever it likes.”

It doesn’t help when politicians and others say the ADF isn’t trained to help in disasters. Deputy Nationals leader David Littleproud said yesterday, “They aren’t trained the way SES people are. And so if we send them in too early they can get in the road ... of trained professionals.”

Yet when I speak to a former high-up in the military, he tells me the people of the ADF are capable of holding hoses and brooms, wielding trucks and helicopters, shovelling stuff off the streets and into skips, posing for a photo-op in the middle of the disaster (OK, he didn’t say this last bit). Also, I have to remind myself Littleproud is speaking of the SES, where members are indeed highly professional but also, ahem, completely unpaid. We are relying on volunteers to save us.

Risk Frontiers’ Andrew Gissing says this is the future. He says we can’t have a standing paid army ready to deal with natural disasters because we have too many too often. We can’t even expect to have enough SES volunteers. Gissing has undertaken major research on the SES and says our communities will need to be the part of our civil society that steps up. It won’t be governments, the ADF, the SES or the RFS.

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“You can never expect a fire truck at your front doorstep in a major bushfire,” he says bleakly.

Know your neighbours, their names and their circumstances. That’s how folks knew to look out for Sadie. She was found up a tree days later. She has sore hips and a gaping wound on one of her legs. Her human mother just has a gaping wound in her heart. But she’s staying in Lismore.

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