In the last few years, the issue of mobilisation for war has, in Australia at any rate, shifted from the arcane to the highly pertinent. Concerns publicly manifested in the government’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which asserted that the long-held notion of up to 10 years’ warning for a possible conventional attack on Australia had – as 10-year rules tend to eventually do – evaporated. Moreover, it alluded to what was thought to be a remote, but nevertheless alarming, possibility of a ‘high-intensity conflict’ in Australia’s region. Suddenly, generating combat power, perhaps more than what was readily to hand, has taken on some urgency.

In the years since the deployment to Afghanistan, Australia’s predicament has become increasingly challenging closer to home, and further abroad, as complex environmental and geopolitical security challenges overlap and become more acute. Australian policymakers should look to create an incentivised but voluntary scheme for national and community service to bolster national resilience. This chapter makes the case for such a scheme: an Australian universal scheme for national and community service. It argues that given the current threat environment and the frequency and scale of natural disasters, it would be imprudent for the Australian Defence Force to continue on a course that was appropriate in past decades.

Chapter 4 discusses the expansion of vaccination in the British Isles during the Napoleonic Wars. The rapid extension of the practice from 1800, involving hundreds of thousands of people, represented a mobilisation of opinion and action that paralleled the mobilisation of the nation for war. Medical men took up vaccination with alacrity, seeking to make their name and serve their communities. Members of the aristocracy and gentry, with women often in the lead, accepted it in their families and supported it in their spheres of influence. Clergymen promoted it from the pulpit. Reckless practice led to adverse outcomes that encouraged anxieties about inoculating cowpox and provided ammunition for an anti-vaccination movement in London in 1805–7. Instructed to conduct an enquiry, the College of Physicians fully endorsed vaccination in 1807. After receiving the report, Parliament broke new ground in health provision by funding a National Vaccine Establishment to distribute vaccine and have oversight of the practice.