In the National Interest: From Ukraine to Geelong - What Critical Infrastructure Disruption Really Looks Like

The recent fire at Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery has been widely reported as an industrial incident. But what does it reveal about Australia’s broader vulnerability when disruption occurs at nationally critical assets?In this episode, we move beyond cause and examine consequence — exploring how disruption to a single node in a highly concentrated and globally dependent system can have cascading effects across the economy.Ukraine has shown us what sabotage and disruption of critical infrastructure really look like. In the years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, fires, explosions, cyber attacks and supply chain disruptions were often treated as isolated events — many ambiguous at the time, and later attributed to acts of sabotage linked to Russian state activity.What becomes clear, over time, is the pattern. Disruption rarely arrives as a single, decisive event — it emerges through a series of smaller incidents that only later form a recognisable and strategically significant pattern.Events like the Geelong refinery fire may be very different in nature — but they highlight how disruption at critical nodes can have broader consequences. Australia’s fuel system is not immune to these dynamics.In this episode, Tim Slattery and Marina Shteinberg from Pentagram Advisory examine what these patterns mean for Australia’s critical infrastructure — and why organisations must shift from a compliance mindset to one focused on assurance, resilience, and understanding their true points of vulnerability.