Politics
Australian national security: this is the nation Pauline Hanson has been waiting for
Notice
We have come to this. Australians now trust the American president as much as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. And it’s not because they think Xi Jinping is a great model of virtue. Most Australians recognize that Xi’s China is repressive at home and poses a long-term military threat to Australia, according to the latest annual report. Lowy Institute survey.
The driving force behind the distrust is that Donald Trump has caused so much damage to the world. Only 21 per cent of Australians trust him to do the right thing in world affairs, the poll found.
Which is the same, statistically speaking, as the 20% who trust Xi to do the right thing. The margin of error for the poll, which asks around 2,000 Australians each year about their feelings about the world, is 2.2 per cent.
Australians are in a gloomy and fearful mood, the poll confirms. The collapse of trust in the American president is only one reason. The Lowy poll quantifies others as well. And if some are threats from abroad, others are perceived as threats from within.
A record 55 per cent of respondents believe Australia has too many immigrants. The proportion who see cultural diversity as something “positive” still stands at 73 percent, but it has fallen by 20 percentage points in two years. This is the Australia that Pauline Hanson has been waiting for.
For the first time in the survey’s history, most Australians say they feel “unsafe” in the world. The 53 percent who say this today are even higher than the 50 percent who said this at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biggest perceived threats? The global economic downturn, cyberattacks, authoritarian states, terrorism and a possible war between the United States and China were all cited by the majority.
So perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that support for an Australian nuclear weapon is also growing. Thirty-nine percent are in favor, an increase of three points in four years, a result that Lowy’s director of international security, Sam Roggeveen, finds “interesting”.
Trump’s approval rating is “the lowest level of confidence in a U.S. president in the history of Lowy Institute polling,” which began 21 years ago, pollsters say. The only leaders we trust less, on a list of 14, are Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
And Trump waged his war against Iran so incompetently that the much smaller country “humiliated” the United States, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it. Trump candidly admitted this weekend that unless Iran lifts its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, there could be a “global depression” with stock prices at 1929 levels.
No wonder eight in ten Australians disapprove of the way Trump has fought his pointless war.
Yet Australians do not reject the United States. On the contrary, support for the US alliance remains solid at 73 percent, down a relatively modest 7 points since last year.
It’s fascinating that Australians may be blocking the bad odor of the US leader, but we continue to embrace the country he leads, even though Japan, New Zealand and the UK all score higher on the trust scale.
Likewise, Australians clearly see the difference between the current US president and the long-term AUKUS agreement. Public support for the By-Products and Technology Agreement is essentially unchanged at 68 percent, up 1 point since last year.
Pro-AUKUS sentiment proves implacable to time and criticism. It has never fallen below 65 percent in the Lowy poll. “It is remarkable that support for AUKUS has remained strong since its announcement in 2022,” observes Roggeveen.
Indeed. It will frustrate Australia’s two leading apologists for the Chinese Communist Party, Paul Keating and Bob Carr, as well as the Greens and Malcolm Turnbull, that their relentless five-year campaign against the nuclear submarine project has made no difference.
One reason is that while public distrust of Trump runs deep, fear of China may be more powerful because it poses a greater direct threat.
Australians, by a majority of 54 percent, expect China to supplant the United States as the dominant superpower. Only three in ten expect America to remain dominant. Perhaps this is why respondents believe Australia’s relationship with China is more important than its relationship with the United States. This is a first in the Lowy series, a pivotal moment in Australian sentiment.
Certainly, most people consider trade relations very important, but they are concerned about the intentions of the People’s Republic.
Most Australians expect China to pose a military threat to Australia within 20 years, down 7 percentage points from last year, but still a substantial majority of 62 percent.
Is it an irrational fear? “I think Australians are right to be concerned about the direction of the two superpowers,” Roggeveen says, a position he describes as “double skepticism.”
“The military balance has changed dramatically over the past decade and this will continue over the next decade. There is currently no prospect that the United States will reverse the trend.”
Roggeveen published a sobering research paper last week. It predicts that China will have 25 nuclear-powered attack submarines in the water within 10 years and will have the capacity to build three to four more per year. “All are likely to deploy cruise missiles or perhaps hypersonic missiles,” he writes. He expects Beijing to also have 35 conventional submarines.
Beijing’s military budget is expected to be around $1 trillion a year, an amount similar to current U.S. spending, according to the newspaper. It reports that: “China’s shipbuilding capacity is more than 200 times that of the United States. China is the only country in the world to produce heavy bombers. It is the only country in the world to have two fifth-generation jet fighter models in production and two sixth-generation models conducting flight tests. China is expected to triple the size of its nuclear weapons arsenal by 2035. All of this is happening amid the ambitions of the China as a regional and global power is growing.
Roggeveen, with masterful understatement, says Australia “needs a serious response in its defense planning”.
Australia has become a scared country. Alas, there is reason to be afraid.
Peter Hartcher is both an international and political editor. His political column appears on Saturdays.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Log in by email.From our partners
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Sources 2/ https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/this-is-the-australia-that-pauline-hanson-has-been-waiting-for-a-frightened-country-20260622-p6092n.html The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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