The Conversation · Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra · Monday 23 March 2026
Security expert Rory Medcalf discusses survey findings showing a sharp rise in Australians' national security anxiety, with a majority now expecting foreign conflict in the near term.
Australians are more anxious about national security, and the security establishment calls this 'disturbing' — as though the public arrived at fear independently, without a decade of threat briefings leaked to friendly journalists and defence white papers written like horror novels. The spooks set the house on fire, then commissioned a survey on smoke inhalation. What's disturbing isn't that people are frightened — it's that the fear is doing exactly what it was designed to do: build consent for budgets nobody's allowed to question.