Opinion
It’s come to this. Australians now trust the US president only as much as they trust the ruler of the Chinese Communist Party. And not because they think Xi Jinping is any great paragon of virtue. Most Australians recognise that Xi’s China is repressive at home and a long-term military threat to Australia, according to the latest annual Lowy Institute poll.
The driver of distrust is the fact that Donald Trump has done so much damage to the world. Only 21 per cent of Australians trust him to do the right thing in world affairs, according to the poll.
Which is identical, statistically speaking, to the 20 per cent who trust Xi to do the right thing. The margin of error in the poll, which surveys about 2000 Australians on their feelings about the world each year, is 2.2 per cent.
Australians are in a dark and fearful mood, as the poll confirms. The collapse in trust in the US president is just one of the reasons. The Lowy poll quantifies others, too. And, while some are threats from abroad, others are seen as threats from within.
A record 55 per cent of people say that Australia has too many immigrants. The proportion who look on cultural diversity as something “positive” is still a large 73 per cent, but has fallen a whopping 20 percentage points over two years. This is the Australia that Pauline Hanson has been waiting for.
For the first time in the poll’s history, most Australians report feeling “unsafe” in the world. The 53 per cent who say so today is even more than the 50 per cent proportion who said so at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The greatest perceived threats? Global economic downturn, cyberattack, authoritarian states, terrorism and a possible US-China war were all cited by majorities.
So perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that support for an Australian nuclear weapon is also rising. Thirty-nine per cent are in favour, an increase of three points over four years, a result that Lowy’s director of international security, Sam Roggeveen, finds “attention-getting”.
The trust rating for Trump is “the lowest level of confidence in any US president in the history of Lowy Institute polling”, which began 21 years ago, say the pollsters. The only leaders we trust less, from a list of 14, are Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
And Trump has so incompetently conducted his war on Iran that the much smaller nation has “humiliated” the US, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said. Trump candidly conceded on the weekend that, unless Iran lifted its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, there could be a “global depression” with share prices at 1929 levels.
No wonder, then, that eight in 10 Australians disapprove of the way Trump has conducted his pointless war.
Yet Australians are not rejecting the US. On the contrary, support for the US alliance remains robust at 73 per cent, down by a relatively modest 7 points since last year.
In a fascinating finding, Australians may be holding our noses against the bad odour of the US leader, yet we continue to embrace the country he leads even if Japan, New Zealand and the UK all score higher on the trust scale.
Similarly, Australians keenly discern the difference between the current US president and the long-term AUKUS pact. Public support for the subs-and-tech agreement is essentially unchanged at 68 per cent, up by 1 point since last year.
Pro-AUKUS sentiment is proving implacable to time and to criticism. It has never fallen below 65 per cent in the Lowy poll. “It’s remarkable that AUKUS support has remained solid since it was announced 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 ceaseless five-year campaign against the nuclear submarine project has made no difference.
One reason is that, while public distrust of Trump is profound, fear of China is perhaps more potent in posing the greater direct threat.
Australians, by a majority of 54 per cent, expect that China will displace the US as the dominant superpower. Only three in 10 expect America to remain preponderant. Perhaps for this reason, respondents say that Australia’s relationship with China is more important than its relationship with the US. This is a first in the Lowy series, a threshold moment in Australian sentiment.
Yes, most people see the trading relationship as very important, but they are apprehensive about the intentions of the People’s Republic.
Most Australians expect China to pose a military threat to Australia within 20 years, 7 percentage points fewer than last year, but still a substantial majority of 62 per cent.
Is this an irrational fear? “I think Australians are right to be worried about the direction of both superpowers,” says Roggeveen, a stance he describes as “dual scepticism”.
“The military balance has shifted dramatically over the last decade and will continue over the next decade. There’s currently no prospect of the US reversing the trend.”
Roggeveen published a sobering research paper last week. It projects that China will have 25 nuclear-powered attack submarines in the water within 10 years, and 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 will also have 35 conventional subs.
Beijing’s military budget is expected to be around a trillion US dollars a year, similar to US spending today, the paper finds. It reports that: “China’s shipbuilding capacity is more than 200 times greater than that of the US. China is the only country in the world producing heavy bombers. It is the only country in the world with two fifth-generation jet fighter designs in production and two sixth-generation designs conducting flight tests. China is expected to triple the size of its nuclear weapons arsenal by 2035. All this is occurring as China’s ambitions as a regional and global power expand.”
Roggeveen, with masterful understatement, advises that Australia “requires a serious response in our defence planning”.
Australia has become a frightened country. Alas, there is much to be frightened of.
Peter Hartcher is both 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.Connect via email.From our partners
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