Lowy Institute Poll 2025 Report

Safety and threats

Feelings of safety

Australians’ sense of safety has returned to a Covid-era historic low, with only 51% saying they feel either ‘safe’ or ‘very safe’ in relation to world events. This roughly equals the reading in 2020, when the Covid pandemic swept the world and feelings of safety plummeted to a record low. The proportion who say they feel ‘very safe’ this year remains extremely low, at 5%.

This is a striking contrast to the high watermark of 2010 (92% overall levels of safety), when four in ten Australians said they felt ‘very safe’.

Threats to Australia

For the third year in a row, cyberattacks from other countries is the leading threat to Australia, according to respondents asked about a range of possible ‘threats to the vital interests of Australia in the next ten years’. Almost two-thirds (65%) see cyberattacks from other countries as a ‘critical threat’, although this is down five points from 2024.

The next highest ranked threat — a military conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan — remained roughly steady, with 61% seeing this potential conflict as a critical threat. Fewer Australians saw the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine (47%) and the Middle East (34%) as critical threats.

Meanwhile, concern about ‘a severe downturn in the global economy’ rose by four points to 58%. While fears of a global economic downturn have increased, the change is much less pronounced than in 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic, when a spike in economic concerns saw seven in ten Australians (71%) rate a downturn as a critical threat.

More than half of Australians (54%) believe climate change is a critical threat to the nation, roughly steady on last year. Concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program (54%), international terrorism (53%), and the spread of infectious diseases internationally (51%) also held roughly steady. A substantial minority of 46% see artificial intelligence — added to this list for the first time this year — as a critical threat.

Despite Australians’ strong disapproval of Donald Trump’s use of tariffs, only three in ten (29%) view ‘tariffs on Australian exports to the United States’ as a critical threat to the national interest. Fieldwork was completed before Trump’s 2 April ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs on countries around the world.