Pauline Hanson set the tone this week when she boasted she had left “landmines” with the election of a One Nation member to South Australia’s parliament. We will see if they actually explode, and if so, to what effect.

As someone who watched the election of 11 One Nation candidates in Queensland in 1998, and their obliteration (as the US president would say) a few years later, I am not so sure. The only real victims, apart from the disappointed voters who were misguided by One Nation’s promises, were the conservative parties – which languished on the opposition benches for 14 years.

Meanwhile, the Australian National University’s National Security College was about to lob a bigger, and in my view more consequential, landmine.

A three-volume report, No Worries? Australian attitudes to national security, risk and resilience, based on more than 20,000 consultations around the country, revealed a rapidly escalating rise in public anxiety about national security and an overwhelming sense that Australia is not prepared.

There was a time when such a report from a research and teaching college closely aligned with the security establishment would have been viewed sceptically as “defence washing”, designed to ballast pre-budget demands for more spending on military equipment and intelligence. No Worries? may yet be used for that purpose but, if that is all that comes from it, the bigger point this groundbreaking research uncovered will have been missed.

For most Australians, the 18-month research project revealed, national security starts at their front door – not at the territorial borders of the island continent. It showed they are worried the country is not prepared for the demands of a volatile 21st century in a polluted information ecosystem, where the rules-based international order is crumbling, economic precarity has become uncomfortably normal and trust is more fragile.

Spending more money on more fancy machines, important though that is, will not be sufficient. The threat is closer to home. In many communities, fear has become the new normal.

The report suggests this is fixable by targeting investments in social and economic infrastructure, providing access to more and better information and really listening to the day-to-day concerns of ordinary Australians and community leaders.

The overwhelming priority of those who were surveyed, took part in focus groups and wrote submissions was for safe and peaceful communities, followed by economic prosperity and a robust democracy.

The gap between Canberra and the rest of the country was revealed in stark clarity. The respondents from the national capital, where security policy is made, where the corridors bristle with defence personnel, spooks and analysts, were the least worried. They felt there was little more to do to strengthen Australia’s security and were least concerned about terrorists, foreign military attacks or crimewaves. Tellingly, they were more worried about the climate crisis, misinformation and attacks on critical infrastructure.

As one of the speakers at the conference that analysed the report noted, this mismatch either meant that the nation was wrong to be alarmed and that Canberra had everything in hand, or that thinking about national security needs to be substantially revamped. Either way, Canberra needs to get much better at sharing information and communicating.

If this report were an outlier, it would be easier to dismiss.

But over the past few months events at home and abroad, along with several research studies – notably the Scanlon report on social cohesion and the Susan McKinnon Foundation report on democratic resilience – have highlighted structural issues that demand serious attention.

”Social cohesion” has become the buzzword of 2026, a disappointingly empty phrase to be dropped into every political speech. That it is fraying, as research and events suggest, is a real and present danger to maintaining safe and peaceful communities.

If we accept the broader definition of national security that the ANU research points to, rather than the Canberra definition of borders, intelligence, guns and submarines, all roads lead to social cohesion. That pivots on belonging, safety and robust pathways to upwards mobility, with dogged and inclusive determination.

One Nation and the opposition are seeking short-term political gain by exploiting the palpable fear in the community – conflating cohesion with multiculturalism. It is not. But they raise the temperature by blaming migrants and dressing assimilationist values up as what the Institute of Public Affairs and Angus Taylor call “the Australian way of life”.

In his post-election reflections SA’s premier, Peter Malinauskas, called for a different sort of patriotism, one that did not just wave the flag but welcomed strangers and civil conversations.

Barnaby Joyce was quick to turn this into a “love us or leave us” proposition, declaring that the Labor premier was echoing One Nation. He wasn’t.

Patriotism can be inclusive and respectful, as Allegra Spender told the ANU conference, it need not exclude and demean. When coupled with open government prepared to share information with citizens, the trust that is fostered is the antidote to political extremism, which is the stick that seeks to break social cohesion and weaken national security.

Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia

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