Voices from across Australia: Community Consultations Engagement Report
NSC/InkLab
This report is one output of a Community Consultations initiative by the ANU National Security College (NSC), aimed at generating a comprehensive picture of what Australians think about national security. It is a qualitative companion report to our core survey-based findings, which are presented in the ‘Community Consultations Results Report’. The third report, summarises discussions with several First Nations people of northern Australia, including the Torres Strait, about their attitudes towards national security.
Executive summary
In 2024 and 2025, consultation teams of NSC staff and affiliates travelled to every corner of Australia – capital cities, regional centres, country towns, and remote communities – to ask people what national security means to them. Close to 500 participants were engaged through semi-structured interviews and group discussions. One hundred written submissions were received, in response to a widely-promoted call for submissions and an Issues Paper published by the College.
This report presents what we learned.
The most important finding is also the most consistent: across every state and territory, every sector, and every community profile we engaged, Australians understand national security through the lens of everyday life. Not so much traditional threats such as invasions or espionage, although people tend to realise that security crises overseas will affect Australian in some way. But more immediately whether the power stays on, the shelves stay stocked, the information they receive can be trusted, society holds together and their neighbours can be relied on when things go wrong.
National security means protecting our interests and values that support our national identity in order to achieve safety, cohesion and prosperity within the region.
Participant, ACT
That finding has implications for policy. It means that national security policies designed without reference to community experience may struggle to earn the public trust that resilience requires. And it means that investments in the fabric of ordinary life – reliable infrastructure, trusted institutions, funded emergency services, day-to-day freedom from fear – are not peripheral to national security. In the minds of most Australians we spoke to, they are central to it.
Community consultations engagement report
At a glance
40+
Locations nationwide
480+
Australians interviewed
300+
Meetings
8
Focus groups
100
Public submissions
Community consultations engagement report
Key findings – interviews and group discussions
Six interconnected themes emerged from the interview program. They are not a ranking. They are six dimensions of the same underlying concern.
1. The information environment feels polluted
Participants across every state and territory described an information landscape that is noisy, manipulated, used to convey threat and increasingly vulnerable to AI-enabled tools. Mis- and disinformation are not felt as abstract risks – they are already daily experiences. Declining trust in institutions runs underneath all of it.
Interviews and group discussions2. Critical systems run through chokepoints that feel inadequately protected
Australia’s fuel, freight, power, water and communications networks are extraordinarily concentrated. A small number of roads, ports, sea lanes, and cables carry a disproportionate share of what the country needs to function. When one fails – through extreme weather event, accident, or hostile action – the effects cascade.
Interviews and group discussions3. The gap between willingness and capability feels wide – and growing
Australians, particularly in regional communities, say that they are willing to show up and help when things go wrong. But the systems, infrastructure, and personnel needed to manage a serious or compounding shock are widely described as inadequate. Where preparedness has improved, local government was seen to have driven it.
Interviews and group discussions4. The next shock was predicted to come from interconnected, proximate systems and cascading failure
Participants described a threat landscape shaped by critical infrastructure as a potential target, digital vulnerabilities, and climate volatility. What unites all three is that they operate on and through the same fragile systems. Extreme weather, cyberattacks, sabotage or accidents can produce similar cascading failures.
Interviews and group discussions5. Questions were common about who is in charge – and that uncertainty is itself a vulnerability
Across cybersecurity, emergency management, infrastructure investment and community communications, the same frustration surfaced: roles are unclear, responsibilities are siloed, and the gaps between levels of government are where communities fall through.
Interviews and group discussions6. Community is seen as the country’s greatest resilience asset – and a site of active strain
The same interviews that surfaced mutual aid, community solidarity, and a genuine culture of showing up also surfaced concern about the stresses on communities and leaders. People have little bandwidth for thinking about nationwide security or how they can contribute to it, when they are focused on immediate issues.
Interviews and group discussionsCommunity consultations engagement report
Key findings – submissions
One hundred written submissions were received from individuals and organisations across Australia. They are not representative of the Australian public generally – they reflect the views of a civically engaged subset with higher-than average familiarity with policy processes. Read alongside the interview findings, they provide a complementary perspective: more structural, more geopolitically framed, and more prescriptive in their policy proposals.
100 public submissions The submissions broadly converge with the interview findings on the central theme. Contributors similarly described national security as inseparable from the conditions of everyday life.
The geopolitical layer
Submissions were significantly more likely than interviews to connect domestic security concerns to broader global shifts: Australia’s alliance posture, the implications of great power competition, and the state – or failure – of the international rules-based order.
Economic security and sovereign capability
Submissions catalogued Australia’s supply chain vulnerabilities more extensively than interviews, identifying exposure across pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, electronics, medical devices, and defence materiel. Many called for onshoring critical manufacturing and reducing single-supplier dependencies.
Social cohesion as a strategic asset
Submissions noted, more explicitly than interviews, that Australia benefits from relatively strong social cohesion by international standards — and that this is worth protecting.
Information integrity and AI as interlinked threats
Submissions treated AI and disinformation as interconnected risks to sovereignty and democratic decision-making, with several specific nations named as deliberate sources of threat in a way that interview participants rarely did.
Climate change as a compounding security threat
Climate featured in submissions with urgency and specificity, connected not only to infrastructure risk but to regional stability, migration, and long-term social cohesion.
