IT’S a tricky world that we live in today.
Scams seem to be everywhere, so safety is our primary concern.
Australian think tank the Lowy Institute has conducted polls on Australians’ attitudes towards the rest of the world since 2005.
The annual poll is the leading Australian survey on foreign affairs, and informs policy and public debate.
According to the Lowy Institute Poll 2025, Australians are very concerned with the ongoing cost of living and President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. Apparently 52 percent of respondents said they were optimistic about Australia’s economic performance over the next five years.
This was the lowest result recorded over the last twenty years, including during the Covid pandemic in 2020.
Young Australians in the 18 to 29 year old group were clearly the least optimistic, but Labor voters were more confident than Liberal or Greens voters – as evidenced in the recent Federal Election result.
The report went on to say that Australians are clearly unsettled by the antics of the second Trump administration, with two thirds of those polled saying they had no trust in the United States acting responsibly, which was the lowest level ever achieved by this poll on that subject.
Even worse, only 16 percent had confidence in China’s President Xi Jinping doing the right thing, particularly when it referred to Taiwan.
Again, that number was a drop since the previous poll.
Trust in China dropped even further due to its navy conducting live ammunition firing off Australia’s east coast, which interestingly contributed to the importance of Australia’s US alliance, despite our deteriorating distrust of Mr Trump.
Despite rising authoritarianism around the globe, Australians have never reported a higher support for democracy with 74 percent believing our system is preferable to every other form of government.
They went on to say that they were most comfortable with other democracies such as New Zealand and Japan but remained somewhat circumspect towards our most heavily populated neighbours of Indonesia and India.
It is all a matter of trust.
By John BLACKBOURN
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