Human security in Australia: public interest and political consequences

Abstract

The new human security paradigm has reconceptualised security beyond traditional physical threats to encompass ‘lifestyle’ concerns, such as health and environmental security. This article uses national survey data collected in Australia in 2007 to examine how public opinion views this new paradigm and to evaluate its political consequences. The results show that the public makes a clear distinction between all four types of human security—health, the environment, national security and the economy. Longitudinal analysis shows that health and the environment have gained greater prominence with the public since 1990. Each dimension of human security has only limited roots in the social structure. However, each has important consequences for the ideological orientation of the public, and for party support. The authors conclude that as ‘lifestyle’ concerns become more prominent for the public, parties of the right will have to adapt to the new paradigm in order to ensure that they are not electorally disadvantaged.

Notes

1. There is considerable research in Northern Ireland about the effects of terrorism on public opinion. For a review, see Hayes and McAllister (2001).

2. For example, there were various attacks on Indian diplomats and interests by Sikhs in the late 1970s; in 1980 the Turkish consul and his bodyguard were assassinated by Armenians; and there have also been various attacks against Israeli diplomats and interests. The main terrorist act on Australian soil was the February 1977 bomb outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney during the regional Commonwealth Heads of State Meeting, which killed three people.

3. The survey also asked the respondents to identify their first and second most important issues, from the list of 14 issues. Preliminary analysis showed that this approach was less effective in identifying four distinct factors, and for that reason the approach used in Table 1 was used.

4. The three items that are not included are the Iraq War, unemployment and the treatment of Aborigines. Based on the coefficient results, these items were not found to belong to the underlying dimensions. We recognise that these are significant human security issues. However, it is possible that the question wording and interpretation of the questions could explain why these variables did not belong to the factors.

5. The scales were constructed by first coding missing values to the mean, dividing each item by its respective standard deviation (to ensure that no one item dominated the scale), and then combining the items. The resulting scale was rescored from 0–10.

6. In terms of the countries that the public sees as a possible threat to Australia, Indonesia is by far the most important. In the 2007 AES, 28 percent of the respondents saw Indonesia as a potential security threat, followed by 10 percent who mentioned China (see McAllister 2008).

7. A second-order factor analysis of the four scales produces this two-factor solution. The correlation between the two physical security scales is 0.364 and between the two lifestyle scales is 0.455.

8. All of the items used to form the scales in Table 1 were not consistently available across the surveys. In summary, the scales were represented by those items which were consistently available: namely, the environment, defence and national security, immigration, education, health, taxation and interest rates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliet Pietsch

Juliet Pietsch is Lecturer in International Relations at the School of International and Political Studies, Deakin University

Ian McAllister

Ian McAllister is a Distinguised Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University