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........

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