Concerns about the safety of the national way of life have consistently arisen in Australian election campaigns. These concerns have ranged from daily personal worries about family, finances and the future to larger scale threats to the nation's security. While the former are positioned in political and media discourse as domestic concerns, the latter tend to be perceived as foreign. As national citizens, we worry about military aggression or invasion; ideologies like socialism perceived as alien to the Australian identity; radical Islamic fundamentalism; and international terrorism. Political leaders have tapped into voters’ fears of these real and perceived threats to develop a complex discourse of security. Addressing domestic and foreign threats has allowed them to demonstrate that they understand the anxieties of those constructed as ordinary Australians and can offer reassurance. Vote for me, they argue, because I understand why you're scared and I can help you solve the problem. This chapter explores the language of leaders who have mobilized voters’ concerns about the security of the Australian way of life in the partisan battleground of campaign politics. Effectively presenting themselves, and their parties, as the custodians of national security offered a mechanism of connection with voters, and a means through which to position their political opponents as aligned with whichever threats were of key concern at the time. An exploration of these discourses of Australian security reveals the way that elections operate as a fundamentally partisan battle and illuminates how leaders have played into this battle, presenting themselves and their party as the natural choice to maintain identity security.

Campaign discourses that ask Australians to be concerned about domestic or foreign threats to identity security are complex. Political leaders use them to develop appeals to voters on a number of levels. First, leaders must construct the threat itself as real and vivid, with the most effective connecting contemporary concerns to long- held political, economic or cultural fears in the Australian imagination. Second, they present themselves and the party they represent as guardians of Australian security in the face of these threats, usually with reference to party history or tradition. And third, they must position their opponents either as a threat themselves, or as aligned with the enemy foremost in the public mind.