By Will Nicholas in Canberra

While the COVID-19 pandemic raged, the economy was nosediving and unemployment soaring, just 14 per cent of Australians thought their lives were about to get a little or a lot worse.

That has now more than doubled to 32 per cent.

Half of Australian adults are now either pessimistic of very pessimistic about the country’s future, when in the midst of the lockdowns and recession it was just 24 per cent.

Two-thirds say too many immigrants are not adopting Australian values, as support for migration tanks across several metrics.

They’re some of the findings from 2026’s Mapping Social Cohesion Survey, published on Thursday by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute.

Cost-of-living pressures and events like the Bondi massacre have soured Australians’ attitudes towards each other and fomented sky-high distrust, the 10,000-participant survey found.

Shrill debates abroad were also trickling into Australian discourse, Australian National University researcher James O’Donnell told AAP.

“It’s clear that some of the trends are coming in from overseas … distrust in elections in Australia, distrust in the court system in Australia,” he said.

“There’s obviously a big global discourse around this particular conservative side of politics that would seem to be infiltrating into Australian political and social life.”

Sorting responders by political leaning revealed huge disparities between left and right.

In two years, the number of One Nation voters who thought immigrants were not adopting Australian values rose from 89 to 96 per cent.

More than two-thirds of them believed elections were unfair, while more than a fifth of all voters – One Nation and not – said they would never trust the government, a near-quadrupling compared to six years previously.

On that measure, Scanlon Foundation head Anthea Hancocks thought she might have found an unexpected cause.

“During covid, when people were in a difficult situation, government acted in a non-partisan way, and they made things happen quite quickly,” she said.

“When people are feeling similarly anxious about the future and from all sorts of different things, local and international, they are wondering why government isn’t acting as fast.”

But while institutions and governments copped a hiding, Australians were much more trusting of the people they knew.

All the surveyed indicators of local – not national – belonging have stayed stable since the report began in 2007, including one showing more than four in five people live in communities where their neighbours are willing to help each other.

“Most Australians are actually good people who want the best for everybody, and the data actually shows that,” Ms Hancocks said.

“The vast majority of us all want the same thing.”

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.