If someone took money from you and then lied about how they spent it, or if they betrayed you and hurt you over and over again, how easy would it be for you to trust them again? What if that person was your government and the ‘you’ was the most vulnerable people in your community? Would the public’s trust in government tear beyond mending?
Trust between people and institutions is not so different from trust between individuals. Most relationships can survive small, unintentional breaches. We’re all fallible. We know that and accept it in ourselves and others. Deep, wounding betrayals or persistent dishonesty are a different thing. They leave scars that never heal.
Trust in government before COVID had reached an all-time low in Australia. Only 25 percent of people agreed that people in government could be trusted and 75 percent believed “people in government looked after themselves”. Both these indicators had been on a steady downward trajectory between 2004 and 2019.
It’s not difficult to understand why. After the turmoil and self-aggrandizing instability of the Rudd/Gillard/Abbot years, the Turnbull/Morrison governments have spent the last five years wading through a litany of trust breaches. Christian Porter, Alan Tudge, Stuart Robert and the Robodebt debacle. Sports rorts. All the other rorts and pork barrelling. Chinese elections signs. Visa for au pairs. Helloworld. Angus Taylor and the poisoning of Jamland. Barnaby Joyce and watergate. Half a billion dollars for a Great Barrier Reef. Barnaby Joyce again. “It’s ok to be white”. Hawaiian holidays in the middle of a national emergency. Land purchase for Western Sydney Airport. Non-expense expenses. Angus Taylor again, on the disinformation about Clover Moore. Taxpayers subsidising political research. Hakeem Al-Araibi imprisoned in Thailand. $423m payment to Paladin. Christian Porter and Witness K. Alan Tudge and ‘criminal’ detention of an asylum seeker. The list goes on and on. And on.
This list is just the most recent and doesn’t include any misconduct by Labor, not because there isn’t any (there most certainly is) but because the Coalition is currently in government and therefore in a position to abuse the power they’ve been given. All parties, including the minor ones, will have to take a high level of mistrust into the next election.
The only people to lose their job so far are National Party ministers, Bridget McKenzie and Barnaby Joyce. A political coincidence that doesn’t pass any kind of test, not when there are so many Liberal Party ministers still standing after equal or even worse carryings on.
Over 80 percent of people have, for years, consistently supported the creation of a federal independent, national anti-corruption body, demonstrating the widespread public suspicion of politicians acting without independent oversight. Unsurprisingly, the federal government is dragging its heels down to the bone on this one. The ‘if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear’ argument was used to justify all kinds of government intrusion into citizen’s privacy but in yet another example of entitled arrogance, this is not the same standard ministers apply to themselves.
Did you fudge your expenses, pork barrel marginal electorates, give jobs and money to your mates or viciously insult a large section of the voters? Never mind. You can issue an absolute denial (facts are not relevant), a quick sorry-not-sorry, or the tried and true, ‘can’t comment until investigations have concluded’. Then everyone will sit back and wait for the news cycle to move on. No one will care, or if they do, they won’t care for long.
And no one does care. The reaction is more jaded and disgusted than enraged. We’re inured to the perpetual white noise of scandal. Trust in government decomposed under a mound of excrement and a lack of any alternatives. Around 60 percent of the country doesn’t believe there is a great difference between political parties and nearly 80 percent don’t think the parties care what the voters think anyway.
This is far less a problem for government than it is for the voters. Politicians no longer really fear there will be consequences for malfeasance, so there is no real deterrent. For the voters, however, the consequences are profound. Lack of trust in government and media (some sections of which are also deeply mistrusted) makes it difficult to believe the vital information we’re given about our health services, economy and infrastructure. It contributes to the perception of an unstable and unsafe world. If we do not have reliable facts on which to base decisions, we have to fall back on feelings. Wishful thinking, self-interest and nostalgia take the place of analysis and assessment. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that lacking trust in our public institutions contributes in no small way to rising ideological polarisation.
Rebuilding trust, as with personal relationships, is difficult. It requires action, not empty words, that prove commitment to genuine change. The Four Corners accusations of misconduct by Alan Tudge and Christian Porter have, so far, proceeded down the usual path of obfuscation, denial and refusal to acknowledge the real issues, which, as I wrote last week, are not about sex but about power and the abuse of it.
There was no massive public outcry about the allegations. They might have had more of an impact if they weren’t cushioned by the cynicism created by a conga line of dishonest dealings.
It’s probably too soon to know whether the allegations made by Four Corners will have any effect on Tudge and Porter’s careers. It’s certainly too soon to know whether they will change the toxic environment of the Canberra bubble. Some people may hope it’s a turning point. I wish it were one of them, but all I can see so far is another breach of trust that politicians will just wait out and then move on as if nothing had happened.
Jane Gilmore was the founding editor of The King’s Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and author, with a particular interest in feminism, media and data journalism and has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, The Saturday Paper and Meanjin, among many others. Jane has a Master of Journalism from the University of Melbourne, and her book FixedIt: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media was published by Penguin Random House in 2019.
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