2022: The year our trust was abused to breaking point

As the summer break draws near, many will be glad to see the back of 2022. But there’s something important to be remembered about this year before we bid it good riddance. Much more than most years, it’s reminded us of something we know, but keep forgetting: the central importance of trust – and the consternation when we discover it’s been abused.

Every aspect of our lives depends on trust. Spouses must be able to trust each other. Children need parents they can trust and, when the children become teenagers, parents need to be able to trust them. Friendships rely on mutual trust.

Trust is just as important to the smooth functioning of the economy. Bosses need to be able to trust their workers; workers need bosses they can trust. The banking system runs on trust because the banks lend out the money we deposit with them; should all the depositors demand their money back at the same time, the bank risks collapse.

Just buying stuff in a shop involves trust that you won’t be taken down. Buying stuff on the internet requires much more trust. Tradies call on our trust when they demand payment before they start the job.

Our democracy runs on trust. We trust the leaders we elect to act in our best interests, not their own. Our country’s co-operation with other countries rests on trust. Of late, our relations with China, our major trading partner, have become mutually distrustful.

The trouble with trust, however, is that it can make us susceptible. And, as Melbourne University’s Tony Ward reminds us, it can be just too tempting to the less scrupulous to take advantage of our trusting nature.

They can get away with a lot before we wake up. But when we do, there are serious repercussions. Much worse, the loss of trust – some of it warranted; much of it not - makes our lives run a lot less smoothly.

The truth is that, as a nation, we’ve slowly become less trusting of those around us. But this year is notable for events where trust – or the lack of it – was central.

It’s widely agreed that the main reason the federal Coalition government was tossed out in May was the unpopularity of Scott Morrison. The Australian National University’s Australian Election Study has found that the two most important factors influencing political leaders’ popularity are perceived honesty and trustworthiness.

Its polling showed Morrison 29 percentage points behind Anthony Albanese on honesty, and 28 points behind on trustworthiness.

By contrast, many were expecting Daniel Andrews to be punished at the recent Victorian election for the harsh measures he insisted on during the pandemic. It didn’t happen. We don’t have fancy studies to prove it, but my guess is he retained the trust of the majority of voters.

The ANU study always asks questions about trust in government. This year it found 70 per cent of respondents agreeing that “people in government look after themselves” and only 30 per cent agreeing that “people in government can be trusted to do the right thing”.

This helps explain why the federal election was no triumph for Labor. The combined primary vote for the major parties fell to 68 per cent, the lowest since the 1930s. Labor’s own election report explains this as “part of a long-term trend driven by declining trust in government, politics and politicians”.

But don’t put all the blame on the pollies. This year opened our eyes to the risk we run of the businesses we deal with allowing our identification details and other private information to be stolen by hackers and made public.

Customers of Optus, Medibank and some other firms have learnt the hard way that the businesses who demand so much identification from us can’t be trusted to keep that information secure.

It’s been a wake-up call not only for those big businesses and others, but also for the new federal government. If businesses can’t be trusted to do the right thing, they must be required to do so by tighter regulation.

Oh no, not more red tape? Yes, and that’s my point. There’s nothing that generates extra expense and slows things down more than not being able to trust the people you must deal with.

Ward reminds us of the benefits of a high level of trust. It reduces “transaction costs” – the cost of doing business. “Profits and investments are higher if you don’t have to spend lots of time and money checking whether other parties are honest or not,” he says.

“People invest more in their own education if they believe a fair system will reward their efforts. If you think the system is rigged, why bother?”

Comparing countries, economists have found strong links between more social trust and higher levels of income. Trust is one of the top determinants of long-term economic growth.

And high-trust societies, with less distrust of science, had better outcomes in tackling COVID. That’s one respect in which we didn’t do too badly this year.

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We risk becoming a business kleptocracy, with pollies showing how

I was startled the other day to hear a mate saying he was a bit depressed by the thought that Australia was turning into a business kleptocracy. What? Surely not. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he was on to something.

I’ve written a lot in recent times about the failure of what lefty academics call “neoliberalism” and its quest for smaller government. Going back to the reign of the Howard government, both sides of politics have accepted the fashionable idea that, though there are plenty of services governments should continue asking taxpayers to pay for, the actual delivery of those services should be “outsourced” to the private sector.

Why? Because, as everyone knows, the public sector is inefficient, whereas the private sector is highly efficient. Because it would be so much better to have more of us working for business and fewer working for the various arms of government. The greater efficiency should lead to lower taxes.

I’ve pointed to instances where this mixture of ideology and tribalism has failed, leading to lower quality services without much evident saving to the taxpayer. In a democracy, it’s always right to hold governments ultimately responsible for their stuff-ups.

But is that the whole story? My mate’s looking at it from a different angle: what do the many failed attempts to hand service delivery to for-profit operators say about the ethics and trustworthiness of Australia’s business people?

That, for a surprising number of them, if you see some money lying around with nobody watching, you grab it? That while ripping-off customers is unethical and will soon get you a bad reputation, overcharging “the government” is a harmless, victimless crime? No human was hurt in the making of this profit?

One of the first government services to be outsourced was childcare. Before long, a single company bought up more than half the childcare centres, expanded overseas and then collapsed. To avoid leaving many parents in the lurch, government had to step in and sort it – at great expense.

Much of the sector remains privately owned. Last week the United Workers Union produced a report finding that three-quarters of the 12,000 enforcement actions taken since 2015 were against for-profit providers.

The Rudd government drew much criticism over the deaths of several people caused by faulty installation of pink batts during the global financial crisis. But what does it say about all the inexperienced operators using unqualified workers who flooded into the industry because they saw an easy buck to be made?

Bipartisan decisions to open vocational education to private operators and charge fees on a similar basis to the HECS loan scheme, attracted many new operators, some of which used salespeople offering free iPads to unsuitable youngsters who signed up for “free” online courses. Cost the taxpayer millions in debt write-offs.

The present government and the four big banks swore there was no need for a royal commission into possible misconduct but, when its hand was forced, we all remember how much misconduct was uncovered.

An accountants’ report for the royal commission into aged care found that, using a common definition of profit (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) for-profit aged care providers in the second-highest quartile had a profit margin of 16 per cent, compared with 13 per cent for non-profits and 4 per cent for state government providers in 2018. Return on equity was 12 per cent for non-profit providers and 72 per cent for for-profit providers.

This week Sydney’s Star casino joined Melbourne’s Crown casino in being accused of turning a blind eye to suspected money laundering, organised crime and foreign interference.

Whether or not you think Treasurer Josh Frydenberg should have included in the JobKeeper scheme a provision to claw back assistance that proved not to be needed, it’s surprising to see some big companies announcing healthy profits while hanging on to their grants.

This week the Fair Work Ombudsman filed court proceedings alleging that the Commonwealth Bank had knowingly breached its wage deals with employees as part of a $16.4 million underpayment.

The ombudsman’s annual report for 2019-20 said it had recovered more than $123 million for 25,000 employees, including $90 million in underpayments that employers self-reported.

Some of our biggest and seemingly most respectable companies, including Woolworths, Coles, Wesfarmers’ Target and Bunnings, Qantas and Crown casino – not to mention the ABC – have admitted or been accused of “wage theft”. Underpayment seems standard practice in the restaurant industry.

We’re asked to believe these are innocent mistakes made by big corporations with big human relations departments and computerised payroll systems because industrial awards and agreements are so hellishly complex. Sorry, I don’t.

Much easier to believe a culture has developed that business’ contribution to the economy is so heroic that behaving with honour and even obeying penny-fogging laws is optional.

And how could business people have reached such a self-serving conclusion? Perhaps by observing the Morrison government’s unashamed rorting of grant programs and Saint Gladys’ sanctification of political pork barrelling: it’s not illegal and everybody does it.

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It's the rich wot get to complain and the poor wot get infected

If you’re anything like me, you’re getting mighty tired of lockdowns. I miss being able get out of the house whenever I choose, I miss going to restaurants and – my favourite vice – going to movies. That bad, huh? You’re right, I don’t have much to complain about. I don’t envy those having to school their kids while working at home – although I do miss seeing my grandkids in the flesh.

If you think I need reminding of how easy I’m doing it compared with a lot of others, you’re probably right. But I suspect that’s true of many of us, even those of us doing it just a tiny bit tougher than me.

Apart from those with kids to mind, the first hardship dividing line is between those of us easily able to work from home and those not. This probably means those still on their usual pay and those reliant on some kind of government support.

Even those unable to work from home but “fortunate” to work in an essential industry probably pay the price of running a much higher risk of getting the virus. And that without anyone doing enough to help them get jabbed.

Another divide would be between those in secure employment, with proper annual and sick leave entitlements, and the third of workers in “precarious” employment, most of whom are casuals rather than in the “gig economy”.

Having so many workers without entitlement to sick leave has been a burden for those involved and for the rest of us, namely an increased risk of being infected by someone who, needing the money, keeps working when they shouldn’t.

But though the dividing lines are different in a pandemic, the greatest divide of all is unchanged. As the old song says, it’s the same the whole world over, it’s the rich wot gets the pleasure, it’s the poor wot gets the blame.

Any amount of research confirms what the medicos call “the social gradient” – the well-off tend to be in much better health than those near the bottom. They’re less likely to be overweight (I must be an exception) and less likely to smoke.

The Mitchell Institute at Victoria University has just issued the second edition of its “health tracker by socio-economic status”. It finds that the 10 million Australians living in the 40 per cent of communities with lower and lowest socio-economic status have much higher rates of preventable cardio-vascular diseases, cancer, diabetes or chronic respiratory diseases than others in the population.

Why then should we be surprised to learn that, though Sydney’s outbreak of the Delta variant seems to have started in the better-off eastern suburbs, it soon migrated to the outer south west, where it finds a lot more business?

Last week the welfare peak body, the Australian Council of Social Service, issued a joint research report on Work, Income and Health Inequality, with academics at the University of NSW.

ACOSS boss Dr Cassandra Goldie says “the pandemic has exposed the stark inequalities that impact our health across the country. People on the lowest incomes, and with insecure work and housing, have been at greatest risk throughout the COVID crisis. Now, they are the same people who are at risk of missing out in the vaccine rollout”.

Then there’s the question of trust. Social trust works through social norms of behaviour, such as willingness to co-operate with strangers and willingness to follow government rules. As in other rich countries, our trust in governments has declined over the years. Last year it seemed to lift, as many of us believed we could trust our leaders – particularly the premiers – to save us from the pandemic.

Whether that confidence survives this year’s missteps we’ll have to see. But the economic historian Dr Tony Ward, of Melbourne University, reminds us of a significant finding in this year’s World Happiness Report: in general, the higher a country’s level of social trust, the lower its COVID-19 death rate.

Stay with me. An experiment by the American behavioural economist Alain Cohn and colleagues in Switzerland involved “losing” 17,000 wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries and seeing how many of them were returned to their supposed owners.

The rate of wallet return was about 80 per cent in the Scandinavian countries and New Zealand, just under 70 per cent in Australia, less than 60 per cent in the US and less than 30 per cent in Mexico.

Ward did his own study and found that two-thirds of the difference between countries could be explained by their degree of inequality of income. The greater the inequality, the less trust. When he added survey data on people’s perceptions of corruption, his apparent ability to explain the differences in trust rose from 68 per cent to 82 per cent.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her minions tell us the virus is raging in certain “LGAs of concern” because people aren’t doing as they’ve been asked. Maybe their lack of co-operation reflects a lack of trust in the benevolence of those higher up the income ladder. Inequality doesn’t come problem-free.

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Economies malfunction when we can't trust our leaders

With the federal, NSW and Victorian governments all mired in questionable conduct but refusing to accept responsibility for their actions, a reminder of the value of ethical behaviour to the good governance of the nation is timely.

A report, The Ethical Advantage, by John O’Mahony, of Deloitte Access Economics, and commissioned by Dr Simon Longstaff’s Ethics Centre, reminds us that while ethical behaviour and trust are different things, a long record of ethical behaviour builds trust, which can be quickly destroyed by unethical behaviour.

To be successful, business leaders need the trust of their customers, employees and suppliers. The less people trust them, the harder they must work – and the more they must spend on marketing and security – to remain profitable.

It’s true you can go for a fair while abusing the trust of others, but when eventually they wake up, they tend to be pretty dirty about it. For years our banks took advantage of their customers’ trusting inattention by, for instance, failing to advise loyal customers of the better deals they were offering new customers. Now they wonder why their customers hate and distrust them.

Years of declining standards of behaviour on both sides of politics, and refusal to accept responsibility when things go wrong, have led to declining levels of trust in our politicians, and lowering respect for our leaders.

The imminent threat posed by the pandemic prompted our federal and state leaders to stop bickering and pull together, with oppositions anxious to be co-operative. The result was a marked increase in public confidence in the Prime Minister and premiers – a bonus Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk banked on Saturday.

But no sooner had the threat eased – but not passed – than we were back to politics as usual. Our leaders don’t lead, they try to score points off their opponents. Great way to kill their newfound popularity.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that there remains significant scope for us to raise our levels of ethical behaviour and trust. The Governance Institute of Australia’s ethics index, based on an annual survey of Australians’ perceptions of the level of ethical behaviour in society, gave us a “somewhat ethical” score of plus 37 on a scale of minus 100 to plus 100.

This was for last year, before the pandemic, and down from plus 41 in 2017. Across industries, healthcare was seen as the most ethical, with a score of plus 67. Then came education, charities and not-for-profits, and agriculture. Banking, finance and insurance was seen as the least ethical industry, with a score of minus 18.

According to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, just 47 per cent of Australians trust business, government, media and our non-government organisations to do the right thing. Worse, none was seen as strongly competent or ethical – with government being seen as the least competent and ethical out of all our institutions.

Remembering the “steady stream of state and federal political scandals”, the report says, this weak ethical performance is no surprise. Royal commissions have uncovered unconscionable behaviour in religious and other institutions, widespread misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industry, and alarming lapses in aged care quality and safety.

Behaving ethically requires us think a lot about what’s right and wrong in the things we do, the way we treat people and the choices we make. For some action to be legal doesn’t make it ethical. Grant Hehir, Commonwealth Auditor General, says “we care not only about whether an entity is following the legal rules, but also whether it is acting within the intent of the law and community expectations”.

Nor is an action ethical because “it’s what everyone does”. Professor Ian Harper, of Melbourne University Business School, says “we all have values and moral convictions – ethics is about having the courage to apply these in the real world”.

The report says that, apart from the pandemic, we’re facing big challenges to our future, including from climate change, an increasingly risky geo-political environment, new technology and the future of work, and reconciliation with Indigenous Australians.

The actions needed to cope with these challenges “will require leadership of a quality that enables society to cohere in the face of external and internal pressures that would otherwise cause divisions.

“In these circumstances, trust will be at a premium – especially for key institutions. In turn, this will depend on the quality of ethical decision-making by individuals, groups and organisations,” the report concludes.

When the unethical behaviour of business and politicians causes them to lose the public’s trust, governments lose the ability to make tough “reforms”. As the pandemic demonstrates, only when politicians can clearly be seen as acting in the whole public’s best interests will they be safe at the polls.

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Boards and managers responsible for reducing banks' value

Too few of us realise it, but we should thank God (and my new best friend, Peter Costello) for our independent central bank. Prime ministers and treasurers seem to say little that’s not point scoring, and Treasury is now highly politicised, but we can always rely on Reserve Bank governors to be frank about what’s happening in the economy and what should be happening.

Last week the latest of our straight-shooting governors, Dr Philip Lowe, offered his conclusions on the shocking revelations of the banking royal commission. His wise words are worth recounting at length, to be sure you don’t miss them.

As Lowe reminds us, finance is all about trust. The first line of the voluntary “banking and finance oath” (which more bankers should now be taking) says “trust is the foundation of my profession”.

Australian banks have a strong record of being worthy of the trust that is placed in them to repay deposits, but in other areas trust has been strained.

The royal commission has highlighted three issues where work is needed to restore the public’s trust. First, Lowe says, “the inadequate way in which banks have dealt with conflict of interest issues”.

Second, “the way that poorly designed incentive systems can distort behaviour – promoting a sales culture at the expense of a service culture, and promoting the short term at the expense of the long term”.

Third, “the fact that the consequences for not doing the right thing have, in some cases, been too light”.

Central to fixing these breaches of trust is creating a strong culture of service within our financial institutions, Lowe says. This starts with correcting the system of internal reward established by the board and management.

“The vast bulk of the people who work for Australia’s financial institutions do want to do the right thing, and they do want to serve their customers as best they can. But, like everybody else, they respond to the incentives they face.

“If they are rewarded on sales or short-term objectives, it should not come as a great surprise that that’s what they prioritise.”

In the minds of economists, incentives can be negative (sticks) as well as positive (carrots). “One of the things that influences incentives is the consequences and penalties that apply when something goes wrong.

“Strong penalties can play an important role in incentivising good behaviour, and this is an area we should be looking it.”

But it’s worth distinguishing between the penalties that apply for poor conduct and those that apply for granting loans that can’t be repaid, Lowe says. “On conduct issues, we should set our expectations and standards high, and if they are not met the penalties should be firm.”

With bank lending, however, it’s trickier. “Even when banks lend responsibly, a percentage of borrowers will end up in financial strife and be unable to meet their obligations.

“We need banks to be prepared to make loans in the full expectation that some borrowers will not be able to pay them back."

Get this: “Banks need to take risk and manage that risk well. If they become afraid to lend simply because of the consequences of making a loan that goes bad, our economy will suffer.”

So it does seem true that Lowe fears the banks will overreact to the punishment and tighter regulation imposed on them following the royal commission’s findings, and that this could lead to them crimping economic growth.

(Just how concerned Lowe is about this is something the media can only speculate about. Top econocrats will always be sotto voce, for fear a loud shout of warning may be self-fulfilling. The media trumpet dire predictions because they don’t imagine anyone will take them seriously.)

Back on the public’s trust, having clear lines of accountability can help. But “we should not lose sight of the fact that it is the banks’ boards and management that are ultimately responsible for the choices that banks make. Creating the right culture is a core responsibility of boards and management.”

One thing that would help, Lowe says, “is for financial institutions to a have a long-term focus and reflect that in their internal incentives. Managing to short-term targets might boost the share price for a while, but this short-termism can weaken the long-term franchise value of the bank.

“I would argue that the franchise value is more likely to be maximised if our financial institutions have a long-term perspective, treat their customers well, reward loyalty rather than take advantage of it, and invest in systems and technology that deliver world-class financial services . . .

“Doing this would not only be good for bank shareholders, but also for the broader community.” Well said.

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How the banks lost our trust - and how they can get it back

Where to now for the big four banks, AMP and some other big businesses? They’ve abused the trust of their customers and the public, and it will be a long time before any side of politics wants to be seen as going easy on them.

Of course, the banking royal commission isn’t over. We’ve yet to see what punishments it recommends be imposed and what tightening of regulation, and then what the next government decides to do in response.

But if the nation’s chief executives have any gumption, they won’t wait for all that before turning their minds to why their customers’ trust was lost, and how they can go about getting it back.

This week the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia held a symposium in Canberra on regenerating integrity and trust in Australian institutions. Professor Leon Mann, a psychologist from the University of Melbourne, and Associate Professor Nicole Gillespie, a management expert from the business school at the University of Queensland, spoke about trust from a business perspective.

Gillespie drew on a major study she conducted with three other academics, Designing Trustworthy Organisations, published by the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Although companies that suffer a loss of trust often blame “rogue employees” or “a few bad apples,” Gillespie and her colleagues’ research shows that major violations of trust are almost never the result of rogue actors.

Rather, they are predictable in organisations that allow dysfunctional, conflicting or incongruent elements of their system to take root. It’s the barrel that’s rotten.

Often the incongruence that led to the loss of trust was the development of a company strategy that favoured the interests of one stakeholder group while betraying those of others.

“This problem has often been defined as letting shareholder profits take precedence over core responsibilities to other stakeholders (such as employees, customers, suppliers or communities),” the study says.

And it’s not just favouring one stakeholder over the others, it’s doing so at the expense of the others, and even causing harm to them.

Bang on. How did those guys know about our banks?

They note that a US Senate committee investigating the global financial crisis was very critical of Goldman Sachs, whose stated values of client focus and integrity were at times overshadowed by a less formal culture that emphasised getting deals done with less than full disclosure (to the mugs on the other end of the deal).

Good point. Trustworthiness has to be embedded into every aspect of the business’s strategy, structure, processes and systems. But there are formal ideals and rules, and then there’s always an informal culture. The two must be “congruent” – they must fit together.

When the rules say one thing, but the pressure from your supervisor says something different, most employees soon realise what the boss, and the boss’s bosses, really want.

“Our research suggests that the key differentiator between companies that violate trust and those that sustain it is integrity and consistency within and across the organisation,” the study says.

So how can a company that’s lost its customers’ trust get it back? The good news is that when years of untrustworthy behaviour reach crisis point, this can create the impetus to really turn things around.

You need to start with a credible, rigorous and independent investigation of the weaknesses in the system that caused the problem.

“Companies are often so concerned with appearance and damage control that they are unwilling to engage in the degree of examination required to root out the entrenched causes of trust violations,” the study says.

For instance, BP allowed its Texas refinery explosion in 2005 to be followed by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. News Corp had an employee jailed for phone hacking in 2007, but endured another phone-hacking scandal in 2011.

Next, since trust failures are typically systemic, the organisational reforms need to be systemic as well. Structures, systems and processes should be the first point of intervention because they’re relatively easy to design and change.

However, such interventions by themselves are unlikely to produce sustainable change. “The more difficult challenges involve making changes to the organisation’s culture, strategy and leadership and management practice.

“Indeed, adding training in ethical conduct probably won’t affect organisational behaviour in any meaningful way if supervisors, workplace norms and performance management objectives continue to encourage questionable activities,” the study says.

Finally, evaluation. Even when a trust crisis recedes, old habits have a way of returning. Reforms must be evaluated to ensure they are working as intended, and any shortfalls are addressed.

“Because it takes time to change systems and deep change is hard to realise, in some respects the most important part of trust repair is the ongoing assessment, learning and course correction required to build authentic, sustained trustworthiness.”

Wow. How easily Australia’s story fits into the academics’ generalised framework.

I think the main reason our banks ran off the rails is that they got locked into an utterly inward-looking game in which each of the four players competed to see who could raise their profits the most.

To this end, they gave their senior people incentive schemes and their junior people key performance indicators aimed solely at increasing profits. The targets set were so demanding they implicitly encouraged staff to ignore the company’s stated values and bend rules that stood in the way of achieving the target and pleasing the boss.

Bosses can’t have failed to notice the questionable practices this gave rise to, but they looked the other way for fear of falling back in the profits comp.

They attempted to justify this by claiming company law required them to put shareholders’ interests first. They failed to mention that, by exploiting and using up the trust of their customers, they were putting shareholders’ short-term interests ahead of their long-term interests – a short-sightedness company law never required of them.

The price bank shareholders are paying for the mistreatment of bank customers is now apparent.

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Trust makes the world go around, honestly

What does Britain's phone hacking scandal have in common with its earlier scandal over parliamentary expenses and with the failure of several of its banks during the global financial crisis? As Jonathan Tame, of Britain's Relationships Global, has observed, all three events shake the trust the Brits can have in key institutions of their democracy. The latest scandal raises questions about the trustworthiness of the press, the government and the police.

Sometimes you don't appreciate the importance of things until you're threatened with their loss. Of nothing is that truer than trust.

''Every society is built on trust, and every person needs to be trustworthy,'' Tame says. ''Yet greater integrity is expected from politicians, the police and the media, which is why their failure to meet the public's ethical standards is so distressing.''

Why is trust so important? It's what prevents us from having to do everything ourselves. Trust is believing someone else will act correctly. It enables us to hand our children over to teachers, give our vote to a politician, relax while the pilot flies the plane, put our money in a bank account and share the roads with other motorists.

''We do these things without anxiety because we believe that the others involved share our values, will act responsibly and look after our interests,'' Tame says.

''With any loss of trust, relational capital diminishes. Society becomes poorer as more time is taken drawing up detailed contracts and regulations, more funds are spent on security, surveillance and policing, and health declines because people grow more anxious.''

Mark Scholefield prepared a study on trust for the Relationships Foundation. He says trust allows us to share information and responsibilities for our mutual benefit, while giving us the freedom to get on with our own work and life without worrying too much about the part others play.

''We probably cannot live without some degree of trust,'' Scholefield says. ''Our lives and relationships are too complex to monitor and control completely.''

Trust involves reciprocity. If I trust you, you're more likely to trust me. If you trust me, I'm more likely to live up to that trust. Assume I'm untrustworthy and I'm more likely to conform to your expectations.

But to abuse another's trust is often to end your relationship with them. You can cheat someone with impunity if you're never expecting to see them again. If you're planning to stick around, however, the best strategy is to behave in a trustworthy manner. It's intolerable not to be trusted and equally intolerable not to be able to trust the people around you.

Trust is closely linked to reputation. Whether you're a business, an employee or just a friend, it pays to build a reputation for trustworthiness and reliability. In the modern world we deal with so many people and organisations we don't know that we're often forced to rely on their reputations.

Richard Bronk, of the London School of Economics, has written that trust is crucial to the success of economic relationships such as those between managers and workers or between companies and their suppliers. And honesty is the essential lubricant to a system of exchange.

''If trust and honesty mean anything it is that these individuals will be motivated by them to suspend the continual quest for personal advantage in certain key situations,'' Bronk says.

If ever there was a case where the quest for personal, commercial and party advantage is damaging our trust in politicians and the media it's the unending brawling over the carbon tax.

It seems the public's trust in Julia Gillard will forever be tainted by the manner in which she came to power. She's not the first or the last politician to break a promise - in this case her promise not to introduce a carbon tax during the present term - but her failure to apologise and adequately explain her reasons for doing so is undoubtedly compounding the loss of trust in her.

Nor will it be helped by her use of taxpayers' money to pay for an advertising campaign to sell the carbon tax before it has become law. In opposition, Labor bitterly attacked the Howard government's abuse of public funds for such purposes; now it's doing the same. In the heat of battle, the possibility of short-term benefit outweighs the risk to the reputation of politicians in general and Labor in particular.

Scare campaigns - where politicians prey on the fears of insecure and ill-informed voters by greatly exaggerating the likely consequences of the other side's policies - are accepted by both sides of politics and the media as a legitimate tactic.

It's always a lot harder to explain a complex policy than it is to put the frighteners on the punters but Tony Abbott's gross misrepresentation of the carbon tax's effect on prices, employment and whole industries exceeds all records in effectiveness and dishonesty.

I would never have believed one politician could, by all his reckless claims, stop retail sales in their tracks as frightened punters close their purses in fear for their futures. Why the retailers aren't tearing him apart I don't know.

Do his fellow Liberals and their supporters imagine there will be no backlash when voters eventually realise just how much they were wound up?

But is the media working to help their perplexed customers discern the truth of all the claims and counterclaims? Too many of them are playing the controversy for all it's worth, trumpeting the claims of interest groups that are undocumented and untested. Some are motivated by partisanship, almost all by commercial advantage.

Do they, too, imagine this abuse of the public's trust will go unpunished? What's happening in Britain says otherwise.

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