Economic reform depends on public trust – and that trust is being undermined by declining transparency, weak accountability and limited public engagement.

Many Labor supporters, including me, have been disappointed by what they see as Albanese’s timidity when it comes to adopting a significant policy reform agenda.

But in fairness to Albo, perhaps he felt a bit inhibited by the decline in public trust over this century; a decline which is common to most liberal democracies. As the OECD has observed, there is a connection between the level of trust in government and the capacity of government to address complex policy challenges.

Unless people feel confident in the capability of their government and generally trust it, many will oppose reforms that inevitably will involve changes for them. Indeed, this public resistance to change can be seen in the rise of One Nation.

In this context, it is interesting to note that according to ANU election studies, in modern times trust in the Australian government peaked in the early years of the Hawke Government. Most probably this reflected the Hawke Government’s consensus approach to economic policy-making, which was based upon the sharing of information.

However, trust in government in Australia started falling in the 1990s and according to OECD data, public trust in government in Australia fell from 62.72 per cent of the population aged fifteen or over in 2008 to 48.72 per cent in 2025. Interestingly, the Australian experience was not very different from other similar countries (see Table 1), although the Nordics have done much better, and the UK and US have experienced the biggest loss of popular trust in government, especially the US under Trump.

Table 1 Trust in government

percentage of population aged 15 and over

So the starting point for any reform program is that unless a significant degree of trust in government can be restored, the likelihood of that reform program being adopted and succeeding is worse than in the past. Nevertheless, despite the likely difficulties in gaining popular support for a significant reform program, Albanese has recently........

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