Money, power, influence, secrecy: This same old rinse cycle is destroying politics

August 3, 2026 — 5:00am

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Last week, there were signs of just how little Australians are engaged with the technical details of how they are governed.

As Shane Wright wrote in these pages, 59 per cent of Australians have an entirely mistaken understanding of the relationship between interest rates and inflation. As well, almost half of us either get wrong or don’t grasp the relationship between interest rates and economic activity.

Meanwhile, Governor-General Sam Mostyn told The Guardian that there is a “woeful lack of understanding … of the tenets of our democracy”. “We’ve got a growing catastrophe, I think, in a failure to understand and engage with and feel proud of the very civic underpinnings of our democracy.”

I’m unsure about whether to find these facts concerning. Have Australians – or any peoples, really – ever had a detailed understanding of how their institutions work? Wright points out, though, that a lack of understanding can interact dangerously with a lack of trust. Each can amplify the other.

Not a problem, if our institutions retain trust. Alas, we already know that trust in our democracy has been declining. The Reserve Bank of Australia has an average score of 5.5 out of 10 for trust – not awful but not great.

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Which feels – let’s be honest – entirely logical. When push comes to shove, I suspect most experts would say neither Australian governments nor the RBA have done a bang-up job in recent years. So what reason would most people have to trust........

© The Age