The report, called Trust and Democracy in Australia, was released by the Museum of Australian Democracy and the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra. It traced an apparent dramatic decline in satisfaction with Australian democracy over the past decade from 86 per cent to 41 per cent.

This research team, including professors Mark Evans, Max Halupka and Gerry Stoker, has been working on the topic of democracy for the past five years and have issued several survey reports related to trust. Recently they concluded that: “There is compelling evidence of the increasing disconnect between government and citizens reflected in the decline of democratic satisfaction, trust in politicians, political parties and other key institutions and lack of public confidence in the capacity of governments (of whatever colour) to address public policy concerns.”

But their conclusions are not at all negative, because they interpret community responses as being confident in what they call the “adaptive capacity” of Australian democracy as its culture moves from “allegiant” to “divergent”. The Museum of Australia Democracy website for its current exhibition “Democracy. Are you in?”, which lists five of the research team’s explanatory research papers, puts it provocatively when it claims that: "Democracy is a living system and it works best when there is a healthy balance between trust and distrust-but the balance is tipping. Distrust is on the rise, and confidence in our political and social institutions is at its lowest point in decades”.

In other words, too much trust can be as much a problem as too little trust. That raises the pertinent question of what is the appropriate attitude of a citizen towards the government? We shouldn’t all be true believers because that would be naïve. Rather we should be alert to the obvious weaknesses of democracy. Active engagement includes a certain healthy scepticism which doesn’t take things at face value.

Few Australians know many politicians at all, most probably know none. Unlike for our personal relationships that means that all our judgements are based on what we learn from the public sphere. We can’t make realistic personal judgments of whether a politician is trustworthy or not. In fact, it has always been the case that our judgements of our local member of parliament, who we are closer to in some sense and whom we may have a personal acquaintance with, are more favourable than they are of the whole system or political parties in general.

The mediating institutions which shape our judgements include media reports and commentary, what we see on television and hear on the radio, and what governments do compared with what they say they are going to do in election campaigns like the one coming up next May.

Evans, Halupka and Stoker emphasise that Australians think about and engage with the political system in a complex way. In an earlier report, they conclude that while Australians are proud of our democratic values in many ways they are “very dissatisfied with the nature of politics on offer which they associate with the untrustworthy contemporary politician and the adversarial system of government”.

In their most recent report they list the top reasons for distrust, based on answers to a direct question: why do you think there has been a steady decline in citizen trust in our governments since 2007?

The answers show how multi-faceted, and sometimes contradictory, the elements of trust in government are and for that reason how tricky trust is for politicians like Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten to address, especially in an election climate.

The top reasons for growing distrust are:

Many citizens don’t trust contemporary politicians and don’t like adversarial politics. Yet a federal election in our political system is an adversarial contest led by the leaders of the two major political parties, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Many don’t like the unrelenting battle between Labor and the Coalition, but many others appreciate some choice and distinctiveness between those same parties. The party leaders therefore have difficult choices to make in how they conduct themselves.

The Morrison government may be able to survive a lack of trust in democracy or in both parties, even though voters may primarily blame the government. But they can’t survive if the lack of trust is directed just at them.

Issues of trust in Australian democracy will not go away but by next May they will come down to how central the Morrison government is to the particular worries of the majority of voters.

John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.