ANALYSIS
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While the summer of disaster has probably put paid to the Morrison government's hopes of eliminating its fiscal deficit, it is a deficit of an altogether different kind that should have it worried.
As an Australian National University survey released earlier this week made painfully clear, Scott Morrison and his colleagues have a serious trust deficit.
It is nothing new for Australians to be down on the government of the day.
But the ANU study of 3000 people found confidence in the government plunged 10.9 percentage points between October and January, a decline that researchers said was "almost unprecedented in scale".
It is hardly surprising the public's esteem for the government has suffered a heavy blow. A terrible summer like the government, along with the rest of Australia, has just had will do that.
Scott Morrison's Hawaii trip and tin ear in the early stages of the bushfire crisis, the rorting of a $100 million sports grants scheme, the police investigation of a minister over a falsified document - the fog of scandal enveloping the government has been even more persistent than the smoke that smothered Canberra.
Increasingly when senior politicians and public servants gather, the common lament has become that public expectations of government have never been so high, and trust so low.
So far, Scott Morrison has tried to shrug it all off as "a bit of a pile-on".
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But there are real concerns about what this low regard means not just for the standing of the prime minister or government of the day, but for the broader institutions of government like the Australian Public Service, and for the way people are likely to interact with government.
A Boston Consulting Group-Salesforce survey suggests there could be serious consequences.
It found a significant proportion of people don't want to share personal data with the government because they don't trust it will be safe.
Even more worrying, confidence in the government's ability to handle personal information safely and securely is sliding.
The report found that people's trust in government was heavily influenced by their experiences in interacting with it.
People have high expectations - half said they expected government services to be as good as the best in the private sector.
Failing to meet such standards undermined their confidence that the government could be trusted with their information.
This matters because the government wants to deliver more and more services online, and to use people's data to better calibrate and direct its offerings.
The solution, experts say, is for the government to be upfront and open with people about how it wants to use their data, and why.
For a government that seems overly obsessed with secrecy and information-hiding, this might be a tough lesson to apply.