Renee Leon | Public Sector Informant: Rebuilding trust in government

They all depend on a foundation of trust. But trust it seems is fragile and in decline.

The recent National Conference of the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) heard from a wide range of speakers across the breadth of issues that impact the public service: national security, climate change, the age of misinformation, the opportunities of big data, and the recent experience of the pandemic. Throughout this diverse agenda, the importance of trust was a recurring theme.

The electoral commissioner Tom Rogers described the need to build trust in the AEC over the whole election cycle to ensure that people accept and support the outcomes of elections.

A newly savvy social media approach saw the AEC respond in real time during the 2022 election campaign to the kind of online disinformation that has derailed support for election outcomes in other parts of the democratic world.

And it seems the AEC has succeeded in its goal, with nine out of ten Australians saying they trust the AEC to deliver fair and accurate elections, an outcome making it unlikely Canberra will see anything like the attacks on the Capitol that followed the last US election.

The public service commissioner, Peter Woolcott, reflected on the necessity for trust to be established in order for stakeholder consultations to be effective.

Jim Betts, newly appointed secretary of the Infrastructure Department, reminded attendees that trust building will be essential for public servants seeking to engage with people and communities that have been traumatised, particularly in engaging with First Nations people.

And the Chief Scientist, Cathy Foley, spoke passionately about the huge opportunities for Australia in using big data for research and for policy, and the risk that these will be missed if there isn't the integrity and transparency that are needed to underpin citizen trust in data access.

With so much riding on trust, it is troubling to have to recognise that public trust in governments has been in decline for some time.

Democracy 2025 found that Australians' trust in their systems of government fell from 85 per cent to just 40 per cent between 2007 and 2018.

The ANU's long-running survey of voter attitudes to politics found a similarly precipitous decline in how much Australians believe people in government are to be trusted, down from 48 per cent in 1996 to just 25 per cent in 2019.

And although governments in Australia, as elsewhere in the world, enjoyed a trust bounce early in the pandemic, with the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reporting an all-time high of 61 points for trust in government, the trust honeymoon was short-lived; by 2022, trust had already dropped off with only 52 per cent of Australians saying they trust government to do the right thing.

What do we know about what destroys public trust, and importantly, what can be done to rebuild it?

Alan Rosenbaum, president of the American Society for Public Administration, brought a perspective from the US to the IPAA conference, detailing how Americans' trust in government has declined as deregulation reduced the capacity of government to positively influence people's lives and as extraordinary growth in inequality left many feeling left behind.

The Grattan Institute's Danielle Wood highlighted the correlation between trust and inequality in an Australian context, with young people losing trust in government as they see access to wealth and financial security sharply divided along generational lines.

Gordon de Brouwer, secretary for public sector reform, shared early insights from the latest PM&C citizen survey that showed how trust in government is broadly aligned with how close people feel to power and influence - men are more trusting than women, people in the cities more trusting than in the regions, people with multiple vulnerabilities least likely to feel high levels of trust.

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In a clear signal that trust will need to be an ongoing focus for the public service, minister Katy Gallagher, making her first major speech on the government's APS reform plans, spelled out for the IPAA conference that winning back public trust would be a key goal of the government.

"Restoring trust," Senator Gallagher said, "can't be done without public servants."

While welcoming the rapid responses developed by public servants to meet community needs in the pandemic, the minister expects that approach to become the norm, with public servants to put the needs of people and businesses at the centre of government services and policy development.

Echoing themes canvassed by earlier speakers in the conference, the minister emphasised the importance of integrity, transparency, and accountability. She set out her expectations that the public service would once again be the stewards of the public interest, and promised that the role of the public service would no longer be devalued or subject to large-scale outsourcing.

All of this will be music to the ears of Canberra public service, which has long been committed to public service values of stewardship and integrity, though may have become less accustomed to transparency in recent years.

Much of the minister's message goes to the 'how' of public service action - how public servants engage with partners and communities, how information is shared, such as her promise to publish the details of the annual survey of citizen experience, and how governments will take accountability for outcomes.

And while it was only a small part of the minister's speech, issues of substantive action - the what - also featured, with the minister flagging work on a new project of "long-term insights", engaging in consultations and developing policy to solve entrenched problems.

Harking back to the story from the United States, where public trust has been lost as governments no longer met people's core needs, perhaps that small start on solving long term policy problems might just be one of the most important steps the government will take to restore public trust.

I'm sure there are some good ideas for those long-term problems waiting for daylight in many a public servant's bottom drawer.