Less than 50 days out from a federal general election Roy Morgan Research reveals that by March 2022 "government leaders dominate the Net Distrust Score rankings: Prime Minister Scott Morrison is the most distrusted politician in Australia, with Defence Minister Peter Dutton and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce the second and third most distrusted sitting politicians across the country"

Roy Morgan Research, 22 March 2022:

Since March 2019 government trust & distrust have fluctuated but 2021 ended with soaring levels of distrust

March 22 2022 Finding No. 8933 Topic: Press Release Country: Australia

Roy Morgan surveys on ‘Trust’ and ‘Distrust’ of government and government services show distrust levels soared in the second half of 2021 while trust in government fell after sexual assault allegations in Parliament house emerged in early 2021 and were followed by further allegations against Government MPs Christian Porter, Alan Tudge and Andrew Laming.

A look at trust and distrust during the term of the current government shows distrust in government and Government services has consistently far exceeded the level of trust leading to a consistently negative ‘Net Trust Score’ since early 2019.

During the early stages of the pandemic there was a clear increase in trust in Government and government services, however this higher than usual level of trust peaked at the end of 2020 and early in 2021 before the sexual assault allegations from Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins emerged.

The sexual assault allegations surrounding the Morrison Government have lingered over the past year and from June 2021 the emergence of the ‘Delta variant’ laid bare the Government’s lack of preparedness for another outbreak of COVID-19.

The extended lockdowns in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra in the second half of 2021 along with the failure to procure enough vaccines and ‘Rapid Antigen Tests’ later in the year when the ‘Omicron variant’ emerged have seen distrust levels in government increase to record levels.

Government & Government services: Trust, Distrust and Net Trust (March 2019 – Dec. 2021)

Source: Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia). Risk Monitor. Base: Australians 14+, Latest 12 months average n=21,314; Latest 12 months average for industry n=700. Includes ABS, ACCC, AEC, ASIC, ATO, Centrelink, Comcare, CSIRO, Defence Force, Education Department, Federal Government, Government (unspecified), Local Government, Medicare, My Health Record, NDIS, Queensland Health, State Government, VicHealth.

According to Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine: “If we take a much longer view and go back to 2007, we see that during the Labor disunity of the Rudd / Gillard years distrust in the Australian government was very high while simultaneously any belief that the government was doing a good job was really low.

“That pattern remained pretty constant through the Abbott, Turnbull and early Morrison governments.

“Then in 2019 when Scott Morrison won the ‘unwinnable’ election things changed - more people believed the government was doing a good job and fewer people distrusted the government.

“But by June 2021 it all went into reverse - Black Summer bushfires, the end of JobKeeper, parliamentary sex scandals, COVID vaccination delays – all sent trust plummeting and distrust climbing.”

Government distrust (red) vs. Government doing a good job running the country (green)

Source: Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia). Base: Australians 14+; quarterly average.

“By March 2022 this pattern was being mirrored in the trust and distrust of our political leaders.”

From a snap SMS survey conducted in early March, Roy Morgan can reveal that government leaders dominate the Net Distrust Score rankings: Prime Minister Scott Morrison is the most distrusted politician in Australia, with Defence Minister Peter Dutton and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce the second and third most distrusted sitting politicians across the country.

Source: Roy Morgan Snap SMS survey conducted on February 28 – March 1, 2022. Base: Australians aged 14+. n=1,409.

Clive Palmer (not in parliament and therefore not in the rankings) has the highest Net Distrust Score (net scores are calculated by subtracting distrust scores from trust scores). Taking distrust on its own however Scott Morrison is more distrusted than Clive Palmer.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has improved his Net Distrust Score ranking to be in 9th position (from 4th place in March 2020).

“With Peter Dutton the second most distrusted politician in Australia and Josh Frydenberg almost out of the top ten, this may well become crucial if the Coalition loses the May election and there’s a leadership battle between Frydenberg & Dutton,” said Ms. Levine.

“Australian political contests are no longer purely won on trust, they are lost on distrust.”

The March survey reveals the political reverse when it comes to the most trusted political leaders in the country. The ALP dominates the Net Trust Score rankings with Penny Wong in the #1 position.

Source: Roy Morgan Snap SMS survey conducted on February 28 – March 1, 2022. Base: Australians aged 14+. n=1,409.

Anthony Albanese has improved his Net Trust Score ranking to move from 8th position in March 2020 to 2nd place by March 2022. Looking solely at trust, the Opposition Leader is the most trusted politician in Australia.

According to Michele Levine, “The Labor Party is the big winner in this survey with Anthony Albanese the most trusted sitting politician, followed by Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek and WA Premier Mark McGowan.

“My take-out from the significant win for Mark McGowan in last year’s WA election and the big swing away from the increasingly distrusted Coalition in Saturday’s South Australian election is that the upcoming federal election will be won or lost on how distrusted a party’s leaders are.

“And a final word on the SA election, my view is not so much that the various polls got it right but that respondents to the pre-election polls did on election day what they said they were going to do.” 

This is how the world sees Australia and Australians in January 2020

A British perspective.....

"..the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security" [TheObserver columnist Nick Cohen writing in The Guardian, 5 January 2020]

The Guardian, 5 January 2020:

There are worse leaders than Scott Morrison. The “international community” includes torturers, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers 
and kleptomaniacs beside whom he seems almost benign. But no 
leader in the world is more abject than the prime minister of Australia.

He cuts a pathetic figure. A leader must speak honestly to his people in a crisis.The sly tactics of climate change denial, the false consoling words that it’s a scare and we can carry on as before, have left Morrison’s words as meaningless as a hum in the background. Nothing he says is worth hearing.

Australian English is rich in its descriptions of worthless men: as useful as tits on a bull, a dry thunderstorm, a third armpit, a glass door on a dunny, a pocket on a singlet, an ashtray on a motorbike, a submarine with screen doors, a roo-bar on a skateboard. Morrison is all of the above, but a British saying sums him up: “too clever by half”. Morrison won last year’s Australian general election, although his conservative Liberal party was expected to lose, by slyly mobilising opinion against tax rises in general and environmental taxes in particular.

The climate change denialism he espoused is a moving target. In the 1990s, lobbyists funded by the oil industry acted as if the overwhelming majority of scientists who understood the subject were in a conspiracy against the public. They accused the authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports of being guilty of a “major deception” when they discussed the human influence on climate. Many still hold to the original sin of this denialism.

Even as Australia burned last week, Tony Abbott, Morrison’s conservative predecessor, was still saying the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”. Abbott proved he was willing to make others suffer for his wilfully ignorant belief by scrapping a carbon tax when he was in power in Australia in 2014. A fallback position is emerging. It accepts that manmade climate change is real but withdraws the concession as soon as it has been made and loses it in an obfuscatory smoke.

The final fallback and the final degradation will come, I predict, in the mid-2020s when the right abandons denialism completely, admits that climate change is catastrophic, but adds it’s far too late to do anything about it, which it may well be.

Scott Morrison is hunkered down in stage two. He grudgingly acknowledges the existence of man-made climate change but hurriedly adds that other causes are at work. The climate has always changed and it’s not worth bearing the costs of challenging a polluting culture. It worked in last year’s elections, but sounds absurd today.

“By not recognising climate change as a serious threat you fail to prepare overworked, underappreciated first responders for larger, more frequent bushfires that devastate communities,” said one previously solid Morrison voter, after he had learned the truth about conservatism as his family waited to be evacuated from a New South Wales beach.

Despite its failure, perhaps because of its failures, the do-nothing Australian right remains admired across the conservative world. The 2019 election was meant to be a climate change election about the killing of the Great Barrier Reef, the extreme drought and average summer temperatures across the continent hitting 40C. Yet Morrison and his campaign team managed to turn it into an election about the Australian Labor party’s tax plans.

So impressed was Boris Johnson that he hired Morrison’s boys to win the British general election. Fawning coverage followed of the digital “whiz-kids” from New Zealand: Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24. In Australia, the hotshots refined their technique of dumping hundreds of crude variations on the same theme on social media. They described how Labor would raise taxes and warned that a proposal to encourage electric cars threatened motorists. Labor wanted to hit “Australians who love being out there in their four-wheel drives”, said Morrison, as his propagandists targeted ads at owners of Ford Rangers, Toyota Hilux and every other popular model, saying that Labor would increase the price of “Australia’s most popular cars”. In Britain, the same team banged home the crude message in a thousand different ways that Johnson would “get Brexit done”.

Politicians and political journalists who eulogise the cunning of clever operators aren’t being wholly asinine. How a party wins a campaign remains a matter of importance. But not one of them added, after the praise for the wise guys and whiz-kids had ended, that the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security. It’s as if crime writers spent their time detailing the cunning of criminals while never mentioning the victims left bleeding on the floor.......

Read the full article here.

An American perspective.....

"Perhaps more than any other wealthy nation on Earth, Australia is at risk from the dangers of climate change. It has spent most of the 21st century in a historic drought. Its tropical oceans are more endangered than any other biome by climate change. Its people are clustered along the temperate and tropical coasts, where rising seas threaten major cities. Those same bands of livable land are the places either now burning or at heightened risk of bushfire in the future." [Journalist Robinson Meyer writing in The Atlantic, 4 January 2020]