The Trust Tree

The Whiteboard That Turned My Stomach

This is not a statistic I read. It is a thing I watched happen, in a room, with my own eyes.

Somewhere in the 2000s, when I was a member of one side of Australian politics, I sat in on a conference session about public trust. Up on the board went a list — a "trust tree," someone called it — a ranking of the people the public trusts, from most to least. I have carried the shape of it for twenty years.

The objective on the table was not how to become more trustworthy. It was not how to change, how to be honest, how to earn a single rung. The objective — stated plainly, as strategy, as craft — was how to use the trust tree to get the best friend to spruik for us.

Not "how do we climb." How do we reach up the tree, past the car salesman, past the ad man, all the way to the top rung where the trust actually lives, and borrow it. Get the trusted friend to carry the untrustworthy message. Launder the pitch through the one relationship the target would never suspect.

That was the moment politics lost me. Not a scandal. Not a broken promise. A whiteboard. Because it made the whole posture visible in a single stroke: the deceit, the dishonesty, and above all the flat refusal to change the thing that made people distrust us in the first place. The trust was a resource to be strip-mined from other people's relationships, not a reputation to be built. And I have never once, in the years since, seen evidence I read that room wrong.

Half A Century Of The Same Ranking

The thing about a memory is that it can flatter you. So before I built anything on it, I went looking for whether the tree I remember is real — whether the public actually sorts people this way, or whether I invented a tidy story after the fact.

It is real. It has been measured, in Australia, continuously, for decades. Roy Morgan has run its Image of Professions survey since 1976, asking Australians to rate occupations for honesty and ethics. The results are almost boringly stable, and they trace the exact silhouette of that whiteboard.

Nurses have finished first in every single survey since they were added in 1994. Health workers, teachers, the people who tend to us and teach our children — they cluster at the top, the professional equivalent of the family circle. And at the very bottom, in the cellar, unmoved: the professional persuaders. Car salesmen have finished last in every survey since 1976. Above them, jostling, sit the advertising people, the real-estate agents, the insurance brokers. And in that same distrusted basement — year after year, decade after decade — sit federal politicians.

So the memory holds. The public really does rank family and carers at the top and sellers and politicians at the bottom, and it has done so, consistently, for the entire working life of anyone reading this. Which means the people in that room knew exactly where they stood. They were not confused about their position. They had the map. They just decided to use it differently than you would hope.

Don't Climb The Tree. Borrow It.

Here is the move, stripped to its mechanism. If you are at the bottom of the trust tree and you know it, you have two options. The honest one is slow and expensive: change your conduct until, over years, people revise their opinion of you. The other is fast and cheap: find the person at the top of the tree — the friend, the family member, the neighbour — and get them to deliver your message. The listener's guard is down, because the message is arriving through a channel they trust completely. The trust belongs to the friend. The message belongs to you. The friend never charged you rent for it.

When I first heard it, I assumed it was a grubby local improvisation — one clever operative's shortcut. It is not. It has a name, a research literature, and by now an entire industry. Campaign professionals call it the "trusted messenger," and the discipline of routing your message through people's personal networks is called relational organising. The theory is one sentence long: a person is far more likely to act when the ask comes from someone they already know than from a stranger, an ad, or a politician.

It is not even new. Abraham Lincoln reportedly advised his allies to watch the doubtful voters and have them "talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence." One influential guide to the craft lists the archetypes of the trusted messenger you might recruit — the vanguard, the trendsetter, and, tellingly, "the friend." The best friend at the top of my whiteboard was not a metaphor. To the trade, "the friend" is a documented, targetable delivery vehicle.

What is new is the machinery. What one operative sketched on a board in the 2000s is now run at national scale, through apps that map your social graph, score which of your friends is most persuadable, and tell a volunteer exactly which five people they know to talk to and what to say. The newest layer bolts artificial intelligence on top — predictive models that scan engagement data to surface the "hidden advocates" in a community: the person who is not loud, not visible, but sits at a high-trust node in other people's lives. The friend, identified by algorithm, and activated.

The Bottom Rung Is Still The Bottom Rung

If borrowing trust worked as a substitute for earning it, you would expect the numbers to eventually forgive the politicians. Two decades of spruiking should have bought something. It bought nothing. The bottom rung is exactly where it was — arguably lower.

In May 2025, Bond University released the latest wave of the Australian Constitutional Values Survey — a representative sample of about 7,000 Australians, part of an Australian Research Council project with the unimprovable title Mapping and Harnessing Public Mistrust. The headline number is brutal.

Only 16% of Australians said they had any trust in politicians. But the finding that should keep people awake is not that one — nobody is shocked that politicians rate badly. It is the next one. Bond's Dr Jacob Deem points out that trust in the guardrails — the systems designed to keep politicians honest — has almost halved since 2008. Only about a third of Australians trust the whole system of government. Trust in the courts sat around 44%; in the independent integrity agencies, around 46%.

That is the real cost of a generation spent borrowing trust instead of earning it. When the people at the top of the tree keep being used as unwitting couriers for messages they would never have endorsed if they'd known the source, the erosion does not stop at the politician. It seeps into the referee, the court, the anti-corruption body — every structure that was supposed to be above the game. If nothing said by anyone in authority can be taken at face value, eventually the machinery that was meant to protect you from them starts to look like part of the con too.

Zoom out and the same picture holds across the developed world. The OECD's 2024 survey found more people across member countries had low or no trust in their government (44%) than high or moderate trust (39%). Australia's own confidence in the federal government, measured by the ANU, sat at just 37% in 2024. And the collapse in satisfaction with democracy itself is the most vertigo-inducing line in the whole record: an Australian Senate committee documented dissatisfaction rising from 14% in 2017 to 41% by 2019. In two years, dissatisfaction tripled.

Everyone Retreated To The Top Of The Tree

Here is where it gets genuinely strange, and where the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer — the 26-year global study of trust in government, business, media and NGOs — earns its keep. Because the story is not a simple, tidy collapse. In Australia, the 2026 barometer actually shows institutional trust ticking up.

Government in Australia climbed six points into the "neutral" band — Edelman's phrasing is that government is "no longer distrusted." Your employer is the most trusted institution of all, at 79. Media, even after an eight-point jump, is still the only institution parked in the distrust zone. So on the surface: a recovery.

Look closer and it is not a recovery. It is a retreat — everyone climbing to the top of the tree. Edelman's own framing for 2026 is "From 'We' to 'Me': our shared institutions lose, my local circle wins." Around the world, when a big societal event shakes people's trust, they report losing trust in national government leaders and the major news organisations — and gaining trust in their neighbours, their family and friends, their coworkers, their own boss. The distant, shared, accountable institutions bleed trust; the near, personal, local relationships absorb it. People are doing exactly what the whiteboard predicted they would value: retreating up the tree, into the circle of the known.

And it has a darker name in this year's report. In Australia, 73% of people now hold what Edelman calls an "insular" trust mindset — hesitant or unwilling to trust anyone who differs from them in values, facts, background or approach. More than half of Australians — 53% — carry a moderate or high sense of grievance: the belief that the system is rigged for the few. Fewer than one in four think the next generation will be better off. Only one in three regularly encounters news from a viewpoint other than their own.

That is the terrain the tactic built. A public that has pulled its trust out of every shared institution and banked it entirely in the personal circle is not a healthier public — it is a more capturable one. Because there is now only one channel left that anyone believes: the friend, the family member, the local voice at the top of the tree. And that is precisely the channel the trusted-messenger playbook was designed to rent.

Now They Call It "Trust Brokering"

The most unsettling thing I found is not in a campaign manual. It is in the Edelman report itself — the flagship, blue-chip, corporate-boardroom trust study — recommending my whiteboard tactic as best practice, dressed in the language of virtue.

Edelman's 2026 through-line is "trust brokering": the idea that because people won't trust distant institutions directly, those institutions should reach audiences through intermediaries the audience already trusts. And the report quantifies exactly how well the old spruik still works. When a financial influencer that people follow vouches for a company those same people distrust, 57% say they would then trust, or consider trusting, the company. For a food or lifestyle influencer vouching for a distrusted brand, it rises to 62%. The endorsement launders the distrust. The trust belongs to the influencer; the message belongs to whoever paid to be vouched for. It is the best friend spruiking, with a media kit and a rate card.

To be fair to the concept — and this site tries to be — trust brokering can describe something genuinely good: an honest broker who translates between two groups that have stopped listening to each other, who surfaces their real shared interests, who does not take a side. Australians, asked what would earn their trust from a business in a divisive moment, put "encourage people to cooperate without taking a side" at the top. There is a version of this that is real bridge-building.

But there is a razor-thin line between brokering trust and borrowing it, and everything depends on which side of that line you are standing. Brokering trust means changing yourself enough to deserve it, then finding someone credible to introduce you. Borrowing trust means changing nothing, and using the credible person as a mask. From the outside — from the couch, from the voter's chair — the two can look identical right up until the moment the mask slips. And the tactic I watched being sketched was, unmistakably, the second one. Nobody in that room proposed we change. They proposed we hire a better mask.

Trust Was Always Available. They Chose The Shortcut.

Here is the part that still, twenty years on, quietly enrages me. Earning it was never impossible. It was just harder than borrowing it, and nobody in that room wanted to do the hard thing.

We know it was possible because the same Bond survey that delivered the 16% figure also delivered a quieter, hopeful one: 71% of Australians could name a politician they actually trust. Seven in ten. Trust in politicians as a class is at rock bottom, but trust in specific, real, individual politicians is alive and findable in most people. And when Bond asked why — why do you trust this particular one — the answers were almost heartbreakingly simple. Because they seem capable. Because they act in the community's interest. Because they listen to people. The reasons for distrust were the exact mirror image: a lack of transparency, a failure to meet people's needs, a failure to act in their interest.

That is the whole recipe. Be capable. Serve the community rather than yourself. Listen. Be transparent. There is no dark art in it, no data model, no rate card. It is the recipe every nurse at the top of the tree has been quietly following for fifty years while the politicians studied how to borrow her halo.

The economist Kenneth Arrow called trust an "invisible institution" — something that saves everyone enormous trouble, and, crucially, something you cannot simply buy. If you have to buy it, he said, you already have doubts about what you bought. That is the flaw at the heart of the whole spruiking enterprise. Borrowed trust is bought trust, and bought trust is brittle. It works right up until the friend realises what they were used for — and then it doesn't just fail, it poisons the friendship it travelled through. Every borrowed endorsement that turns out to be hollow doesn't only cost the politician a voter. It costs the friend a little of their own credibility, and teaches the listener to trust the top of the tree a little less too. The tactic doesn't just fail to build trust. Run at scale, for a generation, it burns down the forest it was harvesting.

Which is, more or less, the graph. Sixteen per cent. Guardrails halved since 2008. Seventy-three per cent insular. Dissatisfaction with democracy tripling in two years. That is not what a trusted society looks like. That is what it looks like when an entire profession spent decades reaching up the tree to borrow trust it refused to earn — and slowly, invisibly, killed the tree.

I left that room because I could see, even then, where the whiteboard led. I did not have the surveys yet. I just had the feeling in my stomach when the question I was waiting for — how do we deserve to move up? — never got asked. Twenty years of data later, the feeling has a footnote. The tree was real. The shortcut was real. And the bill has come due.

Keep Pulling The Thread