Recent scandals have shaken the public's faith in three key institutions.
WHAT does Britain's phone hacking scandal have in common with its earlier scandal over parliamentary expenses and with the failure of several of its banks during the global financial crisis? All three events shake the trust the Brits can have in key institutions of their democracy. The latest scandal raises questions about the trustworthiness of the press, government and police.
Sometimes you don't appreciate the importance of things until you're threatened with their loss. Of nothing is that truer than trust.
Why is trust so important? It's what prevents us from having to do everything ourselves. Trust is believing someone else will act correctly. It enables us to hand our children over to teachers, give our vote to a politician, relax while the pilot flies the plane, put our money in a bank account and share the roads with other motorists.
As Jonathan Tame of Britain's Relationships Foundation has observed: ''We do these things without anxiety because we believe that the others involved share our values, will act responsibly and look after our interests.
''With any loss of trust, relational capital diminishes. Society becomes poorer as more time is taken drawing up detailed contracts and regulations, more funds are spent on security, surveillance and policing, and health declines because people grow more anxious.''
Mark Scholefield prepared a study on trust for the Relationships Foundation. He says trust allows us to share information and responsibilities for our mutual benefit, while giving us the freedom to get on with our own work and life without worrying too much over the part others play.
''We probably cannot live without some degree of trust. Our lives and relationships are too complex to monitor and control completely,'' he says.
Trust involves reciprocity. If I trust you, you're more likely to trust me. If you trust me, I'm more likely to live up to that trust. Assume I'm untrustworthy and I'm more likely to conform to your expectations.
But to abuse another's trust is often to end your relationship with them. You can cheat someone with impunity if you're never expecting to see them again. But if you're planning to stick around, the best strategy is to behave in a trustworthy manner. It's intolerable not to be trusted and equally intolerable not to be able to trust the people around you.
Trust is closely linked to reputation. Whether you're a business, an employee or just a friend, it pays to build a reputation for trustworthiness and reliability. We deal with so many people and organisations, we don't know that we're often forced to rely on their reputations.
Richard Bronk, of the London School of Economics, has written that trust is crucial to the success of economic relationships, such as that between managers and workers, or between companies and their suppliers. And honesty is the essential lubricant to a system of exchange.
''If trust and honesty mean anything, it is that these individuals will be motivated by them to suspend the continual quest for personal advantage in certain key situations,'' he says.
If ever there was a case where the quest for personal, commercial and party advantage is damaging our trust in politicians and the media, it's the unending brawling over the carbon tax.
It seems the public's trust in Julia Gillard will forever be tainted by the manner in which she came to power. She's not the first or the last politician to break a promise - in this case her promise not to introduce a carbon tax during the present term - but her failure to apologise and adequately explain her reasons for doing so is undoubtedly compounding the loss of trust in her.
Nor will it be helped by her use of taxpayers' money to pay for an advertising campaign to sell the carbon tax before it has become law. In opposition, Labor bitterly attacked the Howard government's abuse of public funds for such purposes; now it's doing the same.
It's always a lot harder to explain a complex policy than it is to put the frighteners on the punters, but Tony Abbott's gross misrepresentation of the carbon tax's effect on prices, employment and whole industries exceeds all records in effectiveness and dishonesty. I would never have believed one politician could, by all his reckless claims, stop retail sales in their tracks as frightened punters close their purses in fear for their futures. Why the retailers aren't tearing him apart I don't know.
Do his fellow Liberals and their supporters imagine there will be no backlash when voters eventually realise how much they were wound up?
But are the media working to help their perplexed customers discern the truth of all the claims and counter claims? Too many of them are playing the controversy for all it's worth, trumpeting the claims of interest groups that are undocumented and untested. Some are motivated by partisanship, almost all by commercial advantage.
Do they, too, imagine this abuse of the public's trust will go unpunished? What's happening in Britain says otherwise.
Ross Gittins is a senior columnist.