Everyone is trying to explain the polls. Pollsters have charts, commentators have theories, and party strategists have PowerPoint presentations, which is usually how politics announces it has learned nothing. The funniest explanations come from politicians. They call in the advisers and decide the public needs clearer communication. It never occurs to them that the public understood them perfectly well.

Most explanations come down to three ideas: Albanese is the problem, Taylor is useless, and Pauline Hanson is our saviour.

One Nation now seems to believe Hanson has been proved right about everything, including several things she hasn’t said yet. But they’re missing the larger point. Australians haven’t simply turned on Albanese or failed to warm to Taylor. They’ve turned on politics. With all three parties polling in the twenties, the votes aren’t moving from one side to the other. They’re leaving the building altogether.

Australians used to be a trusting lot. We laughed at politicians and thought them pompous, self-important, and occasionally useless. We knew they lied, but we didn’t think they were crooks. The Australian might suspect a used-car salesman, a bookmaker offering generous odds or a neighbour returning a borrowed mower with a new noise. We didn’t instinctively suspect the state.

Australia wasn’t born in revolution. Unlike the Americans, we didn’t shoot at the mother country. We asked her to pass an Act. Even our revolution came with minutes. Governments changed without tanks, courts worked, and the public service, for all its ability to turn a form into a career, usually delivered. ‘She’ll be right’ was our theory of government.

Then, around 2007, political trust began a long decline. Kevin 07 didn’t invent incompetence, but he brought to it the enthusiasm of a man who’d just discovered the whiteboard. What followed was two decades of policy reversals, leadership spills, and government by media release. Every failure produced a review, every review a taskforce and every taskforce eventually a logo.

Government became more intrusive while looking less capable. It grew very sure about what citizens should do and less sure about how to do the things only government could do. When a policy failed, the lesson was rarely to stop. It needed another $600 million and a refreshed communications strategy. Politicians mistook patience for consent.

Then came Covid. Australians closed businesses, stayed home, missed weddings and funerals, accepted internal borders, and gave up freedoms most thought were beyond government’s reach. That wasn’t proof of obedience. It was a huge withdrawal from the national trust account. But the trust was spent, not protected. Rules changed, exemptions made little sense and evidence was often kept from the public. The advice changed, but the certainty didn’t.

Covid didn’t turn every Australian into a conspiracy theorist. It did something worse for government. It taught ordinary people to ask for the evidence, and that habit didn’t disappear with the QR codes. The voter now asks: What’s the real purpose? Who benefits? What’s buried in Schedule 4? Why does every policy called ‘affordable’ make the thing dearer?

Australians have become auditors. Political spin never needed to be clever. A press release, a friendly headline and a minister repeating the same phrase three times usually did the job. Now the audience is reading the fine print, and much of the work doesn’t survive it.

Ordinarily, Australians might have dismissed all this as the usual parade of fools and failures. But a procession of hate-speech laws, sports-wagering contortions and backflips on mining and gas, each announced with absolute confidence, has raised a more uncomfortable question: Are these people merely useless, or are they doing exactly what they mean to do? More pundits are now asking it aloud, and Australians are listening.

That’s where the poor polling is coming from. It isn’t only the cost of living, immigration, housing or energy. It’s the belief that government either doesn’t know what it’s doing or knows perfectly well and hopes nobody notices. Labor is paying the price, but the Coalition isn’t collecting the benefit because it helped teach the same lesson. Trust isn’t moving between the major parties. It’s being withdrawn from the lot.

One Nation benefits, but many new supporters are simply looking for the biggest available object to hit Canberra with. When people reject an official explanation, Canberra has a convenient answer: misinformation. This turns a failure of government into a defect of the governed. If people don’t believe you, somebody else must have misled them. Perhaps a commissioner can repair them.

Not every mistake is corruption and not every policy is a plot. A democracy can’t work if citizens believe nothing. But government can’t demand trust. It has to earn it: publish the evidence, admit uncertainty, apply rules equally, drop failed policies and allow consequences.

For generations, Australians gave government the benefit of the doubt. Government treated the benefit as an entitlement and exhausted the doubt. The old Australian said, ‘She’ll be right.’ The new Australian asks, ‘Right for whom?’

Government now has two choices: become more competent and honest, or become much better at deception. Judging by the polls, the second option isn’t going especially well.