‘The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation: that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ That’s the great William Shakespeare in Richard II. Reputation is hard to establish. Once lost, it’s brutally hard to recover and losing it comes with significant costs too. That’s the gist of the Bard’s point.

And we see it manifested in today’s corporate and political realms. Take the sports shoe company Nike. This was a small company from Oregon that exploded onto the scene when it signed the basketball great Michael Jordan to a hugely hefty endorsement contract. Then Nike signed Tiger Woods as well. Then the baseball great Derek Jeter. It bought up its one-time dominant competitor Converse. It celebrated sporting excellence. ‘Just do it!’, was the company motto. Nike came to dominate the market. And then, a little over a decade ago, the company went as woke as woke can be. It were as though its HR department, full of women’s studies graduates, had been put in charge of marketing and all big-ticket decision-making. (Sort of like a fair few big law firms here at home.) Nike decided to hire left-wing activists as endorsers such as the transgender Dylan Mulvaney and the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem, worshipped the BLM movement and equated NFL stars on tens of millions per year to (wait for it, I do not make this up) slaves. Bizarrely the company that sold sports shoes opted to glorify obesity. It went all-in on what anyone outside the far left of the Democrat party would call anti-American propaganda. Nike basically decided to blow up its once sterling reputation by taking sides not just in politics but on virtually all  culture war issues, ignoring Michael Jordan’s sage observation ‘that Republicans buy sneakers too’.

And then the bill came in. Nike, today, surely is but gilded loam and painted clay.  Its stock is down about 45 per cent this year; down 75 per cent over five years; down 82 per cent from its record high. Some US$230 billion has been erased in market capitalisation. Sales in the latest quarter were down four per cent. It’s just been removed from the S&P 100 and been forced to announce rolling lay-offs starting next year. And, boy, does Nike deserve it. I stopped buying anything Nike about a decade ago. Obviously myriad others did the same. Who wants to be lectured to by some woke, US West Coast shoe company that hires lefty activists for its ad campaigns? Frankly, I can find my own political sermons. I don’t need them provided to me by lefty millionaire hypocrites – did I mention that Nike was once involved in allegations over using child labour and sweatshop conditions in its Asian factories?

Regaining its corporate reputation is going to be a Bud Light-type, Herculean task for Nike. Meantime, I am personifying that German word Schadenfreude which describes the feeling of delight one has when bad things happen to those one believes deserve it. Put differently, trashing your reputation comes at a cost. In Nike’s case, it was hundreds of billions of dollars in cost.

The same general point about the high costs of a lost reputation apply to today’s legacy political parties. Let’s just take this one small example using Australia’s Liberal party as regards free speech. It once was believable when the Libs said they favoured free speech. But then Mr Abbott succumbed to his own Labor-lite party room MPs and broke a key and much-repeated election promise, which was to do everything he could to repeal the truly awful section 18C hate speech laws (the ones that were recently used, risibly in any country pretending to embrace free speech, against One Nation’s Senator Pauline Hanson by the Green’s Senator Mehreen Faruqi).

That’s not all. It was the Turnbull Coalition government that opted to extend to all Australians the whole e-Safety apparatus that had been initiated just for children by the Abbott government. (These speech-inhibiting edifices are always expanded, dummies!  And they almost never achieve the benefits that are airily thrown about and claimed.)  That was in 2017. Oh, and get this. Continuing with its well-documented record of woeful, ‘anyone-but-an-actual-conservative’ appointments to the bench, to the Human Rights Commission, to near on everything, it was the Coalition and Team Turnbull who figured the right person to be the e-Safety Commissioner was Julie Inman Grant. I could throw a dart at the phone book and almost certainly find someone more sympathetic to free speech concerns than Inman Grant. She seems hell-bent on shadow banning, suppressing, and censoring all sorts of views that most every Liberal party voter back in 2019 (there are considerably fewer today, in part because of this very issue, if truth be told) would have thought should be aired as part and parcel of the back and forth of democratic life.

Then there were the speech-inhibiting Covid-lunacy-related actions of the Morrison government. You remember Scott Morrison? The man who oversaw the biggest inroads on Australians’ civil liberties (free speech ones included) in the country’s history and who patently wrongly had claimed that protecting free speech doesn’t create one job and doesn’t open one business. This was the same Morrison whose government in 2021 passed the Online Safety Act that (wait for it) significantly increased the powers of the e-Safety Commissioner, aka Ms Julie Inman Grant.

And let’s not forget Andrew Hastie who swore up and down he would oppose the Albanese government’s speech-inhibiting Combating Anti-Semitism, Hate, and Extremism Bill 2026. Because it deserved to be opposed for achieving nothing (indeed, is probably counter-productive) except more inroads on freedom of speech in this country. But then Mr Hastie reversed course and voted for the Albo bill. He did so despite earlier explicitly criticising this woeful legislation as a rushed ‘attack on our basic democratic freedoms’ and explicitly pointing to its anti-free speech effects. But he didn’t vote for it alone. Almost the entire Liberal party room did so as well (though not Angus Taylor, who was overseas at the time, and not Alex Antic and one other Lib plus a few Nationals who crossed the floor to vote ‘nay’).

Let’s be blunt here. The Liberal party has no reputation left when it comes to free-speech concerns. None. I know that Angus Taylor is now making the right noises as regards free speech. Good.

But a trashed reputation is very hard to win back. It’s not easy to transmogrify yourself back from being painted clay and gilded loam. You need to make highly specific pledges backed by promised blunt consequences – ‘we will go to a double dissolution if we have to in order to repeal these laws and no one will stay in my cabinet if he or she fails to support this free-speech position’. You get the idea.

Of course this lesson on losing one’s reputation for honesty comes too late for Mr Albanese. No thinking being finds it easy to believe anything that comes out of the man’s mouth. ‘We changed our position’ is a true statement that is non-responsive to the issue of whether Team Albo had planned all along these tax changes. I mean, Albo can’t point to what changed in just one year that required the changed position. His reputation makes those of the Libs on free speech look good.

It’s the Nike-ification of politics.