The waves of the pandemic across the globe in 2020 quickly exposed which countries were prepared to deal with a crisis of this size. One of the factors that governments have been grappling with is how much the public trusts them.
Professor Robin Gauld from Otago University has been working with colleagues in Australia to try and work out how strong public trust is on both sides of the Tasman. They're also trying to work out what impacts public trust in government during a pandemic.
Robin Gauld, is a health systems specialist at Otago University. Photo: RNZ / Ian Telfer
Gauld tells Summer Times they first started researching trust in governments when they did a survey in 2004 on whether people would use online government services.
Their studies have tended to show around 50 percent of people in Australia and New Zealand trust their government. However, in the past year that has risen exponentially.
“We found in our study done in the later part of last year that levels of trust were around 80 percent in Australia and New Zealand, which is really phenomenal increase and pretty interesting.”
He says they can only speculate but they “absolutely” assume it’s because of the Covid-19 pandemic and how the Australian and New Zealand governments responded to the crisis.
“They’ve been seen to be trustworthy and followable which is pretty important in the case of a pandemic when you look at what’s going on around the world.”
The recent upsurge of trust in governments is very reassuring, Gauld says.
“When you have low levels of trusts and people don’t follow the instructions that a government, working in good faith, is giving to the public. That’s really when you lean towards disorder and chaos.
“When you’re in a pandemic situation, it’s absolutely critical. As soon as you have people doing things differently from what’s being suggested by government and public health scientists… you have very real potential for people behaving in ways that are deeply unhelpful.”
While high trust in government is a good thing during a global pandemic, Gauld says there’s always room for a healthy dose of scepticism in democracy.
“You wouldn’t want people just blindly walking forward trusting every single message that comes out. Certainly, we in New Zealand are a fairly vocal group, we like to discuss issues and discuss them openly. We pride ourselves on that.”
