The politics of trust: What the wellbeing era got right (and wrong)

The Spinoff

2 days ago

We throw around the phrase 'trust in institutions' like it means the same thing to everyone, but it doesn't. Who trusts, when and why is deeply political, and far from universal, writes Natalia Albert.
God, we throw around trust in institutions like confetti. Trust in government, trust in the system, trust between groups, it's everywhere. It shows up in political speeches, policy frameworks, media headlines and academic papers.
Last week, while reading a 2022 Treasury paper on social cohesion for my PhD research, I was struck by the language. It was wellbeing all the way down: the indicators, the frameworks, the aspirations. Just a few days later, I found myself at the Local Government New Zealand conference, where the tone couldn't have been more different. The buzz there was about the government removing the four wellbeings from the Local Government Act. In just a few years, wellbeing had gone from centrepiece to scrapheap.
So, do people trust government more when it talks about wellbeing, kindness and social cohesion? Or do they feel more confident when the language is stripped back to cost control and going back to basics? Does trust rise and fall with policy frameworks or with political alignment? Do we even notice the difference, or do we only care when we feel left out?
It seems we talk about trust in government as if it's a single, collective feeling, like we all either do or don't trust institutions as one big, unified public. But that just doesn't hold. It misses the messiness and nuance of a society as hyper-diverse and politically pluralistic as ours. Trust doesn't live at the national level, it lives in lived experience, and it shifts depending on identity, history, power and whose values are being reflected back through the system. When we talk about 'restoring trust', we often imagine it as a linear project. But what if the problem isn't that trust is broken, it's that we're measuring the wrong thing altogether?
Trust is not easy to define or measure
Defining and measuring trust in institutions is messy and very political. The OECD's 2023 Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions in New Zealand report found that responsiveness, openness and reliability are the biggest drivers of trust, but that trust looks very different depending on which institution you're talking about. People trust the police the most, the media the least, and local councillors sit somewhere near the bottom, which tracks with the conversations I heard at the conference.
The biggest influence on trust isn't ideology, it's experience. Your personal experiences with government, or what's happened to your family or community, are what really shape whether or not you trust the system. Media matters less than you'd think, and abstract values like transparency or fairness only come into play if people actually experience them directly.
Political scientists like Eric Uslaner argue that we need to stop lumping all kinds of trust together. He distinguishes between generalised trust (trust in strangers), particularised trust (trust in people like you), and political trust (trust in institutions). Political trust, he says, is the one that fluctuates most, and is most responsive to things like economic performance, political scandals and partisan divides.
And then there's the causality problem. Do better-performing public services lead to more trust? Or do people who already trust government just rate services more highly? Academics like Steven Van de Walle and Geert Bouckaert say it's probably both, and that context, perception and political alignment all distort the feedback loop. In other words: if you already think government is useless, you'll probably see even decent services as underwhelming.
The rise of 'Wellbeing' as a political project
Back in 2017, Jacindamania hit us like a wall of bricks, or rose petals, depending on where you sit politically. That election didn't just usher in a new government; it brought with it a whole new language. 'Kindness' became a political virtue (personally, I never want to hear it again), and 'wellbeing' became the flagship policy concept of the Ardern government.
There was the Wellbeing Budget, the Living Standards Framework from Treasury, the Social Cohesion Framework from MSD, and legislative changes like the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act 2020. That act introduced a formal requirement for Treasury to regularly assess the state of wellbeing in New Zealand: how it's changing, how sustainable it is and what risks we face. It sits alongside the Long-Term Fiscal Statement and the Investment Statement as part of Treasury's big-picture reporting.
Here's how Treasury themselves put it in the introduction to the Te Tai Waiora Wellbeing Report: 'The wellbeing report has the broadest scope of Treasury's strategic assessments. It must describe the state of wellbeing in New Zealand, how it's changed over time, and how sustainable it is. This is supported by a series of detailed background papers that explore indicators and provide introductory analysis on cohesion, sustainability and other key areas.'
At the time, you could reasonably say these reforms were about rebuilding public trust in institutions. There was a sense, especially post-GFC and post-neoliberal consensus, that people had lost faith in government's ability to deliver something more than just economic growth. Wellbeing was meant to change that.
But trust in institutions… according to who?
The tricky thing is this: trust isn't universal, and it's not stable. It moves. It depends on who you are, where you sit politically, and which government is in charge.
Right now, the 2025 coalition government is quietly dismantling much of the wellbeing agenda, among other flagship polices from the previous government. The Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act is on the chopping block. The language of kindness and social cohesion is being swapped out for terms like 'efficiency' and 'core services'. And while some will see this as a loss, a regression, others will feel their trust in institutions increase.
That's the key point: trust in institutions isn't something we all experience in the same way. It's a political variable. It shifts every election cycle. One group's 'accountable governance' is another's 'state overreach'. One person's 'meaningful wellbeing agenda' is another's 'woke box-ticking'. And yet, when we talk about trust in policy or the media, we often treat it like it's some kind of fixed, objective measure.
But it's not. It's a seesaw.
Take what's happening right now between local and central government. There's increasing tension, especially around who's responsible for managing cities, infrastructure and long-term planning. If you ask someone who trusts their council more than parliament, they'll say Wellington is meddling. Ask someone else, and they'll say local government is broken and needs reining in. Same institutions. Different trust profile.
And this isn't just theoretical. Look at Stats NZ after the 2018 census – public confidence took a real hit. That kind of damage is hard to undo, especially when it intersects with other trust-fracturing events (like Covid, housing unaffordability or misinformation cycles).
So when we say 'trust in institutions', we need to ask: which institutions, which groups and under what conditions?
More Reading
Media, perception, and the filter bubble effect
Let's also talk about media, because that's a huge part of how trust is shaped. If you watch TVNZ believing it's neutral (when many would argue it has a soft centre-left lean), or you follow The Platform or Reality Check Radio thinking they're unbiased (when they very clearly lean libertarian or right-wing), your trust in the wider system will reflect that lens.
Media isn't just reporting on trust in institutions, it's creating it. Or undermining it.
If you're left-leaning, you probably felt more trust during the Ardern years and found meaning in the wellbeing agenda. If you're more conservative, it might've felt alienating or overly idealistic. Flip it around today, and the right may feel their values are being restored, while the left sees something important being gutted.
So again, trust shifts depending on who's in power and how aligned you feel with the institutional tone.
I'm not saying we should give up on trying to build trust. But we do need a more realistic and dynamic understanding of what trust actually is – politically, psychologically and socially. It's not static. It's not neutral. It's not equally held by all.
We also need to ask: what groups trust institutions? When does that trust shift, and why? What role does media – and media literacy – play in those shifts? Can institutions be designed to be trusted across partisan lines?
I don't have all the answers. But I do know we need to stop treating trust like a KPI and start treating it like the complex, shifting thing that it is.
Because otherwise, we're just chasing shadows – and wondering why we always feel like we're either winning or losing, up or down, in or out.