ABC RN Big Ideas – Reimagining trust in a time of COVID-19

Inspired by Griffith Review 67: Matters of Trust, published in partnership with ANZSOG, Professor Glyn Davis AC, Professor Anne Tiernan and Professor Caitlin Byrne explore the implications and opportunities of a collapse in trust in the age of COVID-19. Join ABC Radio National’s Paul Barclay for a conversation that considers Australia’s unique heritage in unconventional alliances and asks us to imagine reform in the face of change we can’t always see coming.

Broadcast: 8.00 pm, Tuesday 28 April 2020, ABC Radio National
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What role do alliances and divisions play in our experiences of trust? What are the possibilities of the unconventional, the improvised?

What we trust, who we trust and how we trust sit at the centre of today’s most complex debates, particularly now we are in the midst of a global pandemic. Australia is a country sceptical of its government, a country asking profound questions of its traditional institutions – most recently in light of three mighty Royal Commissions of Inquiry: into the banking and finance industries; into the institutional abuse of children; and into the provision of aged care. All have exposed vast betrayals, extraordinary examples of corruption and the urgent need for broad reform. Does our new uncertainty mark a profound loss of trust in how society is organised and how it operates? Can we look beyond existing systems and envisage something new? How can we reform how we think and live in both a political and personal sense?