>So how can this problem of trust be overcome?

How about some personal accountability to restore trust? Any citizen should be able to sue politicians personally for damages resulting from their actions. Take the pink batts fiasco as an example. That's governments idea of doing something to improve the climate. If any private corporation did what the government has done, with so much misleading and deceptive conduct, so little due diligence, and so much negligence, loss of life, and loss of property, the directors would be facing very long terms in prison. Rudd, Wong, Garrett - they should all have lost their hosues and all their personal wealth and been bankrupted for their part in that criminal stupidity. That would go some way to restoring a measure of trust in the government.

At present, misleading and deceptive conduct is illegal, but only 'in trade or commerce'. The law should be changed so as to include 'in politics or government'. The very claim of government to have the competence to do what it is claiming it can do - fine-tune the temperature of the globe - is false and misleadging. It should result in the long-term imprisonment of the entire Federal Cabinet. That would restore at least a little trust that the next troupe of clowns might not offend so egregiously.

Seibert has got the story the opposite way around. Since the failure of Copenhagen, the public has started to realise that a CPRS without an international agreement in place is an extremely expensive ideological gesture. Greens still push the concept as a way of "showing leadership" in this area but that ignores the critical problem that no country is likely to follow where Australia leads. The public is not keen on paying for ideological gestures, hence the decline in support for the CPRS. If the general public's decline in trust in the government can be linked to this issue - its not clear that it can - then its because the government is still pushing this dead concept. No one wants governments, or policy analysts, who not only refuse to face basic realities, but insist on writing articles saying its all really about a lack of trust.

"If any private corporation did what the government has done, with so much misleading and deceptive conduct, so little due diligence, and so much negligence, loss of life, and loss of property, the directors would be facing very long terms in prison."

A complete fallacy since private corporations in Australia have poisoned whole towns with lead, mercury, cyanide and hazardous waste with impunity and never ever face "very long prison terms."

Meanwhile, particularly in the state of WA, the uranium industry's massive land grab of some 180 tenements, for mining and exploration is soon to contaminate our lands in perpetuity, pollute our air and our groundwater with radioactive fallout and displace surrounding communities.

I would recommend that a government trust be set aside to enable citizens to sue corporate polluters who kill people, are trashing our soils, our rivers, our forests, oceans, human and animal health and indeed the entire biosphere.

It's scandalous that 250 Australians were forced to lodge a law suit in a supreme court in the US against Alcoa for contaminating their residential areas with dangerous pollutants, causing illnesses and even death. This polluter is freely chopping down our Jarrah forests to get at bauxite, while Departments of Environment and Health in this nation defend and protect the culprits and not the victims.

The "pink batts fiasco" was a well intentioned project and implemented for the common good including protection of the environment. Alas, the Federal government failed to anticipate that the corporate cowboys who got in on the act never flinch from an opportunity to make a quick buck at humanity's expense.

A first step towards restoring trust would be to send a memo to the ABC, pointing out that one-eyed AGW propaganda is self-defeating and only encourages further scepticism. The Fairfax Press, too, could be gently reminded that typecasting half of its remaining readers as 'deniers' and 'ostriches' is only going to accelerate its steady decline into irrelevance. Let us have our own Royal Commission into AGW claims -- not stacked with AGW profiteers, like the recent British enquiry, but genuinely balanced. And how about an apology from Rudd -- he's good at those -- for his offensive language, and an admission that 'the greatest moral issue of our time' actually has two sides?

In short, treat the electorate like rational adults and they will generally behave that way.

It's no wonder we get such dreadful policies, when we get clowns like this one doing the research for policy lobbies.

I wonder if he has any idea of the real world, he obviously doesn't live in it.

The author shows his gullibility by stating that "Climate change is an environmental, economic and social challenge that can only be addressed through government action." He adopts the erroneous assumption that there is global warming, and that it is human-caused.
The IPCC, the political body that has been searching unsuccessfully for 20 years for such evidence, nevertheless has conned politicians and policy researchers such as the author into believing in anthropogenic global warming. The IPCC's main weapon has been to use climate computer models to project alarming outcomes. It has managed to keep the lid on the fact that these models have not been validated, and consequently cannot be relied on for projection purposes.
Even Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the Climategate scandal, admits that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years. Even if global warming were proved, there is absolutely no proof that it is human-caused.
Governments are kidding themselves and gullible voters by proposing policies to control climate change.