Rethinking risk in an age of insularity and distrust
Updated: 3 days ago
Australia has become a highly distrusting nation since 2020, characterised by suspicion and resentment and amplified by cost‑of‑living pressures.
The national mood can no longer be dismissed as temporary. A genuine social and behavioural shift has taken place over the past six years, and the research reaffirms it.
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) General Social Survey shows a significant fall in trust across society and a sharp rise in financial stress since 2020.
A long‑running poll series from the Australian National University (ANU) reports that Australia is a country under considerable strain, with record‑high financial stress, low life satisfaction and deepening pessimism.
Roy Morgan national trust and distrust data consistently reports that Australia is a fragile nation marked by widespread distrust, low confidence, and sustained social stress.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer highlights the collapse of optimism and the rise of insularity, as people retreat into like‑minded groups, lose trust in those who think differently, and drift from institutions that once held public trust.
While a trend of diminishing trust is occurring across much of the world, Australia’s level of distrust is statistically notable. And it’s here to stay, for the foreseeable future at least.
Behavioural risk as a critical performance signal
As trust erodes and social cohesion fragments across the nation, new behavioural risks are emerging for organisations as Australians change how they engage, react and spend.
Even routine communication in this climate can quickly trigger behavioural fallout, especially if corporate messages clash with lived experience. For example, assuring customers that prices reflect escalating costs and then celebrating record profits creates exactly the kind of optics that fuel resentment and distrust as people struggle with the cost-of-living crisis.
Affordability and fairness are now so deeply intertwined that perceptions of (un)fairness have become a behavioural trigger, with the power to drive moral judgements about corporate dishonesty and greed.
Tracking behavioural signals in real-time is critical to picking up cues early, and making better-informed decisions, including what to say, when and to whom. Operating blindly can carry major long‑term consequences for both reputation and commercial performance.
This means actively pinpointing:
Emotion rising
Behaviour shifting
Negative sentiment and narratives hardening
Opposition and rejection forming
Groups mobilising
Trust collapsing
Distrust activating.
Warning signs hiding in plain sight
Traditional tracking metrics like satisfaction, reputation and NPS are important, but they only tell some of the story. They show how organisations are performing on a range of measures, but not always where they are vulnerable.
Warning signs can hide behind performance scores, resulting in a fragmented risk picture. Because even if performance seems adequate, distrust can be growing behind the scenes, and unchecked anger and grievance can quickly harden into rejection.
Prior to 2014, national taxi usage was high. On the surface, performance looked fine but behavioural warning signs tied to passenger dissatisfaction were being ignored, and customers were angry and ready to defect. When a credible alternative finally arrived in Australia – rideshare – the taxi industry’s dominance collapsed with remarkable speed.
This occurred in a period when Australia was still a largely trusting nation and much slower to judge. It stands in stark contrast to the deeply distrusting Australia we see today.
While the context has changed, the same behavioural pattern persists: high usage can coexist with distrust. And one of the clearest examples is playing out right now: AI.
Smartphones, the internet, and social media all had explosive adoption curves, but the speed of generative AI adoption is among the fastest ever recorded, and unparalleled for a technology of such complexity.
ChatGPT reached 100 million users in roughly two months, one of the fastest adoption curves in consumer‑tech history.
While AI uptake and usage (performance) is inarguable, AI companies are also operating in a climate of increasing distrust – seen to prioritise innovation and profit over people, sustainability and ethics.
Against this backdrop, focusing solely on performance data while ignoring the clear behavioural warning signs is a risky endeavour. Just how risky will only become clearer over time.
Building contemporary risk intelligence systems
Contemporary risk systems need to capture three distinct categories of risk.
Regulated, mandatory, non‑negotiable risks: HSSE, audit, reporting and compliance indicators
Commercial and strategic risks: Policy-related factors, competitor activity, and performance indicators such as profit, reputation, NPS
Emergent, human, early‑warning risks: Behavioural indicators including grievance, rejection and distrust.
Understanding emergent, behavioural risks strengthens existing frameworks, giving risk teams and decision-makers greater visibility and richer insight into early‑warning signals such as:
Where dissatisfaction is escalating into grievance or anger
Where grievance is beginning to turn into rejection or defection
Where customers, stakeholders, employees or communities are turning against the organisation (or industry), or becoming vocal critics
How far negative sentiment is spreading across channels, groups or issues
Where negative narratives are solidifying and beginning to mobilise people
Where critics are coordinating, amplifying or influencing others
Where early boycott, rejection or defection signals are emerging
Where dissatisfaction is spilling into public channels
Where trust has collapsed to the point people no longer believe corrective action is possible
Where collapsed trust is hardening into active distrust (refusal to engage, hostile reinterpretation of messages, or rejection of the organisation entirely).
A contemporary risk system can help provide a more complete picture of organisational vulnerability, and when combined with proactive stakeholder trust‑building activities, can create a strong foundation for long‑term organisational resilience.
Corporate Affairs as a strategic enabler
Risks rarely behave in linear or predictable ways. They can evolve, escalate, traverse categories, spill into public domains and collide with public sentiment.
The strongest Corporate Affairs teams are built to catch those movements early – connecting the signals, interpreting and escalating them, and positioning the organisation in real time.
While Corporate Affairs should never replace or override existing risk functions (risk and audit, HSSE, compliance, executives and the board), its proximity to stakeholders and public sentiment can help elevate an organisation's overall risk management capability in an age of continuing distrust.
Viewing Corporate Affairs as a support function that simply executes at the end of decision‑making processes is dangerously short‑sighted.
