The testimonies in the Killing Season, the union scandals, and the allegations around people smugglers show there are no simple truths in politics. And without truth there's no trust, writes Jonathan Green.

The truth of politics is that there is no simple truth.

Political truth is mutable, relative, adaptable. It may even be absent or, worse, irrelevant; a servant to the more certain verities of power and advantage.

Which is not the way most of us live our lives. And this is perhaps the great chasm between politics, politicians and people: that for most of us a sense of fundamental honesty underpins our dealings with each other. The alternative is an amoral chaos of deception and empty disregard.

In politics, truth is trampled in the rush to win. It's almost Faustian: trading the honest portion of your soul for power, all of it, paradoxically for people eager to be elected, at the sacrifice of trust.

The most recent Essential Poll of trust in institutions puts political parties at the bottom of its list, with a combined 16 per cent of respondents affirming that political parties had either "some" or "a lot" of their trust. Forty per cent of us beg to differ and have no trust, none, in political parties. Seven per cent don't know. As a benchmark, Federal Police top the ratings, trusted by 68 per cent.

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Federal Parliament itself does a little better with a "total trust" rating of 31 per cent, which is a fine, if slightly despairing, distinction drawn between the institution and its inmates.

Truth might build trust; its absence the opposite.

For further evidence see the most recent episode of the Killing Season and its contrapuntal accounts from Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard of the events leading to that long and fatal night of June 24, 2010.

This was an evening that raced to the incontrovertible truth of assassination, but as we have now heard there is precious little agreement on the circumstances. Was there a handshake deal over succession? Rudd thinks so. Gillard begs to differ.

We know instinctively not to fully trust either account - these, after all are the words of politicians, destined to be either self serving or to confirm the biases of their audience.

Interviewer Sarah Ferguson is alive to the bold ambiguity of it all: "People say what is truth in all of this, and I don't think that there is, there isn't a single truth in all of that."

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 hour 29 minutes 42 seconds 1 h 29 m The Killing Season, Episode II: The Great Moral Challenge ( Sarah Ferguson )

And there in fact is politics, a melange of partial truths that serve a broad purpose, a purpose that is honest enough, if ambition carries its own simple sincerity.

The bigger question is just how long an institution trusted by only a third of the people and dominated by an organisational structure trusted by half as many can endure? Especially when its business is to enact a democratic, well, trust.

It's a mess, both contradictory and destructive.

And here we are again in the killing season before the long tail of the Canberra winter, consumed in the strange and paradoxical way of Canberra politics by narratives that hang on trust and truth, those same narratives enacted by people incapable of telling one or earning the other.

Did Australian officials of some stamp pay bribes to Indonesian criminals? The sort of money, our Government has assured us makes a beeline for terrorists, while it seems, making its own modest contribution? That's one issue of truth at hand, or it was until it appeared such payments were a matter of bipartisan practice if not consensus. At which point the pursuit of truth took second billing to the greater reality of simple politics: there's no point showing the other side to be a liar when that same accusation can be turned back the way it came. Which bells the cat: truth was never really the point in this political exchange, just advantage.

And an unambiguous truth of this moment in politics was revealed: they're all in this together.

Which is traditionally where the political media will lose interest too, starved of a horse race and with no particular interest in the finer detail of whether or not the Australian Government, or perhaps successive Australian governments, acted in corrupt collusion with people smugglers.

The moving finger having written that off will move on, and perhaps the killing season itself, the long nights of this mid-winter parliamentary session, might soon provide the next point of tension and interest.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is about to endure a series of trials, the first thanks to the assiduous investigations of Fairfax journalists who intend parading his shortcomings as a defender of workers' interests in a series of major investigative pieces over the remainder of this week.

Yesterday we read of a deal between Shorten's Victorian AWU branch that made maybe $100 million for a construction company at the expense of workers' conditions. It was a bargain that saw, we are told, $300,000 thrown back to the union.

That's news of a piece with so many stories of recent times detailing the scant regard some unions have held for member interests, especially when set against the far more urgent imperative of power within the Labor movement. Shorten's power in this instance.

There's an appearance before the rather hostile bench of the Trade Union royal commission to come, not to mention the crowning prospect of a vigorously contested ALP National conference next month.

All of which is set against an Opposition Leader who already lacks public support and must surely, by now, be the subject of the sort of vicious internal pantomime of unattributable hints and whispers so exhaustively documented in the Killing Season account of Labor's last covetous brush with self destruction.

In other times you might well wonder whether Shorten would still be leader when episode three airs next Tuesday night, the evening before the fifth anniversary of Rudd's demise.

The irony is that it will be the long tail of Rudd's legacy, cum revenge, that may save him: the new party rule that requires a 75 per cent caucus vote of no confidence before a Labor leader can be voted down mid-term.

That's an inescapable truth, but not one designed to garner even a tiny fraction of our trust.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum.