The current lack of trust in Australian politics, although at an all time high, is nothing new.

Both Labor and Liberal parties have now disposed of their first term prime ministers in favour of a more popular likeable alternative.

In the case of Labor's killing season, the entire process revolved around power plays and factionalism which tore a once mighty Labor party apart.

For Malcolm Turnbull, his lifelong aspiration to become prime minister of the country drove him to seek power and revenge after he himself had been narrowly beaten by the very man he knifed.

Within his first week of the sitting of Parliament since the 2016 election, Turnbull began to seem as if he had lost all control. The man once dubbed the people's Prime Minister had failed to produce the politics that Australia had yearned for in it's new leader.

The 2016 result acts both as an analogy and a reminder of the public's current political feelings towards their leaders. The result was too close to call on the night because the voters didn't have an alternative that was clearly better. Despite shifting the blame on the Mediscare campaign and the underlying instability caused by GetUp! and other progressive groups, Liberal Party Director Tony Nutt failed to recognise that their voter base had shifted towards independent parties and One Nation. By the very nature of the result, Turnbull's gamble of replacing Tony Abbott had barely paid off, with the solution now unclear as to how he plans to gain back those votes he lost at the election. Could Abbott have done better?

This question becomes especially pertinent considering part of the strategy Turnbull used to justify dumping Abbott was that the government hadn't done a clear job of communicating where it wanted to to take Australia into the future. As one voter puts it:

"I would like somebody, or some political party to come up with what they think is a good idea and stand by it even if they don't get votes. But I think that they will be surprised that the votes that they receive by saying "we need to have to take this medicine. It’s a bad medicine but it’s gonna do us good in the long run", I think they’ll be surprised at how many people will vote for them."

Due to these ever-shifting positions, the number of undecided/swinging voters between elections would be expected to increase amid uncertainty of the government's message in relation to an issue like superannuation or state taxation.

There will now be a significant number of voters who aren't attached to a party and given that voters may become increasingly disillusioned with the mainstream political parties, this poses a major risk in attempting to achieve social cohesion across the country.

As another voter says, it gets worse with age:

"As I get older and witness more broken promises, it has become harder to know what each party stands for and how much of it is really about effective policies and how much is about political goals and stepping on others to get to the top."



While the next three years remain an uncertainty in grappling with the question of how Turnbull plans to combat the increasing trust deficit in Australian politics, one major factor is already proving to make his job a lot more harder.