"Give it to me," John Williamson sings in the Aussie classic True Blue.

And in five words he captures the essence of the no-nonsense Australian attitude of just being people, well, honest dinkum with us.

If country music is not your thing, it means in rap terms that it really has to stay.

It's all about authenticity. Politicians wonder whether their policies will endure the "pub test", a term that is not really taken by the pub test itself, because no one other than politicians uses it. In the real world people talk about their bullsh * t detectors.

And in Australia, that sound you've heard lately? It is the sound of the detectors of everyone going off at the same time.

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In this country it takes two seconds to get rid of a prime minister and two months to get rid of plastic bags.

People get angry about both, not only because of the change itself, but because in both cases they feel that they are offended.

Coles and Woolworths performed Olympic-worthy gymnastic backflip routines on the plastic bag ban that prohibited sawbags, alternatives cost 15 cents, then spent for free, then 15 cents again, all in a period of a few weeks.

The lack of conviction in supermarket bosses who stick to their plan and take leadership in doing the right things, played in mistrust that people always had: that supermarkets attach more importance to their profits than to the environment.

That they wobbled showed that they were not authentic. They were not really blue.

I do not think that most shoppers want to harm the environment. In general, I think people want to contribute. We just want supermarkets to contribute.

You see, on the one hand we are told that the plastic bags that we take home can enter the waterways and kill endangered animals. Honestly, nobody wants that.

But on the other hand, when we walk through the supermarket and hold our new canvas bags, we see bananas, apples, Kiwis, all wrapped in plastic. It is not only hypocritical, it is actually a bit loose. Nature gave all these fruits skins to protect them and keep them fresh. Nature even adds bananas to us for a week. I call that convenience!

If the plastic in the fruit department did not give enough reason to get confused, Coles gave his family thirty small, small, small, mini-reasons to be confused. Well, 30 if you manage to collect them all.

An endangered sea turtle might swallow a Coles Mini in the Pacific, but I do not swallow the logic that millions of plastic bags are bad, but millions of plastic toys are fine.

It is not right. It is not a fair dinkum.

What is interesting is that while Woolworths was perfecting his plastic bag-gymnastics routine, Coles distributed mini-toys that contributed to the maxi-landfill. Aldi, who in the first place never bothered to hand out bags, was called the most trusted brand in Australia.

It is extraordinary: a supermarket whose German founders may be fair dinkum & # 39; translated for them has become our most trusted brand, in less than twenty years since it was first opened here.

Perhaps the efficiency of Germany corresponds to the practicality of Australia to build trust in ways that Aussie supermarkets have difficulty understanding.

Part of the key, you might think, is that Aldi controls the art of authenticity in a very simple way: it simply does not claim to be something that it is not.

Aldi has shown how trust and authenticity can be built up quickly. But it can be fragmented even faster. Ask the supervisors at AMP about this.

The company that has existed since 1849 has shaken its reputation and share price by providing evidence to the Royal Commission.

AMP shares were higher than $ 5.00 before the Royal Commission hearings. They are now around $ 3.35.

"AMP's sky-high mistrust has cost the private label billions of dollars," said Michele Levine, Roy Morgan's CEO this week, when the results of the company's trust scores came out.

The financial institution is not the only one to be attacked. Other banks and brokers, whom we trust with our mortgages and super, with everything we've saved and everything we've earned, all have the ringer signaled for the same reason: not being fair dinkum.

Of course, the politicians who see this all happen.

Ask yourself: did the leading spills give you more confidence or less trust from politicians?

If they make promises now, do you see them as authentic?

When they visit the bush in an Akubra, do they really look blue?

John Williamson ends that song, Really blueby asking: "If they sell us like sponge cake, do you really want something?"

The banks and pollies have sold us as sponge cakes. The supermarkets were that too, but they wrap the cake in plastic first.

– Chris Urquhart is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Twitter @chrisurquhart