The Coalition has earned back trust: can they keep it?

At 8.40am, I am in Zoom yoga with most of my family members, either the ones who've moved back in or the ones in lockdown on the other side of the country. Namaste, cobbers.

Also, I now know the name and/or phone number and/or email address of every single person in my street. This wasn't my doing. My neighbour a few doors down thought we'd be at the stage of "bring out your dead" by now and wanted to be able to make sure we could drop off bread, organic apples and kombucha to the newly bereaved. I joke. Kind of.

All this unnatural social cohesion is set against a real fear of what comes next. Who will still have a job? Who will never work again? Who will lose their homes if they ever had them? Will young people have a chance to be carefree or careless again? We can only answer a few of these questions now.

Research released on Thursday from the Australian National University's Centre for Social Research and Methods gives us some good news. We trust each other more, we feel more connected. We even like the government more. As for public servants, we adore them. They now talk to us most days and so we see them and we appreciate them. Go, chief medical officers! Go, secretaries of Treasury.

Part of this increased trust is because we have had to rely on each other more than we did before. We are trusting others to be socially distant, to wash their hands, to keep away from supermarkets if they don't feel well, to self-isolate when necessary. And so far, that's been working. In Australia, the spread of COVID-19 is being limited by our efforts.

"These were always nice things to do but they weren't framed as life and death decisions. What other people do now has large effects on our health. In our research, we found most Australians reported they were adhering to the main physical distancing guidelines.

That's how Nick Biddle explains it. He's the co-author, with Matthew Gray, Ben Edwards and Kate Sollis, of the ANU research. He says that because Australians have followed both the laws and the recommendations, we now put faith in each other to behave in a way which has a public benefit.

I ask him about the jerks who jostle us in supermarkets or who wander into oncoming joggers. He reminds me the infection rate shows those people are in the minority.

"For the most part, people are staying at home. When they are out, they wear masks," he says.

But it's not just other regular people we trust. We also trust our government more than we did two months ago. Then we were emerging from the hell of the bushfire season and the continuing drought - and politicians seemed keener on photo opportunities than they were on coming to grips with the misery of our lives.

Now they're back, baby.

Biddle says it's all about comparisons. We look to the UK and the US and we see leadership chaos and a trail of death and economic destruction (also suggestions we inject bleach). Here, leaders have veered towards the sensible and contained in a marked departure from their regular behaviour.

We already accept New Zealand is better than us at everything, including being better at rugby, but everyone else is in the toilet.

"There is complete disfunction and citizens in those countries don't know what their governments are doing," says Biddle.

Whereas we have a government which has increased welfare to both business and regular people.

"People see our government as trying to protect both our health and the economy," says Biddle.

And this is where the Coalition has to be very very careful if it wants to keep our trust.

Biddle says the data for the survey was collected in mid-April when there was still a lot of uncertainty at how COVID-19 would unfold and what the economic recovery would look like. Now Australians feel that with the stimulus, there is some hope we won't all be a bleak black hole.

As Biddle points out, it would be close to electoral suicide for the government to completely withdraw the additional stimulus in September while at the same time maintaining business can only reopen slowly.

We aren't yet New Zealand where Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday that domestic travel was on again, at least for certain purposes.

"A trip from Wellington to Napier to see your mum is fine, a trip from Wellington to Napier to go to a big conference with an open bar is not fine," she said.

In contrast to the degree of trust we have in each other and in governments and the public service, our life satisfaction has plunged.

That's because we are completely freaked out about our incomes and our future. Whoever says money doesn't buy you happiness is a kook. Of course it does, it underpins our feelings of safety and security. The ANU research says more than a quarter of Australians believe there is a 50 per cent chance of losing their jobs.

And those of us still in work fear shorter hours, more disjointed work patterns and the continued juggle of home and work with none of those useful boundaries set up by the usual physical distance of our jobs.

Like the rest of us, Nick Biddle's at home doing the COVID-19 juggle.

It's no coincidence the report was released on Thursday, a day when Nick's partner isn't doing paid work. That experience is replicated in homes across Australia as we try to manage multiple competing priorities.

"It's reinforced my view of how challenging it is to multi-task," he says.

We've obviously got faith in our institutions now. Let's hope it's repaid after iso.