Australia, how are we doing on wellbeing?

In 2009, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress released its landmark Report. The report was highly critical of governments’ over-reliance on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of aggregate economic activity, as a de facto measure of societal wellbeing. The authors pointed out the obvious flaws of GDP for this purpose: not all economic activity is good for wellbeing and many of the most valuable contributors to wellbeing – such as social connection and a healthy natural environment – don’t count as economic activity. The use of GDP is justified by a simplistic, outdated economic theory of wellbeing as ‘maximising utility’; i.e. people supposedly gaining personal ‘benefit’ by accumulating wealth and material possessions.

Since then, responding to these criticisms, various governments and international agencies such as the OECD, have established alternative frameworks to measure and monitor wellbeing, including topics such as health, housing, employment, education, social connections and environmental health. The Australian Government has now followed the trend, with its Measuring What Matters (MWM) framework, which incorporates 50 key indicators (to be regularly measured) under 5 themes of health, security, sustainability, social cohesion and prosperity.

The logic here is that by expanding the way governments measure their own performance vis-à-vis wellbeing, this will create incentives for those governments to act on wellbeing more effectively, across all areas of policy. Sounds good, doesn’t it? I would certainly agree that, if Australian governments were able to support positive gains on all or even some of the MWM indicators, this would indeed be positive for wellbeing. Many of the indicators reflect current evidence on social determinants of health.

However, in fact the current Australian Labor government, despite its glossy MWM framework, continues to implement multiple forms of policy action and inaction which actually undermine wellbeing by causing chronic stress leading in turn to mental ill-health, and contributing to harmful social outcomes such as domestic violence and addictive behaviours.

The growing and unaddressed drivers of socioeconomic inequality are high on the list of policy failures; underfunded public education, the housing crisis, welfare systems that force people into poverty, the fragmented, managerialist approach to Indigenous policy, and on it goes. The pretended action on climate change while simultaneously enabling growth in fossil fuel industries will drive chronic stress, despair and mental illness on an even greater scale, as landscape are destroyed, species lost, and people exposed to more frequent and intense fires, floods, droughts, and heat. The current data on mental health outcomes – reflecting these policy failures – are bad and getting worse, especially among young people.

So, what is going wrong? What explains this massive disjunction between a government’s good intentions on wellbeing and their actual performance? As with its Coalition predecessors, the primary considerations driving policy actions and inactions under the current government are not to fulfil their duty to promote the public interest. Rather, it is a narrow, risk-averse, gutless calculation of their own perceived political interests to keep their asses on the government benches at all costs. Thus, elected members are far more interested in conformity with their own corrupted, party room culture, the approval of their cocktail party companions, and beating their political opponents than in the core wellbeing interests of the Australian public. Literally every time one hears an Australian politician speak, one can easily see the cogs of political calculations turning in their head.

Within the political calculations driving policy, meek obedience to the perceived private interests and political donations of large corporations is now a first-order priority. In policy decision making, it is the corporate voice, behind closed doors, which will have the ear of the relevant Minister. The Labor government is mortally afraid of political blowback to even the smallest decision seen to challenge corporate interests. In this game, the public interest is forever deferred to a magical time when it can be acted on with no political risk. Any recognition that private interests must sometimes give way to larger public interests – and be required by law to do so – is deemed to be politically unrealistic (with one or two rare exceptions). The ‘big 4’ consultancy firms have been allowed to take over large slabs of Federal policy making, and the strategies they recommend almost always involve privatisation in one form or another. The quasi-market model of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is just one of many examples of how this thinking fails, with hundreds of for-profit providers exploiting the public purse to line their own pockets. Despite the MWM, the cheap conceit used to defend this corporate obedience is the same as it always was; GDP growth is the magic wellbeing pudding.

The present government and the MWM framework itself also display some crucial forms of wilful evasion and ignorance on fundamental questions of what wellbeing really is, how it is shaped by social and economic environments, and the kinds of systemic policy changes required to begin to turn the situation around. The assumption that simply measuring some indicators is going to drive effective policy for wellbeing is naive. With measures alone, it is all too easy for Minsters and departments to just carry on implementing their standard policy formulae while pretending these somehow address items in the MWM framework. ‘Feelings of safety’ have declined? Well, let’s just lock up more ‘bad’ people with longer sentences. ‘Mental health’ has declined? Well, let’s just pour evermore psychoactive drugs down people’s throats. In general, let’s paper over the problems with a politically ‘realistic’ response, while ignoring the fundamental causes and real, systemic solutions.

What then can we say about Australia’s performance on wellbeing? Unfortunately, the unavoidable conclusion is that the MWM framework, despite some worthy goals, right now it little more than a piece of empty political theatre, an act of government-as-performance, not intended to actually do anything, but only to give the appearance of meaningful action.  

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I show in my forthcoming book on How to Create Societies for Human Wellbeing, real and effective policy strategies are readily available for any government genuinely committed to act on wellbeing as an enduring public interest. These strategies have little to do with throwing public money at remedial health and social services to treat the harms caused by failed policy elsewhere. Rather, three forms of action are needed. First, the policy settings actually causing the harms of socially determined chronic stress and mental illness – the inequalities, the gross hypocrisy on climate change, the failures of Indigenous policy – must be addressed. Second, the dominance of private interests over the public interest in policy making has to be reversed. Third, the focus  of wellbeing policy must shift to generating universal access to the essential conditions required for wellbeing to the realised, from early childhood to old age. In practice, this means governments using place-based policy methods to support the development of wellbeing communities; where community members and local services – aided by public resources – engage in localised actions to raise healthy children, promote primary health care and lifelong education, generate meaningful work, build social connection, provide secure housing, care for nature, and ensure access to healthy foods. The 1986 statement in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion is as true now as it ever was: ‘Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health’ and, I would add, their wellbeing.