Jim Chalmers gets the boffins to measure what really matters

The Bureau of Statistics is broadening its research beyond population, jobs and inflation into areas of social well-being, as Alan Austin reports.

FEDERAL TREASURER Jim Chalmers has performed a valuable service to the nation and helped his government along the way. His decision to fund the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to research more non-economic fields has provided some excellent information. Measuring What Matters is already showing that the Albanese Government is reversing several of the disastrous outcomes of the previous Coalition Government.

Woeful outcomes under the previous regime

A chart showing the unmet needs of vulnerable people has data from 2012 to 2022. This shows a sharp increase in unmet needs by both senior Australians and people with disabilities through the Coalition period. See chart below.

Another chart shows the proportion of persons satisfied with formal assistance received over the same period. This declined for people with disabilities from 79.5% in 2012 to 76.8% in 2022. It declined for senior Australians from 88.6% in 2012 to 85.4% in 2022.

We await with interest – and some understandable anxiety – updates on all these disturbing numbers in future years.

Valuable areas now measured

This new ABS framework has labelled its key themes with five adjectives:

Healthy: People enjoying good physical and mental health, with access to services and health information.
Secure: People living in peace, safety and financial security with adequate housing.
Sustainable: A society using resources sustainably, protecting the environment and building resilience to combat challenges.
Cohesive: Strong connections with family, friends and the diverse community.
Prosperous: A strong economy that invests in skills and education to provide secure, well-paid jobs.

These themes comprise 12 dimensions and 50 key indicators to be tracked over time.

Adults experiencing psychological distress

A disturbingly high 13.0% of Australian adults reported high or very high levels of psychological distress in 2004-05, which was a year of material prosperity but turmoil over asylum seekers, race relations, the war in Afghanistan and terrorist attacks in Indonesia. The 2004 Election was bitterly contested by the Coalition led by John Howard, Labor led by Mark Latham, the Greens led by Bob Brown and the Democrats led by Andrew Bartlett. See chart, below.

That percentage fell to a low of 10.8% in 2011-12, after four years of the Rudd/Gillard Administration, a level still pretty high. It increased thereafter to an appalling 14.3 % by the end of the Morrison regime. Again, what happens hereafter will be intriguing to observe.

Positive personal safety

A high level of citizens feeling safe, compared with, say, the United States, is a tribute to all sides of politics in Australia collaborating to introduce sensible gun laws in 1996 and 2002. It is also a hat tip to law enforcement across the nation for maintaining community security through all the changes in state and federal government.

The ABS chart showing the percentage of citizens who felt safe or very safe walking outside alone during the day is close enough to a flat line from 2012 to 2023 at around 91.0%. The proportion feeling safe walking alone at night is also a flat line over that period, but at the lower level of 52.2%.

Measures of homelessness and financial stress

The other important dataset released last Friday is the extensive file relating to vulnerable citizens published quarterly by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). This updates the numbers of people who are homeless, at risk of homelessness, needing short-term accommodation, requiring emergency financial help, enduring domestic violence, and dealing with mental health and drug and alcohol problems.

Much to the dismay of the pro-Coalition mainstream media, the data does not support their narratives that Australia’s economy is in disarray and Labor is to blame.

Clients requiring emergency accommodation increased slightly in April and May, as we would expect with the approach of winter, but then decreased in June. The last six months have seen a slight increase commensurate with more funds for emergency services being made available.

Both in absolute numbers and relative to population, the situation is substantially better now than it was for the last two years of the Coalition. See blue chart, below.

Citizens requiring emergency financial help have increased over the first two quarters of this year, but remain well below the elevated levels of 2020 and 2021.

Homeless numbers have increased in each of the last two quarters, but only marginally so relative to population. Those at risk of becoming homeless also increased in the last two quarters but remained below the peaks in 2020 and 2021 relative to population.

News media undermine overall life satisfaction

One prominent variable in the new Measuring What Matters series from the ABS is overall life satisfaction, assessed via survey questions from around 5,000 households.

It will be intriguing to compare outcomes on this variable with actual measures of economic, health and security well-being.

We would expect during periods of Labor governments to see economic well-being improve greatly, but life satisfaction plummet as a consequence of the constant barrage of media falsehoods declaring the nation is currently experiencing an economic disaster of one sort or another. Currently, the media narrative is of a fictional cost of living crisis.

The results so far bear this out. Actual material fortunes have improved substantially since the 2022 Election, but overall life satisfaction has declined.

Such is Australia’s doom.