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- Australia is unwell
Do you remember the first budget Labor delivered last October? I’m assuming you’re a normal, well-balanced person who does not. But I do 🤠 It was only a short-term budget, but it included a brand new feature called “Measuring What Matters” dedicated exclusively to wellbeing. At the time I thought it was going to be included in the budget every year, but turns out the federal government is releasing it as an independent annual report – and they dropped the first full instalment on Friday.
You can read the read the report here, but it’s probably more interesting to play around with the dashboards that show the results in each category. Ok, now for what I think…
Is Australia feeling well?
This report makes it really hard to know. I really, really hate to agree with criticisms published in the like of The Australian (their goal is malicious, mine is not!), but some of the data in Measuring What Matters is too old to be useful. To explain, let’s just look at one metric.
The mental health data covers 2004 to 2018 – already five years old. As a result, the report says Australian’s mental health status is ‘stable’. I don’t know, does it feel stable out here to you?
It’s not like we don’t have a lot of mental health data from the past five years. The report acknowledges this, but then says that data from the pandemic might not be helpful for determining long term trends. That’s not necessarily untrue, but I worry it’s a sign the govt is too eager to carve out data that looks bad and call it an anomaly. Distressing events like a global pandemic or the 2019 Black Summer fires (also not included in this data) do have long term mental health impacts. They are the catalysts that change long term trends. The impact of COVID-19 will be felt by young people for years, and will inform the mentality of an entire generation.
Data in some sections is much more recent. Measuring chronic health conditions goes right up to 2020-21, and shows a significant increase (almost 50% of the population suffers a chronic condition). It’s really good to have more up-to-date assessments in some areas, but makes it very difficult to compare one thing to another.
The report is supposed to show a holistic view of where we are at as a nation, how we’re feeling, but that patchiness of data is why it fails that goal. Because there is so much variation in the time periods of each thing being measured, you can’t make any useful comparisons.
The overall measure of Life Satisfaction uses data from 2014, 2019 and 2020. It shows that people with a mental health condition AND those with a chronic health condition are less satisfied with life compared to the ‘national average’. It also shows that a) chronic health impacts life satisfaction, and b) the prevalence of chronic health has increased in the past. So if I had to guess, I’d say there’s probably also been an increase in mental health conditions… But this report won’t tell us that, ‘cos the data is too old.
This doesn’t only apply to the mental health metrics. There are 50 indicators total, broken down into five different categories – even related indicators within a category have little useful connection to each other. ‘Homelessness’, ‘Housing Serviceability’ and ‘Ability to Make Ends Meet’ are each examined from different perspectives but none that overlap. We’re shown that Indigenous people are significantly more likely to be homeless, but not how they fare on the other two measures.
For a Treasury document that was literally created to inform policy and funding, there’s way too much guesswork for my liking. The inconsistent way the data is collected, compared and presented can easily be gamed by a government, particularly when it’s close to election time. That’s not a partisan criticism – both Labor and Liberal governments will do this.
I don’t want to be a hater. It is good that the federal government has committed to tracking the wellbeing of the nation. It is also good to see that some indicators are broken down into specific groups too. Impacts of the economy are not felt evenly and its past time we seriously tracked it. I truly believe there are good intentions underpinning this, and the govt admits it’s a work in progress. Room for improvement.
But as it stands, the Measuring What Matters report just cannot tell us how well Australia is feeling right now.
Good stuff on Zee Feed rn:
It’s hard to sum up how I feel about this essay. It tackles the shame of girlhood, the power of reclaiming it, and why ‘girly’ stuff can be an effective tool to build solidarity, share political information, and challenge oppressive power structures. Seriously. CLICK HERE TO READ.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
Who is Gwen The Milkmaid? ASMR YouTuber GwenGwiz Re-Emerges as Tradwife TikToker— But is She For Real? on Centennial World
I was an unofficial consultant on this deep dive. By that I mean, Centennial’s Head of Content Lauren messaged me every time she found an insane new layer to this story. I see this as a detailed, cautionary tale of how quickly young, highly educated women can get sucked into the far-right pipeline. Scary stuff.
Sam Kerr and the Dream of an Australian World Cup Title on The New Yorker
“Lloyd, who played with Kerr in Kerr’s first American season, told me, “Some of the things that she would pull off and do, you’re just, like, ‘How did you even do that? Have you ever trained that?’ And she’d be, like, ‘No, I just pulled it off in this game—and I did it for the first time.’”
How can I best support my daughter who’s clashing with her teachers over racism? on Guardian Australia
Sisonke advice in this column is invaluable for everyone. “You’ve got to help her frame what is happening in ways that support her excellent instincts. Help her see that she has every right to challenge her teachers and point out racism, but ultimately if she wants to change the broader system, she is going to need a lot of help.”
And this TikTok user presented a H1 report analysing every time she had a breakdown in the first half of the year. Excel spreadsheet girlies will understand how impressive this is!