Pearls and Irritations

The Australian Government has established ‘Measuring What Matters’, Australia’s first national wellbeing framework. It follows similar frameworks in SA, Victoria and the ACT, and one under development in NSW. Will these frameworks help to improve psychological wellbeing in Australia?

The landmark 2008 Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by Joseph Stiglitz, strongly criticised Governments’ use of GDP (aggregate economic activity) as a proxy indicator of social wellbeing. It argued that GDP could assign positive value to economic activity arising from social harms while also failing to ‘count’ many other elements of life which matter for wellbeing. Since then, Governments internationally and in Australia have instituted monitoring frameworks incorporating multiple, (assumed to be) proxy indicators of societal wellbeing. In theory, those governments will be more inclined to hold themselves accountable to a range of social or environmental outcomes pertinent to wellbeing. In general, this growing policy interest in wellbeing is welcome.

Belatedly, the Australian Government has now jumped on the bandwagon with its Measuring What Matters (MWM) framework. The framework encompasses a diverse range of indicators including, for example, life expectancy, online safety, biological diversity, experiences of discrimination, job satisfaction, and income/wealth inequality. Many of these indicators are measuring recognised socioeconomic and environmental determinants of health, and if relevant improvements could be made across some or all of these measures, then health and wellbeing, and health equity, would very likely improve.

However, there are two significant problems for the MWM Framework as a form of national policy commitment to wellbeing, both of which stand as obstacles between the framework itself and effective, equitable policy action to promote wellbeing.

First, as noted, the standing assumption of these frameworks in that governments will tend to act on what they measure. I do not see any evidence that this is necessarily so at all. In political science, policy is standardly seen to be determined by activity in three intersecting domains, policy ideas, political interests, and the institutional structures of government. If the MWM Framework can be placed in the first of these domains, it is by no means guaranteed that political interests and institutional structures will meekly fall into line. The Labor government’s failures on socioeconomic inequalities in income, housing and education, and on climate change suggest that short-term political and private sector interests are outweighing the fundamental public interest in wellbeing (and MWM objectives) by a large margin.

Second, as I show in my recent book, How to Create Societies for Human Wellbeing, published with Policy Press, the government’s notional commitments to wellbeing, and the structure of the MWM Framework, are simply missing a whole body of public health knowledge on psychological wellbeing; what it is, how it works, and how it is shaped by socioeconomic conditions. Understood in this way, psychological wellbeing exists in close relationship with psychosocial stress, caused by exposure to demanding, uncertain social conditions. Too much exposure to known stressors such as financial or housing insecurity, poor employment conditions, unemployment, domestic violence or climate anxiety and chronic stress results, contributing to mental ill-health and harmful social behaviours. Conversely, if exposure to stressors is reduced and people feel able to cope effectively with their conditions, this is favourable to psychological wellbeing. (There is more to wellbeing than this but let’s focus on this aspect for the moment.)

The chronic stress which undermines psychological wellbeing is widely understood as a major causal contributor to common forms of mental ill-health, conventionally described as mood, anxiety and substance abuse ‘disorders’. Thus, the prevalence rates of these conditions at any one time are clear indicators of the extent of harmful population exposure to social and economic stressors.

ABS data shows that currently, in any 12-month period, around 21% of adult Australians and 38% (!) of young adults are subject to one of other of these so-called disorders. The latter figure has significantly worsened in recent years. Australian social and economic policies over several decades – contributing to all of the stressor conditions noted above and others – stand condemned by these figures. They show in effect that our public performance on psychological wellbeing is poor and getting worse.

As I discuss in the book, such figures also indicate the extent to which (some) Australians’ access to the basic social conditions favourable to psychological wellbeing is breaking down. Such conditions include secure, meaningful work, secure housing, safe and caring family environments for early child development, social connectedness, contact with nature, education for life-long learning, and comprehensive primary health care. A positive sense of hope for the future is also fundamental to wellbeing. Labor’s pathetically transparent doublethink on fossil fuels and climate change – Australian emissions bad: fossil fuel exports good – constitute an attack on Australian’s psychological wellbeing.

Until Australian governments really come to terms with the cumulative impacts of their policy actions and inactions on psychosocial stress, distress and mental ill-health, the MWM Framework commitments to wellbeing can be considered as little more than a piece of empty political theatre.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as I show in How to Create Societies for Public Wellbeing, there are feasible ways for governments to act to reduce exposure to stressful social conditions and increase exposure to conditions favourable to psychological wellbeing. Place-based policy to support active wellbeing communities has an important role to play.

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