Remember Jacinda Ardern’s “Wellbeing Budget”? How well did that one go, now? So well, apparently, that Ardern doesn’t dare set foot in New Zealand any more. About as well as KiwiBuild.
Not coincidentally, Ardern’s fellow socialist Anthony Albanese is slavishly aping both policies – with even less success.
While Albanese is still at least trying to pretend that his promise to build a million, billion, gazillion houses (to house the million, billion, gazillion cheap foreign workers he’s importing) is on track, he’s not even pretending that his ‘wellbeing agenda’ is deader than a Māori kid with a silly first name.
The Albanese government devoted time and energy in its first term to developing a wellbeing agenda for the economy and society.
It was a passion project of Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who wanted better ways to measure national welfare beyond traditional economic indicators such as growth, jobs and inflation.
Chalmers developed the Measuring What Matters framework to try to better align economic, social and environmental goals as part of a deliberate effort to put people and progress, fairness and opportunity at the very core of our thinking about our economy and our society.
In other words, a bunch of vague, subjective, fairy-floss to tickle lefty hearts.
And they screwed up even that.
As Labor settles into its second term, what has happened to its wellbeing agenda? And how much was a poor consultation process to blame for it apparently falling by the wayside?
Because it failed miserably.
Measuring What Matters was badged as a wellbeing framework to improve the lives of Australians and help better inform policy-making across all levels of government.
It tracked 50 indicators spread across five overarching themes:
• healthy
• secure
• sustainable
• cohesive
• prosperous.
There was also a standalone indicator on life satisfaction.
Who can honestly say that the miserable Albanese government has succeeded on a single one of those? Hospitals are bursting at the seams, our defence and security is a joke, cost of living is spiralling, and cohesion? Just ask Jewish Australians about that.
As for life satisfaction: independent tracking shows that that one plunged as soon as Albanese got into government.
No wonder they don’t want to talk about it any more.
The fanfare surrounding the release has since fizzled, and wellbeing is now seldom mentioned.
Furthermore, there is little evidence insights have been taken up by the government. The Australian National Audit Office recently noted the challenge of embedding Measuring What Matters in policy, as well as the absence of any evaluation work to gauge its effectiveness.
Translation: it was a load of airy-fairy bullshit, all along.
