Australians now have an evidence-based report on the state of the nation.
What does the report tell us about how we’ve been travelling?
This is the second article in a series of five about ACFP’s recently released report on The State of Australia 2025. View the first article here.
ACFP’s recently released report on The State of Australia 2025 does not paint a positive picture of our progress as a nation towards a future of better wellbeing and security for everyone. On the contrary, the report shows that during the 47th parliament there were dozens of policy decisions that, on balance, took Australia further away from that destination than towards it. And over the past decade there has been much more poor performance than good performance.
Progress during the 47th parliament has been a little better than during the 46th parliament and the previous decade, but it is still far too slow.
A summary of The State of Australia 2025 is accessible here.
The State of Australia 2025 report uses a vision statement called the Vision for Australia Together as a yardstick for assessing our progress towards the better future Australians have said they aspire to when they’ve been asked about that in surveys and research during the 21st century. The Vision is only a draft but it succinctly collates the stated aspirations of Australians for the sort of life we want to be able to lead and the country we wish to live in by 2050 or sooner.
With the aid of the draft Vision, ACFP has been able to assess our potential as a nation to make that Vision a reality. We have done this by pulling together 368 indicators of the health of our society, natural environment, economy and democracy, and by providing factual baseline data as well as targets for each indicator. This assemblage of data and essential information about policies and their effects is called the Australia Together National Wellbeing Index.
The database enables us to assess the direction of movement from the baseline on each indicator and follow trends in progress towards or away from the targets over both the short and longer term. Based on the evidence about performance over the last decade, we do not have grounds to expect that we will arrive safely in the future we have said we would prefer if we persist with the policies we have been pursuing.
So where exactly are we falling down?
When we use the Vision as the yardstick, it becomes apparent that the worst areas of performance - not in any particular order - have been in relation to:
our health and safety – that means our personal physical and mental health and our feelings of safety in relation to world and climatic events;
the unresolved relationship between First Nations peoples, non-Indigenous Australians and the state (the Crown) itself;
unfairness and inequality, particularly inequality of opportunity and political inequality;
increasing inaccessibility of vital services including education, housing and health (due to increasing unaffordability, itself caused by excessive reliance on the private sector for delivery of essential social services);
over-exploitation of scarce natural resources;
continuing species extinctions and threats to biodiversity;
an economic composition which is unsustainable and particularly disregards future generations; and
a system of governance which has offered neither equal suffrage, nor a reasonable share of power for the people, nor a process by which trust can be established in parliaments and governments.
The data suggest that it is on this last point that we are failing the most. During both the 47th parliament and over the longer term the worst area of our nation’s performance has been in our governance. This includes our management of defence, security and international relations but also our policies for human rights, political equality, transparency and corruption in governance, and constitutional reform.
During the 47th parliament, out of 91 indicators monitored about our governance, only 5 results were positive. 27 were neutral and 59 were negative. Negative results outweighed positive results by a factor of 11.8.
Over the longer term, out of 91 indicators monitored about our governance, only 8 results were positive. 16 were neutral and 67 were negative. Negative results over the longer term have outweighed positive results by a factor of 8.4.
It appears that the quality of our governance has been getting worse for some time and that the way we have been using – or misusing – our democratic systems and institutions is a significant cause of all the other features of our decline in society, the natural environment and the economy.
Interestingly, the second worst area of our performance as a nation during the 47th parliament was in our society, where out of 154 indicators monitored only 29 results were positive. 38 were neutral and 87 were negative. Negative results for our society outweighed positive results by a factor of 3.0.
This is quite a different result to the one recorded for the 46th parliament in The State of Australia 2022, where the worst areas of performance were in our natural environment and our economy. Performance on our economy improved somewhat during the 47th parliament, specifically in relation to employment planning and industry transition and equitable improvement in living standards. But as noted above performance on our governance continued its trend of deterioration.
For a more fulsome list of the worst areas of performance, readers can browse Section 4 of the summary of The State of Australia 2025. It doesn’t – and probably shouldn’t – make for comfortable reading, especially since there are far more poor areas of performance than the good ones highlighted in Section 5 of the summary report.
Curiously though, and fortuitously, the worst area of our performance as a nation – our governance – is also where our best performance is most evident. However, credit for this cannot be given to our governments of the last decade. The best areas of performance almost all arise from the community itself and the civil society groups that have organised themselves to champion for peace, climate change mitigation, and equality. Relatively few have arisen from the performance of recent parliaments and governments, although in the economy there has been some improvement in performance for short term during the 47th parliament.
The sheer number of results showing negative movement from the baseline compared to the number showing positive trends indicates that Australians need to use the strengths of civil society and local communities to set a new course for their governments in several policy areas; otherwise the parliaments we elect will not be able to deliver on our aspirations at all.
In coming articles I’ll speak about:
factors that ACFP has been able to identify as likely causes of the drift away from the Vision for Australia Together;
policies we have pursued in the short term that might look good but which are likely to have long term negative effects;
what the report is showing about the sort of future we might be able to expect if the policies that have prevailed (and failed) over the last two decades remain in place;
areas where we might be able to improve things in the future; and
the insights in the report about Australia’s capacity for avoiding the sort of social, environmental, economic and democratic decline we can observe in some other countries, especially in the age of Trump.
Find out more about the Vision for Australia Together
The Vision for Australia Together is a yardstick we can use to see whether the parliaments and governments we elect are working together well enough to help us build the future we want.
If the draft Vision for Australia Together describes the sort of country and future we want as a nation, then the information in The State of Australia 2025 on our progress towards that country and future can help us with selection of the parliaments most likely to work with all Australians to build it.
Find out more about the Vision for Australia Together here.
Want to know more about ACFP?
Find out all about ACFP and how to become involved here.
