In Australian politics today where is the vision and hope for a better future?

Find out in the 2025 Australian Better Futures Commitment Index.

In the lead-up to each federal election, Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP) prepares a report analysing the policies being offered by three major political parties – Labor, the Liberals and the Greens. We check to see whether each of these parties has designed a policy agenda that will help the nation move towards a future of safety and wellbeing for all over the longer term.

The new report is called Election 2025: Assessment of Major Party Policies. It incorporates the Australian Better Futures Commitment Index – an index established by ACFP in 2022 which essentially measures the commitment of each of the three parties to the long term public and national interest.

The analysis is extensive. ACFP gives each party the best possible chance to display its credentials as custodians of our future, rather than as short-sighted custodians of their own jobs. Essentially, the main questions are:

• In whose hands are we more likely to be safe and stay safe?

• Which party is the most and least likely to help us build and maintain the best sort of society, natural environment, economy and democracy that we can hope for?

• Which party is setting out a vision for a desirable future and designing policies that arc towards that vision via the safest paths?

In 2025, none of the three parties could boast of having set out a coherent or tangible vision for a desirable future, at least not in terms that would give Australians some sense of hope or excitement about what we might be able to achieve as a nation for our quality of life and that of our kids if we salute their policies at the ballot box.

So in order to assess each party’s commitment – if not to a desirable future, at least to a better and safer one – ACFP uses the draft Vision for Australia Together as a yardstick. This is a one-page summary of the things that Australians have been saying repeatedly in surveys and other research and community engagement during the 21^st century about their aspirations for the nation’s future and their own.

Because it describes – in apolitical terms – our longer term interests as an Australian community and safe directional paths to a better future for everyone, the draft Vision provides an alternative means of assessing the risks associated with the policies of each party. It has seventeen elements (one-line statements) describing the sort of life Australians have said they wish to be able to lead and the country they wish to live in. In that form it functions as an efficient, practical tool to help people make their own decisions about which party is more likely to minimise risks, maximise their chances of ongoing safety, and protect what matters most to them – both personally and as members of a democratic society.

Given that the yardstick is about the safety, security and ongoing wellbeing of all, it probably won’t come as a surprise that the analysis reveals a lack of commitment by both the Liberal and Labor parties to our long term prospects. But many might be surprised at the extent of the gulf between Labor and the Liberals on one hand and the Greens on the other. When you look at their policies – rather than at the personalities of their leaders, their campaign one-liners, their professions of competence, and their promises of help in the short term – the gulf between Liberal/Labor and the Greens is now as wide as it could probably get. The report shows that:

• the policies of the Liberal Party, on balance, are entirely incapable of taking Australia towards a future of wellbeing and safety for all;

• those of the Labor Party are also, on balance, incapable of building a future of safety and wellbeing for all, although they are somewhat more disposed to a better future than the Liberal Party; and

• those of the Greens Party are the most likely to propel Australia safely towards a peaceful future where all Australians have opportunities and equality of access to services vital to their wellbeing and security.

Or to put that another way, the analysis shows that:

1. the Greens have demonstrated substantial commitment to all 17 elements of the Vision for Australia Together;

2. the Labor Party has demonstrated commitment to 1 Vision element, a neutral commitment to 7 elements and no commitment to 9 elements; and

3. the Liberal Party has demonstrated no commitment to any of the 17 Vision elements.

In effect, this means that only the Greens seem to be offering hopeful prospects to Australian voters.

The report shows clearly that Labor has largely abandoned its 2022 agenda of “a future where no-one is held back and no-one is left behind”. Despite what it might say in campaigns, its current policies overall can have little other net effect than to hold more people back and leave more behind.

For their part, the Liberals have relegated the word “future” to the background in favour of an agenda claiming to get Australia “back on track”, ostensibly to “end the cost of living crisis and make Australia prosperous, secure and united again.” That agenda might be the sort that any political party would offer and any voter would accept; but there isn’t much (if any) evidence that the policies of either Labor or the Liberals would deliver it. The evidence is that they would both significantly increase our chances of losing a decent future.

The Election 2025 report describes the widely contrasting types of society and future we can expect if the policies offered by these three parties prevail. The future offered by the Liberals and Labor is grim – very grim in the case of the Liberals. Page 21 of the report provides a chillingly succinct description, based on the evidence of the parties’ own statements about their policies; it shows what we are all likely to end up with in the long run in return for a vote for Labor and Liberal. View the picture here.

Given the extraordinary contrast between the futures on offer, it's apparent that there is an advantage that voters can seize here if they think first about the future they want and then vote accordingly. ACFP’s analysis shows there is obviously more hope on offer from the Greens – if what we hope for is a safer and secure future of wellbeing. In their totality, Labor and Liberal policies are likely to take Australians to the polar opposite of the sort of society and future that is likely to be built if we select and stick to the sort of policies proposed by the Greens.

In this election Australians are being offered a wide array of choices right across the policy spectrum from progressive to conservative, and fortunately they are still fully free to make those choices. With the aid of the Election 2025 report they can make those choices in the light of information about the likely effect on our longer term prospects if we vote any one of these three parties into government in 2025.

ACFP makes no recommendations on who to vote for. We have no affiliation with any political party inside or outside of Australia. We receive neither political party nor any other funding. All output from ACFP is produced by the in-kind contributions of volunteers.

This article was first published in Independent Australia under the headline, “Voting for the future you want”.

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