The wellbeing and security of Australians is in decline.

What’s causing the decline in our quality of life and can we reverse the trend?

This is the third article in a series of five about ACFP’s report on The State of Australia 2025. View the series from the start here.

ACFP’s recently released report on The State of Australia 2025 paints a picture of a nation that’s been drifting away from the better future most of us have hoped to secure for ourselves and our loved ones.

If any of us has a sense that the next generation will not be as well off as we have been and will not have the level of wellbeing and security necessary for a decent quality of life, then the data and information in The State of Australia 2025 will show that they might well be right.

Fortunately, however, the report provides a very clear picture of the causes of the decline and, as such, it pinpoints the things we can change that will give us the best shot at reversing the trends of decline. In the main, these are things about the policies we are using to structure our economy and run our democracy fairly.

In my last article I summarised aspects of the report that show what’s been going wrong and where we are suffering the ill effects of policies that governments have stuck to for the last couple of decades. For a list of the worst effects of these policies, readers can browse Section 4 of the summary of The State of Australia 2025. It does not paint a happy picture. The decline of our quality of life is evident in literally hundreds of indicators.

In preparing the report, ACFP has used a database that pulls together 368 indicators of the health of our society, natural environment, economy and democracy to assess whether our quality of life is improving or not. This is called the Australia Together National Wellbeing Index. In analysing the data and trends on these 368 indicators, it has become apparent that over the last ten to twenty years Australia’s performance has been positive on 58 of the indicators in the Index but negative on 232. Performance has been assessed as neutral on the remaining 78 – in other words, we’re getting neither worse nor better on those indicators. And during the shorter periods of the 46th and 47th parliaments, negative performance has outweighed positive performance by factors of 5.2 and 4 respectively across all the indicators.

Because the balance of results over an extended period has been consistently negative, it is evident that the prevailing policies of the major political parties have not taken Australia towards a better future. Nor – quite apparently – can they be expected to. But the question is how do we sift out the things we might change that will give us the best chance of reversing the trend? The summary report of The State of Australia 2025 should be a big help. It gives us an efficient way to find and select the policies most likely to make a positive difference to our prospects.

So what are the policies we can change in order to reverse these trends?

The most notable areas of policy failure - not in any particular order - stand out as:

1. the continuing commitment of governments to neoliberalism, despite proofs of the damage its focus on small government, privatisation and poor regulation does to the economy and to equality within our society and democracy;

2. unfair and regressive taxation;

3. targeted welfare in preference to universal income and services security;

4. education which requires debt for students;

5. competition policies which reduce competition;

6. refusal to price carbon;

7. continued subsidisation of fossil fuels and new coal and gas extraction projects;

8. support for weapons exports - which by the way have increased massively in the last eight years;

9. a narrow base of industries in the economy;

10. support for defence policies which actually threaten our security, create an unproductive economy and will significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions;

11. support for the mining sector that is highly disproportionate to the returns it provides for Australians in revenue and jobs – that support comes at the expense of our services, it does not secure funding for them;

12. refusal to act to prevent biodiversity extinctions; and

13. refusal to pursue constitutional reforms capable of establishing Australia as a genuine democracy of political equals where human rights are acknowledged and honoured by the state.

These and multiple other policy failures are coincident with and clearly causal of the continuous trends of decline now observable in our quality of life. If we and our governments persist with these policies, all the evidence suggests that our quality of life will surely continue to decline. The only area of doubt about that relates to the speed with which it will decline. The speed is likely to increase for every year that we delay the necessary policy reforms. If Australian governments persist with these failing policies, it is likely that Australia will face environmental and economic collapse within a decade. But if they reverse the policy directions they have pursued in the above listed areas, there is still a chance of reversing the decline, as long as we start now.

Chapter 11 of The State of Australia 2025 provides detailed descriptions of the sort of decline we are likely to face if we persist with these failing policies. The picture it paints is one of a full reversal of the quality of life Australians have said they would prefer whenever they’ve been asked about that in surveys, research and community planning programs during the 21^st century. Those expressed preferences have been summarised by ACFP in a draft vision statement called the Vision for Australia Together. Current policies are dragging us towards the reverse of that Vision. They are dragging us away from what Australians have said they value and want.

Does the draft Vision for Australia Together reflect what Australians value and want?

Australians can test that for themselves. As part of our ongoing research programs to ensure that the Vision for Australia Together continues to describe the future that Australians have said they prefer, ACFP routinely scans the reports that are made public by other research organisations on what Australians have said they value and what they want for their future.

The most comprehensive results from these scans have been published in Chapter 5 of my book, The People's Constitution: the path to empowerment of Australians in a 21st century democracy.

Readers can find out more about the draft Vision for Australia Together in the ACFP question and answer sheet called: Does the Vision for Australia Together reflect what Australians have said they value and want? This Q&A sheet sets out:

• how the draft Vision is aligned with the things that Australians have said consistently during the 21^st century about what they value as individuals, as a society and as a nation; and is sets out

• how pursuit of policies that are capable of making the Vision for Australia Together a reality will maximise our chances of building a society that can live those stated values.

Crafting a new national policy agenda.

The results set out in The State of Australia 2025 make it clear that to reverse the evident trend of decline in our quality of life we must change the national policy agenda.

Since the weight of policy over the last two decades has been pushing Australia straight towards the reverse of the Vision for Australia Together, it is evident that Australians need to do more than simply change who is in parliament and in government. They need to change the agendas of parliaments and governments by telling them which agendas they would prefer. That can only be conveyed coherently in the form of a long term integrated national plan that is crafted by the people of Australia themselves and strategies within that plan must be selected based not on politics or ideology but on their potential to drive us towards the Vision rather than away from it.

In coming articles I’ll expand on the factors ACFP has been able to identify as likely causes of the drift away from the Vision for Australia Together. That will involve talking about policies we have pursued in the short term that look as if they are good but which, if we persist with them, will actually bake in long term negative effects. And it will involve talking a little more about what The State of Australia 2025 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.

But I’ll also talk about 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 in the age of Trump. Australia still has significant capacity to avoid that sort of decline, if we organise ourselves to cooperate efficiently on the design of an agenda for a better future and if we seek to impress that on the parliaments we elect.

Want to know more about ACFP?

ACFP has been established to provide Australians with the tools and practical help they need to select the policies and systemic reforms necessary for a better future and to organise themselves efficiently to impress that vital agenda on parliaments and governments. Find out all about ACFP and how to become involved here.