The Federal Government’s National Wellbeing Framework, Measuring What Matters was a welcome and much publicised commitment by Treasury when introduced to the nation in 2023. The first annual update was released quietly on the ABS website last week.
The framework’s original goal was to align economic and social objectives to improve the wellbeing of Australia, through a series of measures for the Government to track progress. These included health indicators such as access to health services and mental health, security indicators such as childhood experience of abuse and online safety, sustainability indicators such as air quality and emissions reductions, and cohesive indicators such as First Nations languages spoken and social connections.
While these indicators remain unchanged, the 2024 updates provide little or no analysis of how wellbeing has improved, or otherwise.
The Centre was critical of the measures when first released, because of the limited data representing the perspective of children and young people. It is not clear from the 2024 update when these datasets for children’s wellbeing will be developed or how Government departments and ministers will be held accountable for reporting on their performance in relation to national wellbeing.
There will be an expanded General Social Survey in 2026, which promises to increase the number of indicators and metrics updated annually.
You can find the annual update here https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/measuring-what-matters
