The Albanese government’s new “Measuring What Matters” framework for a wellbeing economy has been criticised for relying on out-of-date data in several crucial measures. But that’s an easy and somewhat cheap criticism to make.
Notably, the Treasury document reports “little change” in overall life satisfaction based on statistics from 2020, and “stable” psychological distress, based on statistics from 2018.
As The Australian newspaper has editorialised, this old data “fails to reflect the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of dollars in extra NDIS spending, and the most aggressive series of interest rate hikes in a generation”.
