By Stephen Saunders:
The October Budget offers us a sparkly new “wellbeing” framework. Which nowise dents the gnarly old Treasury thinking. Endless growth and environmental denialism.
Statement 4 of the October 2022 Budget is Measuring What Matters. It declaims Treasury’s “traditional” macroeconomic indicators that don’t measure “community wellbeing”. Who knew?
Thus, the OECD and OECD nations (hi, Jacinda) have tacked on trendy “frameworks” for that purpose, incorporating wellbeing “indicators” across various policy “domains”.
Treasury invites your response – by end of January. What should an Australian framework measure? This year, they promise a “stand-alone” Statement.
Statement 4 mimics progressive thinking. But favoured “experts and stakeholders” will mostly determine what gets measured.
Like the Budget generally, The Statement’s regressive subtext is heedless population growth and chronic environmental denialism.
Ahead of any framework, we need Budget transparency around population/inequality and environment/climate. And any framework should cover population growth.
OECD is the springboard
Wellbeing frameworks aren’t totally new. For example, the Human Development Index and the economic/environment/social Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) date to the 1990s and earlier. Australian GPI has retreated since 1974 – when the population was around 14 million.
It looks as if the newer OECD Framework will be Australia’s springboard. Statement 4 compares national frameworks to that of the OECD. It rates Australia against 15 OECD policy “domains” and 32 headline “indicators”.
The top-eight OECD domains are: Income & Wealth, Social Connections, Knowledge & Skills, Environmental Quality, Health, Housing, Civic Engagement, and Safety.
It’s a good list. In key domains, sure, Australia ranks highly.
But where’s “Population Growth”? Or “Inequality”? One OECD indicator is the “80/20 income share ratio”. It’s a start.
Statement 4, like the rest of the Budget, buries Australia’s radical population settings. These only surface as Appendix A of Budget Paper No. 3.
Population growth strongly influences wellbeing across other domains. Particularly in Australia, it should be its own domain.
Politicians weaponise population growth
Albanese’s Labor takes its licence for mass migration from, you guessed it, “stakeholders”. The in-crowd of the Jobs and Skills Summit. Mere voters aren’t consulted – despite the wellbeing implications. So, there’s more reason than ever to canvass population in any framework.
COVID border closure shrank net migration to negative 85,000 – the lowest figure in a century. Unemployment sank to a fifty-year low – some fillip.
Yet the previous and present governments raced to reboot mass migration. They disregarded the 2050 environmental prospect – 10 million extra people for the arid continent of great extremes.
The Budget and the Population Statement target 235,000 in net migration. With visa processing in overdrive, and unprecedented student intakes, even that will be swamped.
Treasurer Chalmers and his strident propagandists (notably ex-Treasurer Costello’s Nine media) imply that 235,000 is the “normal” trend. But it’s three times our historic average. Canada (hi, Justin) is the only rich nation with a more intensive immigration program.
Chalmers and Home Affairs are deploying COVID as the smokescreen for our biggest immigration drive ever. While the Statement and its supporters gaslight us into believing that population is slumping and smaller and older than expected.
With the Statement ink barely dry, Chalmers portrays to a helpful media stenographer that he’s not stopping at 235,000, while his Melbourne mate Dan Andrews sings harmony.
It’s a worry having an unreconstructed Treasury as the wellbeing czar towards 2050. Just look at Treasury’s propaganda that Sydney’s a triumphal global, not the sprawling but congested burg of socioeconomic polarisation.
Even Appendix A divulges population aggregates only. By calculation, the target population growth is 1.4% as far out as 2025-26. That’s two-three times higher than sensible OECD nations.
This population growth helps Treasury – via GDP growth. It doesn’t necessarily help wellbeing. Australia experiences regular per-capita GDP recessions. Under surging population, 2023 risks another.
Population growth isn’t wellbeing
Peak-COVID polls found ordinary voters liked the COVID migration respite. They didn’t want mass migration. Post-COVID polls go likewise. Unless you’re a media triumphalist that cherry-picks surveys from the Scanlon immigration lobby.
Treasury-brand “wellbeing” starts with continually growing the population, as favoured by the graduate classes not the rest.
A wellbeing framework ought to knit stuff together. But Treasury dictates population policy and is dismissive of the weak Climate and Environment portfolio.
Following suit, “progressive” media punditry tries to delink climate “reform” from population, even though global emissions track global population.
Statement 4 ignores this climate-change basic, on which Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) has made a detailed report.
UN “net zero” emissions can’t happen, they infer, under established global population trajectories. Over-population increases vulnerability to climate change.
Even for wealthy Australia, this imposes chronic problems:
- increasing water-security risks, both rural and urban
- population overload in cities, stymying infrastructure and congestion relief
- risky urban-fringe developments, increasingly facing fire and flood
- ongoing environmental degradation and species crashes
- an extra 1.5m net migration by 2030, most magnifying their carbon footprints
- forget about an honest “43%” reduction in emissions by 2030
Outside the Budget, the State of the Environment warns of “human pressures” leading to “land clearing” and associated ills. Perversely, the Budget magnifies those pressures.
“Climate action” and “protecting environment” band-aids can’t offset the population loading. Nor does the Budget tackle entrenched or illegal land clearing, nor modify Australia’s notoriously timid regime of taxes/levies on fossil-fuel extraction.
Naturally, Statement 4 talks up Australians’ world-ranked personal wealth levels. These are largely embedded in expensive housing that increases inequality.
While profits handsomely outpace labour costs, real wages have fallen to levels of more than a decade ago. We’re the OECD’s worst per-capita greenhouse-gas emitter. Our State of the Environment reports are dire.
Nations with lower population growth do better in GDP per-capita growth. Nations with rapidly growing population don’t seem to do better for equality.
For wellbeing, a precautionary population policy is indicated. Not the radical “Costello” Chalmers alternative. Rapid population growth will be a negative for real wages and housing affordability. It will undo the low-unemployment windfall.
It’s time the Treasurer brought population policy out of the closet and into his speech and Budget papers. His economic-parameters Table, 1.1 ought to include population growth.
Our national “wellbeing” priority isn’t a framework per se. It’s about Budget honesty on population, inequality, and environment.
Make the framework inclusive
Any Australian wellbeing framework is playing catchup with our population policy.
Nevertheless, an inclusive framework might allow voters to see for themselves the domains where Australia does well. But also consider for themselves, does more population mean greater wellbeing, as the Treasurer and “stakeholders” assert?
How would a framework handle education, where the political settlement is for pampering church schools, not funding state schools for educational attainment and population growth? Or health, where some query measures such as hospital beds per population?
Here’s a range of inequality/environment indicators and measures that could be sampled in an Australian framework. Some are reflected in the GPI or OECD Framework.
Under Inequality (or Income & Wealth), Australia versus OECD trends for:
- (Un)employment rates
- Profits vs incomes; Inflation vs wages; Real unit labour costs; Real GDP per capita
- Population growth vs productivity growth; Real wages; 90-10 or 80-20 income/wealth shares
- Housing (un)affordability; Household debt
- Private vs state school SRS funding; Teen and adult educational attainment
Under Population Growth, and Environmental Quality, Australia versus OECD trends for:
- Total natural increase, numbers and % of population; Total net migration, numbers/categories and % of population; Total population growth, numbers and % rates
- Major cities, population shares and commuting/congestion trends
- Material footprint
- Greenhouse gas emissions estimates – including and excluding land clearing (LULUCF)
- Land clearing estimates – not solely based on National Carbon Accounting (NCAS)
- Tallies of endangered species; Tallies of (un)natural disasters
Across such measures, it’s doubtful the first “Big Australia” surge of 2005-2020 has improved ordinary wellbeing. Yet the second surge could last many years.
Leaving the environment aside, this phase will entrench the income/wealth positions of the top 10-20%. Putting the environment back in, it won’t improve ordinary “wellbeing”.
Stephen Saunders is a former APS public servant and consultant.
