Happiness index delivers a pointless exercise in futility

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: AFP

Jim Chalmers’s much-awaited great Australian happiness index is a tale of outdated data and ­obsolete assumptions.

Its usefulness is questionable.

In fact much of it is meaningless if taken as a measure of the current state of general wellbeing of the nation, primarily because it is based on publicly available data that was produced prior to the cost-of-living crisis.

As a political document, it also undermines any premise that Labor might like to rest on to prosecute its case of inequality against the former Coalition government.

One might rightly ask, what was the point of it?

And one could reasonably further assume, based on the averaged sum of its conclusions, that people were happy enough under the previous government.

It says nothing about how much happier and content people are having changed governments.

And why would it? Things would presumably be demonstrably worse now than they were a year ago based on any happiness index that a government might want to apply.

Of the 50 measures that the “Measuring What Matters” project sought to gauge, in an attempt to assess the overall wellbeing of Australians, many of them improved before Labor was elected.

Sure, some went backwards but the rest pretty much stayed the same, s quite remarkable considering Australians suffered the worst pandemic in a century and endured the most draconian government impositions on their liberties since the last world war.

Even more remarkable is that much of the data predated the start of the cost-of-living crisis.

This is one of the most absurd conclusions in the Albanese government’s version of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index.

When measuring people’s level of mortgage stress, the document suggests people are doing just fine. In the fine print, it then admits “the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, global price shocks, inflation and impact of interest rate rises on households is not captured …”

This admission, and data on mental health capturing a period prior to the Victorian lockdowns, undermine the broader credibility of the document and begs the question as to what was its purpose in the first place.