Too often economists reduce important issues, like prosperity, to a narrow set of indicators such as gross domestic product to measure national progress.
Anything that boosts GDP is good, right?
Well, no, of course not. Growing the size of the economy while wrecking the environment or making people miserable is no step forward.
So a number of countries around the world – including the UK, Canada and New Zealand – have introduced alternative ways to measure wellbeing that goes “beyond GDP”.
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Treasury, under the direction of Jim Chalmers, established the “Measuring What Matters” framework in 2023 to track our progress towards “a more healthy, secure, sustainable, cohesive and prosperous Australia”.
Here’s a selection from each theme as laid out in the ABS’s latest update on the Measuring What Matters indicators, which pulls information from various sources to paint a wider picture of Australia’s progress.
Healthy
Costs and waiting times are key factors when it comes to how easy it is for people to access healthcare.
The Measuring What Matters report shows access has become more difficult on both counts over the past decade, and especially since the pandemic.
The share of patients who said they waited longer than they felt was acceptable to see a GP has climbed from 16.6% in 2020-21 to 28% in 2023-24.
When it came to delays getting a specialist appointment, the proportion who said they waited longer than acceptable was 29% in 2023-24, up from 22% three years earlier.
And cost has also become a bigger barrier.
In 2023-24, 9% of patients said they delayed seeing a GP due to the expense – more than triple the 2.4% share in 2020-21.
And 10% said they delayed seeing a specialist for the same reason last year, compared with 5.9% a few years earlier.
Secure
There’s evidence that the constant barrage of bad news from overseas is weighing on our collective psyche, according to the report’s gauge of “national safety”, or “living peacefully and feeling safe”.
In 2025, just over half of Australians reported feeling safe or very safe based on views of world events, the ABS said, versus 91% in 2005 and 80% a decade ago.
“Since 2020, very low proportions of people have reported feeling very safe,” the ABS noted.
Sustainable
On a day when the government released its “scary” report into the devastating potential impacts on Australia from climate change, the Measuring What Matters report shows net greenhouse gas emissions of 446.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2024.
That is 27% below emissions in the year to June 2005, which is the baseline year for our 2030 emission reduction target of 43%.
Worryingly, there hasn’t been much progress in the 2020s.
Cohesive
Part of a cohesive country is one that accepts diversity – a topic that’s top of mind amid anti-immigration marches both here and abroad.
The share of Australians who agree or strongly agree accepting immigrants from many countries makes Australia stronger dropped from a peak of 78% in 2023, to 71% in 2024.
Still, that remains higher than pre-pandemic levels broadly in the mid-60s and suggests we remain proud of our multiculturalism.
Prosperous
Australians are getting richer and generally earning more over time.
But a prosperous country isn’t just rich, it’s also equal – or at least not terribly unequal.
A recognised way of measuring equality is via the “Gini coefficient”, which can range between zero and one, where the lower the score the more equal the distribution.
Australia’s latest Gini coefficient, based on the latest household, income and labour dynamics in Australia (Hilda) survey, is 0.307 in 2022-23 – a marked improvement from the year before but broadly equivalent to what it’s been over the past 20 years.
That said, it’s still too early to judge whether the pandemic has made us more unequal, but the early signs are positive.
In 2022 we had the 16th-highest level of income inequality among the 37 OECD countries for which data was available, the ABS said.
