Opinion & Commentary
Just give us the figures, we can add
THE Australian Bureau of Statistics this week released the latest Census findings. Collecting and publishing data about population trends has long been the bureau's bread-and-butter role, and once again it has done us proud.
Two months ago, however, the bureau released a rather different kind of report called Measuring Australia's Progress. The report selected 15 dimensions on which it claimed we could assess whether Australia had been going forwards or backwards.
With the publication of this report, the ABS moved beyond its traditional role in collecting statistics and into evaluating trends. Given that definitions of 'progress' are politically controversial, however, this was an unwise move for a statutory authority to make.
The ABS's 15 dimensions of 'progress' cover economics (things such as national income per head), society (health, education, crime) and the environment (measures such as land clearance and biodiversity). It turns out that Australia has been doing well on the first, OK on the second but poorly on the third.
All these statistics are important—but we had them already. This report did not collect new information; it simply selected some existing trends and highlighted them as indicators of whether we are making 'progress'. This is where the problems start, for although the ABS thinks these indicators are 'unambiguous', ideas about progress are always contestable.
Bias is inevitable whenever we try to define 'progress'. It occurs in deciding what should be included and in determining what should be left out. If a political organisation makes these judgments, this bias doesn't matter. But the ABS is a statutory authority, and it is expected to remain neutral.
Consider some of its indicators of 'progress'. Land clearance is treated as unambiguously a 'bad' thing, but presumably the farmers who carve out new grazing land and the residents who live in the new housing developments would not agree.
Another of the progress indicators is 'economic deprivation and inequality'. To measure this, the ABS compares how people on lower incomes have fared relative to those higher up. The assumption is that a reduced income gap signifies 'progress', yet this is highly contentious. The Left believes in reducing the income gap, but others think it is more important that people who work hard and show initiative get properly rewarded than it is to redistribute their incomes to other people.
Not everybody shares the ABS's criteria of 'progress'. There is a heavy emphasis on environmental issues in the report, but asked to name three things the government should do something about, fewer than one in 10 Australians mentions the environment.
The problem of bias also arises in what the report leaves out. Twice as many Australians see 'lower taxes' as a priority than mention 'equality', but reduced taxation is nowhere to be found as an indicator of 'progress' in the ABS report. Many Australians are also concerned about high divorce rates, but the ABS thinks divorce statistics would be too controversial to include as a measure of the quality of family life. How did the ABS come up with these measures of 'progress'? It drew them up by consulting a panel of 'experts'. So who were they?
They were all knowledgeable people in their fields, but together they were hardly a cross-section of opinion, and Left-green values appear prominent among them. Apart from a former government statistician, they included an academic who thinks economic growth is 'hostile to our wellbeing'; a government ecologist; two academics working on income distribution and social justice issues; and somebody from the Australian Council of Social Service. They also included Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute. This institute has for some years published its own Genuine Progress Indicator, which emphasises things such as traffic congestion and the harm it thinks is done by advertising. Its choice of measures leads to the conclusion that life in Australia did not improve at all from the late 1970s to the mid '90s - a view which reflects Hamilton's belief that 'the growth project has failed' and that we should 'step off the materialist treadmill'.
The Australia Institute claims that the ABS report supports its contention that 'the costs of the growth process have begun to outweigh the benefits'. It has also leapt to the defence of the ABS, dismissing our criticisms of this report as 'extraordinary and risible'.
But it is not extraordinary to point out that ideas of 'progress' are inherently contestable, and it is not risible to point to the important line that divides fact and opinion, the world of the bureaucrat and the world of politics. The job of the ABS is to gather and publish statistics, not to get involved in defining what is good and what is bad in social trends. It should stick to things such as the Census and leave the politics to others.
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About the Author:
Peter Saunders is the Director of Social Policy research at the Centre for Independent Studies.
