For the past 21 years, the Australian Centre on Quality of Life at Deakin University has collaborated with Australian Unity to track the Subjective Wellbeing (SWB) of Australians aged 18 to 90-plus.
This monitoring has been conducted via 39 national surveys of over 70,000 Australians.
The 2022 SWB report is out and shows that Australians collectively are suffering from record-low economic satisfaction, with younger Australians most badly impacted.
“In 2022, Australians’ subjective wellbeing showed a pattern of decline across all measures, at both the personal and national level”, the report notes.
“This marks the first time in over a decade that such a consistent decline has been observed”.
The below charts tell the story.
Australians’ views about their current economic situation are the lowest on record, even worse than during the Global Financial Crisis:
Satisfaction with life is also at a record low:
Personal wellbeing is tracking just above the 2006 record low:
Standard of living has tanked from the 2020 high, but remains within the normative range:
Australians have record low satisfaction in life achievements:
They also feel less secure about the future:
Whereas global national wellbeing fell to its lowest level on record:
There is also an intergenerational divide in the figures, with the personal wellbeing index (PWI) of young Aussies far lower than older Australians:
Indeed, the PWI of young Aussies was the lowest on record last year:
Not surprisingly, PWI correlates strongly with incomes:
The PWI of low-income households has collapsed under the weight of rising cost-of-living (including rents):
This result correlates with the latest spending by demographic data from CBA, which shows younger households pulling back hard on spending while older Australians spend-up:
Next year’s SWB Report will likely be even more brutal given the ongoing rise in mortgage rates and rents this year, which is hitting younger Australians especially hard.
