General objective

The Pre-conditions of Well-being project aims to develop a platform of public policy measures conducive to allowing Australians to thrive.

Rationale

Although there are innumerable centres of expertise in the multitude of specialist fields relevant to health and well-being:

  • many centres of expertise reside in disciplinary silos;
  • many centres of expertise are sectoral and obliged to advance the interests of their sector:
  • policy responsibility in health and well-being is distributed between national, state and local governments – and with international obligations;
  • entities that supply the public goods that underpin well-being are widely underfunded and underpowered; and are cowed by governments’ fear of debt-and-deficit rhetoric;
  • there are very few forums able to foster dialogue across the disciplinary, sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries.

There is therefore a role for an independent scholarly body with multi-lateral policy expertise in this arena as the issues require the application of scientific method with its focus on causation. The project is intended to expand beyond the traditional role of a scientific academy in producing and publishing information to identifying the core reasons why scientific and medical knowledge is not embedded more thoroughly into public policy and public budgets. It will suggest how these problems could be overcome.

Persimon

Only 20-30% of Australian families eat an adequate quantity of fruit and vegetables each day.

Initial strategy

To develop recognition and momentum, the platform will initially be built up incrementally by a series of opinion pieces, nominally 1000 words each, submitted to The Mandarin online newsletter, outside the paywall. Any member of any Australian Royal Society may draft an article. To validate articles, an Editorial Panel has been established comprising representatives of the Royal Societies of Australia and several individual Royal Societies for peer review. The series is entitled Prevention or Patch-up?

In due course the articles may be published in one of the member Societies’ peer-reviewed journal, or may be aggregated into a monograph, or appear in some other format. They may also be source material for press releases or policy submissions.

Emerging themes

  1. The well-being of the population is in the ‘public interest’ and should be a (or the) primary concern of governments. Many positions aired in policy circles such as market efficiency, individual freedom and government intervention are best described as means to that end, often contestable, but the end outcome, the flourishing of Australians, should not be controversial.
  2. Many of the preconditions of health and well-being lie in the provision of public goods which by definition are under-provided by commercial markets. Public goods require financing by civic or government (taxation) sources. Market neoliberalism cannot adequately explain how to deliver the public goods essential to human development.
  3. Corporations are not required to advance the public interest as their primary purpose. The activities of many corporations, such as those involved in the gambling, alcohol and pornography industries are not prima facie conducive to well-being and require firm policy leadership and regulation by governments on behalf of the community.
  4. Cases of capture or at least undue influence of governments by regulated industries are common. The inclusion of industry representatives on decision-making boards is contrary to the public interest. Their role should be confined to advisory committees.
  5. Regulation is not necessarily antagonistic to individual freedom and self-determination. Regulation can firm up rights and freedoms. Nor does public funding equate to regulation or coercion.
  6. The tension between individual accountability for managing one’s life and civic/community/government accountability, being one of the major cleavages of partisan politics, may not ever be resolved, but must be addressed for each issue.
  7. Financial inequality entrenches disadvantage and low well-being from one generation to the next. Minimising inequality is necessary for a society’s well-being.
  8. Bringing up children is a responsibility of the entire community.
  9. The human body is fundamentally a biological entity upon which sociological and economic forces are superimposed.

Social media forum

The project has established a LinkedIn account, accessible by clicking here or logging in to your LinkedIn account and seeking “The Royal Societies of Australia”. From time to time the project will harvest insights from the LinkedIn feed to convert them into durable published articles or reports.