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The Hon. IAN GILFILLAN: I am indebted to the Ombudsman, Eugene Biganovsky, for a preliminary version of a paper entitled, `Happiness, Economy and Institutions', by Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich. The paper has allowed me to look, at least in part, at what is a substantial piece of research relating to what is not normally looked at analytically by politicians and serious members of the community in these terms, namely, the phrase `happiness of a community'. I wanted to draw some conclusions that are identified in this paper and relate them to two particular issues which are before us as a Parliament and as a community: first, unemployment; and, secondly, local government.
The significant question was framed, `How satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?' It was asked of 6 000 people in Switzerland. Although it is quite clear that you cannot interpolate Swiss circumstances directly to Australia, we do share a lot in common in being a relatively affluent community with high degrees of democracy. The summary states: . . . happiness (which, for simplicity's sake, is in the following interchangeably used with the more precise concept of `reported subjective wellbeing') is `high among those who are married, on high income, women, whites, the well-educated, the self-employed, the retired, and those looking after the home. Happiness is apparently U-shaped in age (minimising around the 30s). . . Later in the document it points out that those over 60 are amongst the most cheerful in society, to which I can firmly attest. So, it does cover more than just the areas that I wanted to focus on. But it is interesting that, in the areas of micro and macro economic factors, it states: An early study of effective income on happiness. . . In most nations those individuals belonging to the highest income group report somewhat higher subjective wellbeing than persons with low income. This relationship is, however, of small size and not robust. The often dramatic increase in per capita incomes in recent decades has not raised happiness in general. . . The influence of the other two major macro-economic variables, unemployment and inflation, is clear-cut. Unemployment is correlated with substantial unhappiness. As income is kept constant, that influence is not due to a fall in revenue but to non-pecuniary stress. In terms of a trade-off, `most regression results imply that an enormous amount of extra income would be required to compensate people for having no work. The Whyalla scheme, which shares unemployment amongst young unemployed when there is only a limited number of jobs, is progressing well. I believe that this study emphasises over and over again how we cannot afford to avoid concentrating on mitigating unemployment by whatever means are available to us. The second area of significance is the increase in happiness enjoyed by citizens close to democracy in what I consider to be local government, and in that regard it states: . . . the more active role of the citizens, (professional) politicians are better monitored and controlled. Government activity, i.e. public outlays as well as the many other decisions by the Government, are closer to the wishes of the citizenry. As a consequence, satisfaction with Government output is reflected in a higher level of overall wellbeing. It is reinforcing in a statistical measure that we need to strengthen the arm of local government, that we need to give local government more significance. As a result of that, we will increase the sense of wellbeing of our community at large, and we must again concentrate on that much too high proportion of our community still suffering from unemployment. In those two ways the statistics of this paper show that we can substantially increase the sense of wellbeing and the degree of happiness in the community at large.