Josie Pagani: Why ‘Wellbeing’ is hurting us

Thursday, 15 December 2022

Finance Minister Grant Robertson has confirmed mental health will be one of five top priority areas in the Government’s first 'Wellbeing Budget' next year.

Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular contributor to Stuff. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance.

OPINION: To borrow someone else’s line. There is no dog in hotdog. A koala bear ain’t no bear. And let us not speak of urinal cakes.

So, about the Government’s Wellbeing Framework.

The Treasury has released a new report to accompany its Living Standards Framework.

The framework is a salad of abstract concepts like ‘’knowledge’’, ‘’voice’’ and ‘’subjective wellbeing’’ attractively arranged in columns and bubbles with no development of logical relationships between them. Nor any use of old-fashioned analytic tools such as whole sentences.

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Attempting to give meaning to the framework, the Treasury has published a discussion of ‘’12 Domains of Wellbeing’’. I count 44 in the framework, but perhaps maths is not in Treasury‘s toolkit either.

Life is better for some people than for others, according to Treasury. Crikey, who’d have known?

Anyway, the nation's leading economic agency is trying to define ‘’advantage’’ and ‘’disadvantage’’, how to measure them and understand the causes, and ‘’the normative challenge of assessing whether advantage and disadvantage is cause for concern’’.

In summary, the Treasury finds that ‘’life is better for some people than for others’’. Crikey! Who knew?

It adds, “Life has got better over time in some ways but worse in others”. That sentence is so banal that I can’t be bothered coming up with a sarcastic barb.

I counted 17 names attached to this scholarship. Did none of them say, ‘’But this is a childish statement of the bleeding obvious’’?

Is there a single person who will read the Treasury report, and exclaim, ‘’I had no idea some of us are ‘more advantaged than others’!’’

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No-one would talk about their own lives like this. This could be written only about other people, not by anyone who is actually ‘’disadvantaged’’.

‘’Wellbeing’’ is the descent of politics into diplomacy and bureaucratic blancmange. Who could disagree with ‘’wellbeing’’?

Well, me. ‘’Wellbeing’’ does public policy by replacing choices and priorities at the heart of politics with fog. Instead of looking around us and seeing obvious problems to fix, we get: Depends what you mean by ‘’disadvantaged’’.

One example of how real problems disappear: An enormous inequality in New Zealand exists in access to dental care. Half of us do not have adequate dental care, causing massive ongoing problems, from shorter lives, to pain and social exclusion. Yet there is no reference to dental care in Treasury's 115-page discussion of ‘’the distribution of advantage in Aotearoa New Zealand’’.

Politics should be about priorities. Mine would be inequality. Housing, healthcare (including dental care, mental health) and education for everyone. An economy that delivers well-paid working class jobs.

I expect policy advice to highlight the costs and benefits of alternatives, to strip bare tradeoffs, and present practical menus of options. I expect sophisticated evaluation of whether policies are achieving what they are meant to.

When advice instead hides choices behind wellbeing mush, no political constituency is ever built for underlying ideas. If no-one can disagree with ‘’wellbeing’’ then no-one can ever win an argument for it either.

The idea of ‘’wellbeing’’ as a political project has emerged from the takeover of our social institutions by an educated middle class that thinks it's being progressive. Instead it signals its elite status.

All of our major economic, social and cultural institutions are dominated by this class – political parties, publicly funded posts and media (yes, including me).

It has led to the celebritisation of politics and the exclusion of meaningful ideology (in the sense of a coherent system of ideas). Everyday working people are invisible.

Ironic when we've come to appreciate the importance of diversity in our institutions, of gender and ethnicity, but not class, lived experience or political ideology.

For most of the 20th century, public institutions were strikingly egalitarian in an economic sense. Classes mixed in churches, RSAs and rugby clubs, and so shared many social interests. There were cruel inequalities, though, between genders and races, and a stifling orthodoxy. So those social institutions withered.

Meritocracy was supposed to replace it. The promise of merit is that the Pasifika daughter of a minimum-wage worker should have the same life opportunity as the Pākehā son of a banker.

But what these Wellbeing papers reveal is a special club of merit, where members know the secret handshakes. If you're not fluent in the cultural preferences of the educated class, you don't belong.

The second, deeper, problem is that by definition not all of us are meritorious. Most of us are average. We are just going about our lives. Those of us who are not winners need to be seen too.

I suppose wellbeing is trying to find a language to understand this mysterious phenomenon of people whose periodic ‘’disadvantage’’ is a ‘’cause for concern’’.

I have a better alternative: make our public institutions genuinely representative, so the priorities and language of working people will surface on their own.

This mush is the opposite of progressive. Tough choices are obscured behind fifty shades of bureaucratic beige. That makes for an amusing column. Less amusing, it stops us making decisions at all.