General objective

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

Supporting the project

We need your support to achieve the outcomes of this project. We have established a crowd funding platform to enable donations to this project to be received. Your financial support, no matter how small, will go a long way to allowing the project to fulfil its aims. Click this link to donate: DONATE

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 1200 words each, submitted to The Mandarin online newsletter. The series is entitled “Prevention or patch-up?” (Page under construction).

Emerging themes – a summary

  1. The human body is fundamentally a biological entity upon which sociological and economic forces are superimposed.
  2. The well-being of the population is in the ‘public interest’ and should be a (or the) primary concern of governments.
  3. 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.
  4. Financial inequality entrenches disadvantage and poor well-being from one generation to the next.
  5. Bringing up children is a responsibility of the entire community.
  6. The forums available for synergistically assembling insights from a range of knowledgeable sources and for crossing disciplinary and portfolio boundaries are non-existent or under-funded. New consultative forums are required.

More detailed emerging themes can be found on the separate page presenting the columns.

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.

Knowledge Hub

The project aims to assemble an archive of informative materials uncompromised by artificial intelligence (AI), including sources used in compiling its analyses. Click on ‘Knowledge Hub‘ for a landing page for this archive, still under construction.

Well-being