#1098 for broadcast on 2CH Sydney, 12 July 2015.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released its fourth four-year “general social survey” of 13,000 households, taken in 2014. The survey measured the “subjective wellbeing” of respondents by asking them to assess their overall satisfaction with life on a scale of nought to ten.
The average was 7.6, higher than in other OECD countries, and up from what was said four years ago. Scoring elow average were people with a disability, one-parent families with children, the unemployed, and people with a mental health problem.
As Ross Gittins observed in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday, “Governments wanting to raise the nation’s wellbeing now know where to start.”
He notes a link between the wellbeing of individuals and access to social capital, in particular “networks of mutual support, reciprocity and trust.”
Our sense of wellbeing can significantly improve when we do voluntary work for an organisation, or get involved in an environmental or animal welfare group, or actively participate in a local church.
I’m Rod Benson for the NSW Council of Churches.
NSW Council of Churches 
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