Wellbeing and Royal Commission Outcomes

Wellbeing and Royal Commission Outcomes
Torrey Orton
April 30, 2009

What’s it all about, this Commission? It’s all about human well-being in Victorian bushfire prone areas. We are concerned with our areas but extend this concern to the experience of others in similar ones (across Australia, and in California and Greece for instance). The underlying question of the Commission’s inquiries is, ‘What is a viable context for human well-being in such areas?’ For many this will include the well-being of indigenous plants and animals, too.

The Black Saturday Royal Commission has the responsibility to recommend on:

1) The preparation and planning for future bushfire threats and risks, particularly the prevention of loss of life.
2) Land use planning and management, including urban and regional planning
3) Fireproofing of housing and other buildings, including materials used in construction
4) The emergency response to the fires
5) Public communication and community advice systems and strategies
6) Training, infrastructure, and overall resourcing needs.

The last is the outcome delivery system, the means through which the first 5 are implemented. So, how it is shaped matters more than the others, since without good implementation the Commission will have been just another Government ‘talkfest’. At least three pre-conditions are important to success. One, that the implementation of new ways of doing anything is understood to be iterative, not a one-shot stamping of a new impression on old materials. Two, that the processes are open and transparent (including no places to hide like ‘commercial in confidence’). And, three, that implementation is well-rounded: its parts and processes are interconnected and interdependent. The last is the focus of the following discussion.

All of these recommendations will touch directly or indirectly on aspects of human well-being. There are models of well-being around. One I like is used by Australian criminologists to drive a new approach to sex offender rehabilitation – where re-offending is an all too usual result. Their model looks like this:

1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) 2) Knowledge 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) 7) Community 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) 9) Happiness 10) Creativity

*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.
Tony Ward, Claire A Stewart,

I am not too excited about happiness and inner peace as core human needs (I think ‘interest’ does better because it isn’t turned in one direction – a ‘positive’ one - about outcomes). While we can dispute the specifics of models, we have a sense of what it means to be human. That is, we won’t dispute well-being as a human need, just its components and configurations. All societies have well-being assumptions. Our models are also implicit most of the time, until decision demand times arrive with high life/death outcomes.

Let’s apply part of our model to the sixth outcome - Training, infrastructure, and overall resourcing needs. The relevant parts may be life (1), knowledge (2), excellence in play and work (3) and community (7). For example’s sake I’ll take the resourcing element as one focus for application of well-being criteria. What would it mean to do this? A series of questions which can be used to establish the parameters of resource decisions and for tracking their implementation:

Life
Will these resources in this configuration best provide for added safety within the technical constraints and not detract from other life sustaining matters?

Knowledge
Will these resources provide the best chance(s) of increasing our understanding (knowledge) of fire related factors as they change across their total spectrum? Eg – is it clear where across various provisions, systematic data gathering and interpretation is necessary and how will it occur? This understanding must be increased at three levels at least: state, locality and family / individual.

Excellence in play and work
Are the programs associated with fire danger amelioration providing best opportunities for local stakeholders (business, residents, etc.) to improve / increase their work and play?

Community
What affects on the whole populations of various localities will the total set of programs have, how will this be monitored, what feedback systems are built in…?

A similar application of selected well-being parameters should be made to the other two parts of item 6 (training and infrastructure) , and each of the other 5 outcome areas, and then across the set as a whole. Attention should be paid to which well-being parameters must apply to assessment of all outcomes.

Underlying all efforts may be this mantra: “It’s just not affordable”.
Access Economics CEO Chris Richardson on ABC 7:30 Report, 280409, talking about the coming financial constraints of the GFC.

This will be at play in the Commission’s decision-making, too. A rounded, well-being based approach will enhance the value achieved from their work. Lack of it will lead to an assumption ruling the proceedings – the neolib assumption about public debt and private provision before which all still kowtow since there is no other accessible language for public discourse!! This one is employable almost with impunity because we cannot know what the future will bring to the ‘economy’. This fact, and its attendant diversely reported feelings of fear, anxiety and anger, will tend to drive everyone and every public process (where those feelings are constantly intentionally exaggerated) to lowest common denominator thinking.