Shadow Minister for Health and Wellbeing, Leanne Castley, today described the ACT Government’s Wellbeing Dashboard, intended to show how Canberra is doing on various wellbeing measures, as a cruel joke on Canberrans.

Announced with great fanfare by the Chief Minister as part of the Wellbeing Framework, much of the Dashboard’s data dates from 2019, some is from 2020, some from 2018 or earlier, while some measures still have no data.

Despite updates being promised every two years, and despite new data being available, basically it doesn’t appear to have been updated since it was launched back in April 2021.

Ms Castley said the Wellbeing Data Dashboard, comprised 100 measures under 56 indicators, under the 12 domains in the Framework covering topics such as the economy, housing, environment, health, education and governance.

“This is another case of this Labor-Greens Government being all about the ‘announceable’ and indifferent about delivery,” Ms Castley said.

The Dashboard’s Access to Health Services datasets still use 2019 data, when 5.5% of Canberrans said it was hard to access a GP, despite December 2020, data showing this had risen to 10.7%.

Economic indicators such labour force, participation rate, unemployment and underemployment are from February 2021, despite being updated monthly by the ABS, and are thus two and a half years out of date.

Incredibly, in the Education domain, the NAPLAN figures on literacy and numeracy are from 2019 – years out of date.

For the number of low-income Canberran rental households in rental stress, the Dashboard uses data from 2017-18 when over 42.7% of lower income renter households paid more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

In the Governance and Institutions Domain, the measure for Trust in Government is still “under development,” despite a promise that it would be “published in 2022.”

“The Wellbeing Data Dashboard is woefully out of date. No wonder Canberra’s Labor-Greens Government is so out of touch in so many policy areas,” Ms Castley concluded.