The wellbeing of society depends not only on the wellbeing of individual citizens, but also on the quality of our collective public life: on factors such as the fairness of our political system, the health of our democracy and the participation of citizens in public life.

While democracy, governance and citizenship is one of the headline dimensions for assessing whether life in Australia is getting better, it is difficult to find a single indicator that adequately captures this very wide dimension of progress, and consequently there is no headline indicator.

For a more in-depth discussion about how the dimension of democracy, governance and citizenship relates to progress and whether it is improving in Australia, please see the Democracy, governance and citizenship chapter in Measures of Australia’s Progress, 2010 (cat. no. 1370.0).