The Next25 Navigator survey 2021 answers the question, “What future does Australia want and are we on track?”
To dig deeper into the survey findings, Next25 conducted 42 qualitative interviews with members of the public and people who are informed by their professional roles - distilling the findings into three digestible snapshots.
Click to read each snapshot below and scroll further for the full Next25 Navigator survey.
Together, these three snapshots provide additional insight into important national issues identified in the 2021 Navigator survey. This deeper understanding creates a foundation for actively improving how Australia makes its future.
The Next25 Navigator survey asks the question, “What future does Australia want and are we on track?”
Australia is not on track to deliver a flourishing future
Public Interest Index
We created the Public Interest Index (PII) as part of Navigator. It measures the public’s sentiment about how well institutions are delivering what Australia wants, how well institutions are acting in the public interest.
To measure the PII, we asked the public to assess the performance of six key institutions that have a mandate to act in the public interest – politicians, the public service, business, non-government organisations (NGOs), media, and experts/academia.
A depressing picture emerges.
The Public Interest Index is just 31/100.
Australia’s key institutions are viewed poorly
There is a marked difference in how the public sees politicians, who rate the lowest, and NGOs, who rate the highest. Politicians score 22%, meaning just one in five of us thinks that politicians act in accordance with the needs of Australians.
The fact that no institution rates higher than 40% (NGOs) suggests that Australian institutions are not in touch with the needs of the people. It is clear that the public believes that institutions are not serving the public interest.
One of the findings of Navigator 2021 is about how well Australians believe we are doing as a nation — is the country better today than in recent history? The answer is no.
61% of Australians do not believe the country is any better than it was 5-10 years ago and only 39% of Australians are confident that Australia will be better in 5-10 years’ time.
What future does Australia want?
Navigator asks what the priorities of life in Australia should be. With this knowledge, Next25 can begin to answer the question, “What future does Australia want?”
The 39 aspirations in Navigator are deemed to be the 39 most important aspirations for modern life in Australia by Next25 through a rigorous prioritisation process that will continue to be augmented in future editions.
We asked Australians to rate the importance of each of the 39 aspirations and then to rank how well Australia is doing on each of them – we call this performance.
The nation’s priority to-do list
We then measured the total gap between an aspiration’s importance and its performance. We call this its tracking score. The poorest tracking aspirations are those that are important to Australians that the nation is doing a poor job on.
This is the priority to-do list for the nation and for anyone wanting to act in the public interest.
For media enquiries, please contact the team at contact@next25.org.au.
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