Australian charities release major new report showing Australia is going backwards on key measures when it comes to the kind of communities we actually want to live in.

The Australia we want, Third Report reveals Australians have become less generous and less likely to volunteer time to charity (and are giving less to charity).  Women feel less safe walking alone at night when compared to many other countries and Australia’s incarceration rate has climbed to become almost twice that of Canada’s and five times higher than Japan.  At the current time there are 18,000 un-sentenced prisoners awaiting their fate.

Community Council for Australia’s CEO, David Crosbie, says the negatives in the report clearly outweigh the positives for most States and Territories.

• Australians have become less generous.
• Australians are less likely to volunteer time to charity.
• Less people are now giving to charities.
• A lower percentage of income is now being allocated to poorer countries than is the case in most OECD countries.
• Australian women clearly feel less safe walking alone at night compared to many other countries.

The positives are also worth noting.

• Women are now making up more of our workplace and the gender pay gap is reducing
• Our education attainment levels are rising including for Indigenous students
• Suicide is trending down in all but one jurisdiction
• The ACT and NSW are the top-scoring jurisdictions, while Victoria and Tasmania round out the bottom of the ranking tables.

David Crosbie said, “Charity leaders believe Australia can be a much better place if governments look well beyond the economy as a measure of success and start investing in making Australia a much fairer, safer, more just and more generous community that is also inclusive.”

“One of the deep concerns in this report is that Australians appear to have accepted the idea that we should simply lock up more and more citizens, at a greater expense to taxpayers, when there is no great gain in crime reduction.  It is disturbing beyond measure that Australia’s current incarceration rate is almost twice that of Canada, double most European countries and five times that of Japan.  Clearly, we could and should do better.”

“In the middle of an election campaign where it seems it is all about how much money each political party can offer voters, we would have like more discussion about some of these critical areas like incarceration rates. Australia now has 18,000 un-sentenced prisoners waiting to be sentenced.  A third of our prisoners have disabilities and chronic health conditions.  Over a third are Indigenous.  80% of prisoners have not completed secondary schooling.”

The Australia we want Third Report is the latest comprehensive review of Australia’s performance set against values-based measures developed by charity leaders.

In 2015, Community Council for Australia brought together 60 major charity leaders to identify what kind of Australia they wanted to see in the future.  Charity leaders selected a series of measures.

David Crosbie added, “During this current Federal Election campaign, you could easily be forgiven for thinking Australia is ultimately nothing more than an economy.  As a community we are so much more than that.