Mike Salvaris is a member of: the interim national committee of the Australian National Development Index; the Expert Reference Group for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ project ‘Measures of Australia’s Progress’; and the Steering Committee for Community Indicators Victoria. He has been a long term participant and adviser in the OECD Global Project ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’. Formerly a community lawyer and political adviser, Mike has worked extensively over 30 years in the measurement of progress and wellbeing; democracy, social justice and human rights; community engagement and development; and strategic public policy.
ANDI – the Australian National Development Index
In the past decade, a global movement has developed to ‘redefine progress’ beyond GDP. It is a movement driven as much from community as from national and international levels, and its common features include: developing new visions of equitable and sustainable progress measured by new progress indicators and indexes; directly engaging citizens in the process and seeking to integrate the different dimension of ‘true progress’ (economic, social, cultural, environmental and democratic; spiritual/ethical and material; objective and subjective wellbeing). Progress and wellbeing in arts and culture have been an important component in most of these ‘new progress’ models, stimulating new thinking about the role of arts and culture in progress and wellbeing, and the key goals and progress measures that should underpin it. Defining key community goals and progress measures in arts and culture based on citizen engagement is an important component of community plans and indicator frameworks. More broadly, arts and culture workers and planners need to be aware of the broader movement of global, national and state movement to redefine progress in order to maximise opportunities to enlarge the place and contribution of arts and culture in new models and measures of progress.
This session will explore the global ‘redefine progress’ movement from three perspectives, each presented by a different speaker.
· Adjunct Professor Mike Salvaris (RMIT University Melbourne) will discuss the global movement and a new national citizen-led initiative to develop national progress measures (ANDI – the Australian National Development Index (ANDI)
· Associate Professor Geoff Woolcock (Griffith University) will give an overview of local and state wide initiatives in redefining progress, including the Australian Community Indicators Network (ACIN), and the place of cultural indicators in it.
· Lenine Burke, Contact Inc will discuss these issues from the perspective of a cultural practitioner.
