TRANSCRIPT
According to the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia report, also known as HILDA, various data analysed the country's economic, physical and mental well-being and found four main trends.
The first is that Psychological distress is on the rise.
In 2021, 42 per cent of 15-24 year-olds were psychologically distressed - that’s more than double the share in 2011.
Loneliness was also highest among that same age group, which is a major shift from 2001 and 2009 - when the highest proportion of lonely people was among those 65 or older.
Roger Wilkins who is the co-director of the HILDA survey explains how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted this.
"People who are heavier users of social media have experienced greater increases of psychological distress. With the arrival of the pandemic in 2020. We saw a massive jump up in loneliness between 15-24 year olds. And I guess this is consistent with uh this being a group with who's most adversely impacted by the restrictions on social interaction and movement."
First Nations peoples reported greater average loneliness scores compared to non-Indigenous Australian people and immigrants.
Marriages are also on the decline.
In 2001, around 55 per cent of women aged over 18 were married, but by 2019 that number had fallen to below 50 per cent.
But the rate of partnering hasn't entirely changed according to Professor Wilkins.
"There are two main drivers of the declining in marriage. The first is that people are tending to do things like form families, buy a house and get married at later ages. So we're seeing a lot more people in their 20s who are in de-facto relationships than we did say 20 years ago. So I think there is also a bit of a broader social shift away from marriage. I think increasingly people are probably that they don't need this formal piece of paper to affirm their relationship. There's certainly not the stigma of living with someone out of wedlock."
In 2001, about 64 per cent of women aged between 18 and 64 were employed, but that had jumped by 10 per cent to 74 per cent by 2019.
And the proportion of women in the workforce has risen by around 10 per cent from 64.3% in 2001 to 74.1% in 2019.
Professor Wilkins explains.
"The increase in the proportion of women working full-time is actually a more recent phenomenon. Most of the growth, prior to the 2000s was in women working part-time. But since then, we've seen both part time and full time employment of women grow. So up until 2016 we saw essentially no progress in the gender wage gap. But since then, we've seen substantial narrowing of the gender pay gap. So in 2016 women were earning about 78 per cent of men full-time employees. The most recent data, that was up to 86 per cent."
And for the first time, the survey collected information on vaping, with 14.1 per cent of those over 15 having tried electronic cigarettes or vaping.
To tackle this, new government regulations came into force this year, that aimed to restrict access to vapes and e-cigarettes.
