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People in WA country are happiest in the land

Source: perthnow.com.au
Date: 28 January 2009

FRUSTRATED city dwellers longing for a quieter life are right to look with envy at all those sea and tree-changers.

A new study shows that living in the country towns, where everyone knows everyone, is a happier existence than the hustle and bustle of city life.

Australians who live in regional areas with fewer than 40,000 people have a higher sense of personal wellbeing than those living in cities, the study shows.

The Australian Unity Wellbeing Index measures people's overall feeling of wellbeing through satisfaction with factors including health, relationships, safety, standard of living and community connection.

NSW rates lowest on the scale of all the Australian states and territories, while Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria are the highest.

But there was a downside to the findings. The research showed that once the proportion of people in an area not born in Australia exceeded 40 percent, wellbeing started to fall.

Deakin University Professor Bob Cummins, the author of the index, said wellbeing was related to a sense of community.

"Anybody who's lived in a small country town knows ... that everybody says hello to everybody else,'' he said.

"You become very quickly connected to those communities.''

But he says areas with a high number of new Australians have lower levels of social connection.

"This acts then to reduce the wellbeing of people in those areas,'' he says.

"What this signals to government is that more resources are clearly required, not in terms of financial support ... but in terms of social interventions, about bringing people of different cultures together.''

He says policymakers need to direct more resources to these areas.

The latest index brought together the results of wellbeing surveys of about 35,000 people across Australia, between 2001 and 2008.

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People in WA country are happiest in the land

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