I want to specifically have a look at BankWest and the latest edition of that bank’s so-called “Quality of Life Index”. This report got a massive free kick from a range of media outlets. Even the ABC had no problem covering the report, making sure they included the corporate sponsor’s brand when referring to the “BankWest Quality of Life Index” on ABC TV news, before going on to give BankWest executive Ian Corfield some free media on the national broadcaster. A Google News search on this topic yielded 167 mentions — not bad going for a report that has some serious methodological flaws.

The BankWest study because it shows just how easily busy journalists and credulous media outlets can be taken in by what appears to be rigorous research. The media reported the findings of the report with little analysis of what it actually said, and no examination of the dubious reasoning behind its impressive league tables of best and worst local government areas in the nation. “The BankWest Quality of Life Index has debunked the myth of Australians’ ‘sea-change’ and ‘tree-change’ desires,” is how the ABC story led.

No, it hasn’t. The Quality of Life Index is not a survey of Australians’ desires. It contains absolutely no market research, survey polling or indeed any investigation of where Australians would like to live. Instead, it is a league table of local government areas based on a fairly rudimentary formula that compiles and combines 10 different statistics from published sources like the ABS.

Pause for just a moment to look at these statistics and you’ll immediately notice some very surprising assumptions built into them. Take the housing category, for instance. One of the 10 indicators for “quality of life” is the percentage of detached houses in a particular municipal area. Houses = good, apartments = bad. Even the shabbiest shack without water or electricity apparently conveys a much better quality of life than a sumptuous Gold Coast apartment. (This, incidentally, is probably the reason the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs score near the bottom of the 590 Australian municipalities in the Index: unsurprisingly, they have almost no detached houses.)

A second category used to calculate the formula is housing vacancies, or “empty homes” as the BankWest authors, with their fingers on our heartstrings, so charmlessly describe them. Municipalities with low rates of “empty homes” are ranked higher than local government areas with high rates. Of course, not many people want to live in a ghost town. But it’s not clear why extremely low rates of housing vacancies are a good thing — just ask the residents of Port Hedland, as Four Corners’ Matthew Carney did the other night.

The increased scrutiny being accorded significant reports like the BCA’s recent emissions trading paper is a welcome development. There should be more of it. If you’re interested, I go into more detail about the BankWest report at New Matilda.