Jonathan
Boston, Te
Herenga Waka — Victoria University of
Wellington
As New Zealand heads
toward another
general election, political attention is naturally
focused on the issues touching people’s lives right
now.
The months ahead are sure to bring more
pledged policies to ease the country’s cost
of living crisis, housing
unaffordability, high
unemployment and health
system pressures.
With so many families
struggling to make ends meet, that’s hardly surprising.
But focusing on today’s challenges risks ignoring, if not
worsening, those of tomorrow.
Many of New
Zealand’s “long
problems” – including the economic and social
implications of an
ageing population, a changing
climate and transformative technologies such as artificial
intelligence – are fast coming to
bear.
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Others – such as an ongoing biodiversity
crisis, infrastructure
and housing shortages and low
productivity – have long loomed in the background but
increasingly also require durable and effective policy
responses.
None of these problems can be solved
quickly or easily. Meaningful progress requires policymakers
to look beyond the next three-year parliamentary term and
the short-term incentives of the electoral
cycle.
Why promises are easier than
persistence
Encouragingly, some campaign policies
already announced do stand to address long problems.
Understandably, the specific problems highlighted and the
preferred solutions reflect the political philosophies of
the respective parties.
Centre-right National, for
instance, proposes
reforming the KiwiSaver scheme to enhance long-term
savings and investment. Centre-left Labour has meanwhile promised to
introduce a targeted capital gains tax to improve the
overall fairness of the tax system and discourage housing
speculation.
The smaller parties have also
identified their own long-term priorities.
The
right-wing libertarian Act Party is focused on reducing
public expenditure and regulatory burdens on business.
The right-leaning populist New Zealand
First emphasises preserving local ownership of the
nation’s resources.
At the other end of the
political spectrum, the Greens prioritise
rapid decarbonisation and reducing income and wealth
inequality, while Te Pāti
Māori advocates fundamental constitutional reform and
stronger Indigenous rights.
The Opportunity Party,
which claims to be centrist, proposes major welfare
and tax reforms, along with greater public investment in
research and innovation.
Announcing long-term
policies, however, is only the first step. As I argue in the
Helen Clark Foundation’s forthcoming book, Facing
Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New
Zealand, the greater task is sustaining them over
time.
Whatever the merits of individual proposals,
tackling the country’s long problems will require a
consistent and durable policy approach. Repeated policy
reversals waste valuable resources, delay progress,
discourage investment and risk eroding public confidence in
the democratic process.
That kind of policy
consistency cannot be delivered by one government
alone.
It depends on parties of different political
persuasions being willing to negotiate durable multiparty
agreements, whether through formal accords or less explicit
understandings.
New Zealand has demonstrated it can
do this. Cross-party agreements notably led to the Superannuation
Accord in 1993, the Zero
Carbon Act in 2019, and, most recently, a
new long-term program of infrastructure
investment.
How lasting change
happens
Not every democracy approaches long-term
policymaking this way. The prominence of formal cross-party
agreements varies considerably, reflecting each country’s
constitutional arrangements, political history and
culture.
That said, international experience
suggests durable agreements on long-term challenges rarely
emerge by accident.
They depend on broad agreement
about the nature of the problem, shared goals and guiding
principles, confidence in the policy tools being used and
political incentives that reward cooperation rather than
conflict.
For major parties of both the centre-left
and centre-right, particularly, this requires informed and
inclusive deliberation, negotiation and compromise. But the
broader public also has an important role to
play.
Voters can encourage long-term policymaking
by rewarding responsible, evidence-informed and
future-focused policies. Interest groups, unions,
iwi and hapū, community organisations and
think tanks can all help build support for long-term reform
through evidence, ideas and public debate.
And
other independent public institutions can identify long-term
challenges, assess solutions and help build
consensus.
New Zealand already has bodies such as
the Climate
Change Commission, the Infrastructure
Commission, the Retirement
Commissioner and the Parliamentary Commissioner
for the Environment.
But it still lacks
future-focused offices such as a Parliamentary Commissioner
for Future Generations, which exists
elsewhere. NZ also does not have a Parliamentary Office
for Science and Technology, a Parliamentary Budget Office or
a centre for foresight and long-term
strategy.
There is also no parliamentary select
committee devoted specifically to long-term or
intergenerational issues. The fiscal cost of addressing
these institutional gaps would be
modest.
Ultimately, governing for the future is a
choice. It requires political leaders willing to look past
the next election rather than simply follow the latest
opinion poll.
That means respecting the best
available evidence, speaking honestly about long-term
challenges and unavoidable trade-offs and building the
cross-party relationships needed to sustain reform over
time.
Without that commitment, today’s long
problems will simply become tomorrow’s bigger ones.
Jonathan
Boston, Professor of Public Policy , Te
Herenga Waka — Victoria University of
Wellington
This article is
republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the
original
article.
