Long-term opportunities and challenges for Aotearoa New Zealand – an overview

by Sir Peter Gluckman
View of the New Zealand flags flying in front of the parliament building, the Beehive, in Wellington.

Policy making is difficult when unprecedented changes are destabilising many aspects of society and making the future more uncertain.

Koi Tū has produced a comprehensive briefing Long-term challenges and opportunities for Aotearoa New Zealand: Briefing for the incoming Prime Minister and Government.

The areas we highlight in this briefing include social cohesion, human potential, technology, the economy, sustainability, our place in the world, and enhancing policy making.

This briefing primarily restricted to those policy areas in which Koi Tū has produced reports and engaged both academic and non-academic stakeholders. It provides an overview of the issues, and comprises a series of short briefings.

Central to our briefing is one core concern: it is generally accepted New Zealand policy making
has been dominated by short-term thinking which has been influenced by our political system, our constitutional arrangements and our cultural and social history. Yet beyond crisis management, the core role of any government must be stewardship so as to ensure the long-term health of our human, social, cultural, environmental and economic assets.

There is ample evidence that redirecting public policy towards accepted long-term goals is essential. This briefing suggests to the incoming government some core areas where action or policy development is desirable or critical.

Download the individual chapters below:

Future society
Social cohesion and societal polarisation
Democratic innovation
Disinformation

Human potential
Youth mental health and wellbeing
The future of education
Intergenerational disadvantage

Navigating change
Foresight and technology assessment
Artificial intelligence
Research, science and innovation ecosystem
Higher education
Our place in the world
Our land-use challenges: connecting economy. agriculture, resilience and environmental sustainability
Our future economy
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Evidence informing policy
Risk assessment and response
Enhancing policy formation

Overview

Policy making is difficult when unprecedented changes are destabilising many aspects of society and making the future more uncertain. But the short-term and reactive focus of much of our policy and political community has made it harder. There is a natural bias towards the short-term. But competent stewardship of our country requires a greater focus on long-term thinking.

Society and its political masters face continuing and rapid change in the spheres of social mores and societal expectations, demography, technology, economics, the environment, climate change, and geopolitics. These are not independent of each other. Yet citizens have been encouraged to expect simple solutions to complex problems. In reality a more strategic problem-solving approach is needed but this is impeded by siloed analysis and policy processes. In our work it has become obvious how narrow much of our policy-thinking has become on such issues as human-capital development, meeting the challenges of an increasingly digital world, and responding to the need for greater efforts to achieve sustainability. This calls for a process review to retool governments so they can undertake policy development and evaluation in a more anticipatory and systems-focused, multi-agency way.

Liberal democracies worldwide are cracking. Trust in governments and their institutions has fallen, populations are increasingly polarised and concerned, and disinformation is rife. Yet at the same time we face challenges from growing inequalities, social change, rapidly emerging disruptive technologies, geopolitical change, environmental challenges, and the hazards of climate change, all of which put increasing pressure on communities and economies.

Aotearoa New Zealand is not immune. Our institutions are less trusted, policy debates have often been reduced to personal attacks and citizens feel relatively powerless. We have a climate in the public square of growing contentious rhetoric rather than a serious and open attempt at a resolution of how to be a diverse and multicultural society based on bicultural underpinnings. Our human capital is challenged by an underperforming education system, persistently high rates of intergenerational disadvantage and the rising challenge of mental-health concerns, especially in young people. The country’s infrastructure is straining, we have an economy in danger of missing the technological boat and the rules-based system of trade in which New Zealand has thrived is under threat in an increasingly multipolar world. Our position relative to other countries is perceived by many to be deteriorating.

Yet we claim a history of being a consensual, cohesive, and a free market orientated democracy endowed with a social conscience and a collective conscience that in recent decades has increasingly held environmental values dear. Strong and innovative leadership can shift us back to a more positive trajectory. In part that requires a government that is honest and open with its citizens and engages them fully in a long-term discussion of the New Zealand they want. The public understands not everything can be done in a single term, but people get sceptical when simple instant solutions are claimed for long-term complex issues. Better partnerships between the political, private, academic and civil sectors can shift the dialogue and allow governments to engage in long-term substantive developments to progress the nation rather than reactive short-term thinking.

Our themes