Facing Up to Our Future

New Zealand's traditional “she'll be right” optimism is no longer adequate to the challenges facing the country. 

Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand brings together 21 of the country's leading thinkers to confront the long-term pressures shaping the nation's next decades. Edited by Emeritus Professor Peter Davis, the collection ranges widely, covering issues as diverse as climate change and the energy transition, demographics, the cost of living, housing and home ownership, health, environmental decline, fiscal sustainability, infrastructure, transparency and democracy, race relations and the Crown–Māori relationship, and the future of Pacific communities in Aotearoa. Its central argument is that these are not passing storms to be ridden out on the country's traditional “she'll be right” optimism, but decades-long structural challenges that no single government can solve alone.
Our different governments are failing to take effective action on the long-term economic, social, governance and environmental challenges New Zealand faces. In this book some of our best policy thinkers offer options for practical, feasible and longer-view solutions.  Tackling the challenges our nation faces is vital for a better future.
Structured around the four themes of Economy and Wellbeing, Society and Culture, Governance and Government, and Environment and Place, the book moves beyond diagnosis to an equally broad slate of practical reforms. Its contributors propose, among much else, a cross-party housing accord, an independent fiscal watchdog, a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations, a broader tax base, binding environmental limits, stronger competition and lobbying rules, a simpler welfare system, sustainable funding for public-interest journalism, and a renewed commitment to multilateralism and Pacific climate leadership. With forewords by the Rt Hon Helen Clark and Professor Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, it sets out the kind of evidence-based, long-term policymaking New Zealand needs — solutions built on collaboration and consensus that endure beyond any single electoral cycle.

Our different governments are failing to take effective action on the long-term economic, social, governance and environmental challenges New Zealand faces. In this book some of our best policy thinkers offer options for practical, feasible and longer-view solutions. 

Tackling the challenges our nation faces is vital for a better future.

Published by Dunmore Publishing Ltd for The Helen Clark Foundation.