As the 2023 election draws ever closer, the University of Otago is getting behind the political spin to critically examine the issues facing Aotearoa. To launch this series, today Professor Nick Wilson, Dr Matt Boyd, Dr John Kerr, Dr Amanda Kvalsvig, and Professor Michael Baker argue political parties need to build long-term thinking into policies and systems, and this election year is an opportune time to display commitment to that.
Short-term thinking dominates policymaking in Aotearoa New Zealand. It leads to neglect of public health problems but also the failure to plan for catastrophic and existential risks. These include threats from nuclear war, engineered pandemics, ecological degradation, out-of-control artificial intelligence and climate change.
The good news is that there are feasible options to build long-term thinking into government and get the public engaged, such as creating a Parliamentary Commissioner for Extreme Risks. However first we need to understand the threats we face if we continue down the road of myopic policy.
There are many examples showing where short-term policymaking has failed this country. Drinking-water infrastructure is typically decades out-of-date and needs a major upgrade. This contributed to an outbreak of waterborne disease in Havelock North that killed several people and made thousands more sick. Allowing building on land that is vulnerable to floods and slips has been clearly exposed as a problem by the recent flooding in Auckland and Cyclone Gabrielle. Tobacco control has been neglected for many decades since smoking was established as a cause of lung cancer in the 1960s (only last year was there a major step forward in government action with a new law that will remove nicotine from tobacco). New Zealand children have suffered because of systematic under-investment which has resulted in poor outcomes across a range of indicators, with lifelong consequences in terms of lost human potential and preventable harms. There are also clear deficits in our pandemic planning, gross distortions that make our tax system unfair, glacially slow responses to climate change and many more examples.
Internationally, philosophers have been paying increasing attention to the need for long-term thinking and protecting the wellbeing of future lives. But an easier conceptual shift may be to focus on the risk to lives of people alive now. Taking a 100-year time horizon – the potential lifespan of those born today – would force serious consideration of all the major known problems that our society needs to tackle.
The world faces a range of existential and catastrophic risks as recently detailed by the Oxford scholar Toby Ord in his book The Precipice. The risks considered to pose the greatest threat to human survival are (in order of decreasing probability): out-of-control artificial intelligence, engineered pandemics, nuclear war, climate change, and ecological degradation (the latter three at a similar existential risk level). Overall Ord puts the “existential risk this century at around one in six: Russian roulette”. That’s a one in six chance that children today may have their lives severely impacted by one of these threats.
Other countries are responding to these threats. In particular, the US has just adopted the Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act.
Despite the dominance of short-term thinking, New Zealand has a relatively well functioning government system when comparisons are made with other countries. Yet far, far more can be done. New Zealand should:
- Explore a range of structural changes to strengthen long-term thinking in NZ. The requirement that every departmental chief executive has to publish a ‘long-term insights briefing’ independent of ministers every three years is recent progress. But there is room to improve such as having a dedicated Parliamentary Commissioner for Extreme Risks or adopting a US style Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act.
- Reform the NZ Parliamentary system to make it more likely to deliberate carefully and address long-term issues and spend less time on political party posturing and partisan name calling.
- Strategically direct resources to invest more in preventing catastrophic risks given the immense burdens and costs, should they occur.
- Build long-term resiliency into NZ society to increase survival prospects.
- Increase public engagement in long-term policymaking and on considering major risks and how to prioritise responses. Options include more use of citizens’ assemblies, in-depth public surveys, and a Polis-like process, an online conversation platform. Taiwan has successfully used Polis on more than 100 occasions as part of policymaking at both the national and local levels.
Without such changes our society will continue its wasteful and dangerous approach of ignoring major long-term threats and lurching from one inadequate short-term fix to another.
A longer version of this article appears on The Public Health Expert Briefing as part of a public health priorities series put out by the Public Health Communication Centre.
Author bios:
Professor Nick Wilson is a medical doctor and researcher, from the Department of Public Health, at the University of Otago Wellington.
Dr Matt Boyd is the director of Adapt Research Ltd, in Wellington
Dr John Kerr is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, and Science Lead for the Public Health Communication Centre
Dr Amanda Kvalsvig is an epidemiologist at the University of Otago Wellington with a clinical paediatrics background
Professor Michael Baker is an epidemiologist, from the Department of Public Health, at the University of Otago, Wellington
