The Spinoff: How to design a wellbeing ‘meta-law’ that could actually make a difference
Read the original article in the Spinoff
Some politicians play the game better than others, but the smartest ones change the rules of the game itself. Most laws create something: a new penalty for shoplifting, a different type of school, an enhanced entitlement to paid parental leave. Some laws, though, change the basis on which all other decisions are made.
You could call them embedding laws or meta-laws. Some are uncontroversial. The 1993 Electoral Act, for instance, is the bedrock of the democratic system, determining how elections are run, MPs elected, and political parties registered.
Other such laws, though, embed a specific view of the world. For a long time, left-wingers have complained that the 1980s neoliberals entrenched a market-fundamentalist mindset through three interlocking pieces of legislation. The 1986 State-Owned Enterprises Act put profit ahead of the public interest. The 1987 State Services Act, while it was on the statute book, made government departments operate more like private companies. And the 1989 Public Finance Act nudged governments to borrow and spend less. Rather than do a specific “thing”, these acts changed the terms on which all government agencies did their “things”.
The last Labour government had a penchant for passing meta-laws – albeit with mixed success. The Zero Carbon Act reorients policy towards climate action, and creates an independent commission and reporting processes that seek to embarrass governments into cutting emissions. David Parker’s 2023 Taxation Principles Reporting Act, which forced governments to justify their policies’ impact on equality, was designed to nudge all future tax laws in an egalitarian direction. Jacinda Ardern’s 2018 Child Poverty Reduction Act contained no policies to reduce child poverty, but created official measures and targets against which future governments could be held to account. But while the Zero Carbon Act has had enduring influence, the others have not: Parker’s law was repealed the moment National took power, and Ardern’s is largely ignored.
Embedding acts, in short, are no sure thing. Another recent attempt, this time from the right, is David Seymour’s controversial Regulatory Standards Bill. Although a pure reporting mechanism, with no hard power of its own, it nonetheless creates processes that seek to elevate private property rights and nudge ministers away from legislating in the public interest. How far it will succeed is an open question.
Welsh lessons
The latest idea for a meta-law, however, holds far more promise. The Wellbeing Alliance Aotearoa, a recently formed NGO, is running a campaign called Tomorrow Together, the centrepiece of which is a proposed Future Generations Act. The act is modelled on the Welsh equivalent, which requires public bodies to follow “sustainable development” principles and promote the country’s long-term cultural, social, environmental and economic wellbeing. Public agencies have to set wellbeing objectives and take “all reasonable steps” to achieve them. The act also established a future generations commissioner, who makes recommendations that public bodies must – once again – take all reasonable steps to follow.
Finally, the act requires Welsh ministers to set national indicators that show whether wellbeing is really on the rise. They include carbon emissions, community safety, poverty rates, productivity growth, the number of Welsh speakers, and participation in democratic decision-making.
There is much to like here, but also a few things to give one pause. Of the 50 indicators, fewer than half are headed in the right direction, suggesting they may not have much influence over state action. It is hard to maintain government, media or public focus on so many measures. And, being set by ministers, the indicators are neither determined nor owned by the public.
Picking five to 10
How, then, might a wellbeing act gain more teeth? The answer to this question begins with understanding why, year after year, economic debate is dominated by the demand for governments to run a budget surplus. Surpluses have assumed this status not just because they are often desirable but also because they generate a simple and widely understood measure of “success”.
While our governments run budget surpluses, however, they are often racking up environmental and social deficits, polluting the countryside and allowing poverty to rise. The budget gets balanced on the backs of the poor, and at the expense of the planet.
Governments sometimes pay a price for this, if media stories of social misery and environmental pollution become too powerful to ignore. But the quest for a surplus continues to dominate debate because, by contrast, other measures are vague and amorphous. What does a social or environmental “deficit” look like? Even if we knew, which ones would matter most? How would we measure them? And how would we stop governments from inventing their own, easily satisfied targets?
Social and environmental measures, in short, need to be made more concrete, for both policymakers and the general public. The first step is probably to pick just five to 10 measures to target. (This would avoid the fate of the last Labour government’s “wellbeing” approach, which got bogged down in 141 different measures.) Why so few? Because many people, among them the Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz – one of the godfathers of wellbeing economics – believe a small suite of measures is needed to focus attention. “One can grasp five to 10,” Sitglitz told the Treasury in 2023.
How should we select those measures? A government could of course pick them itself, but that would have neither true democratic legitimacy nor real staying power. Imagine, instead, that we had a genuine national conversation – an overused phrase, admittedly – about the social and environmental measures most important to us. Who knows what people might choose – safety in their community, swimmable rivers, connections to whenua and reo, higher living standards, something else?
Discussions could be held up and down the country, allowing individuals to come together, articulate different versions of the good life, and aggregate their views into a national vision. A citizens’ assembly – a representative sample of, say, 100 New Zealanders, “New Zealand in one room” – could be convened to make the final call, in full view of the wider public and with complete access to experts and evidence. (Countless other process choices, of course, would have to be made.) The resulting suite of five to 10 measures, embedded in legislation, would have immense democratic legitimacy, embodying the considered will of the public. And it could be renewed every decade or so.
Countering the power of the ‘surplus’
To sharpen matters still further, though, imagine if the national conversation generated targets for each wellbeing goal: the best cancer survival rates in the world, for instance, or a halving of child poverty within a decade. That would hone government accountability to a well-defined point.
And we might go further still. If we could estimate, however roughly, the spending needed to reach each target, and we added them all up, we would effectively have a measure of the social and environmental deficit – the amount by which spending on those outcomes was “under” the line even while the government’s budget surplus was “over” it.
This might constitute, finally, a number to compete with the hallowed surplus, creating a sharp-edged way to hold governments to account for their social and environmental failures. Imagine the effect of Jack Tame saying to a future prime minister, “Sure, you’ve run a $1bn surplus, but what about the social and environmental deficit, currently at $23bn and worsening?”
Embedding our shared goals
The ideas above are naturally speculative. But even if all this were practicable and came to pass, how much difference would it make? Meta-laws can be undone, and even those that survive may have less power than their framers imagined. But the lesson from laws like the Public Finance Act is that they can have enduring power if they encapsulate elite opinion, the public’s “common sense”, or – ideally – both. And this would plausibly be the case here: wellbeing economics is now mainstream policy thinking, and most people care about far more than just GDP growth.
The results of such a priority-setting process, and the measures and targets selected, would not necessarily be the ones I would choose, nor those that you, the individual reader, would prefer. But that’s democracy. The point is not to advance our own narrow interests but to orient politics, in an enduring manner, towards the social and environmental goals endorsed by New Zealanders as a whole. That is the kind of accountability worth embedding.