Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 30 July
12:00
Beyond good ideas, good government is about whether the rules and institutions we rely on can hold steady long enough to do their job, when so much of our governance is rewritten with each electoral cycle. This webinar brings together four contributors to Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand to examine the structural choices in front of us across four pillars of our governance.
Hon Chris Finlayson KC on the Crown and Maori relationship, and what it would take to repair a 50-year bipartisan project. Phillipa Yasbek on New Zealand’s quiet slide on the global corruption index, and the integrity reforms needed to reverse it. Emeritus Professor Peter Davis on a tax system that is an OECD outlier, and a structural deficit that makes the status quo untenable. And Lucy Cassels on why, for a small and open economy, staying invested in the international rules-based system is a matter of survival rather than idealism.
Across all four, a common thread emerges: our longest problems cannot be solved inside a three-year political cycle. This session takes a clear-eyed look at how New Zealand might govern for the long term, and what it would take to make those choices hold across successive parliaments.
Speakers
Hon Chris Finlayson KC
Hon Chris Finlayson KC is one of New Zealand’s most distinguished legal and political figures. A barrister with a long career representing iwi in Treaty claims, he served as Attorney-General and Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations from 2008 to 2017, where he reached nearly 60 Treaty settlements. He also represented New Zealand at the International Court of Justice and on the United Nations Security Council. He’s now back in practice at Bankside Chambers in Auckland.
In Facing Up to Our Future he writes on the Treaty debate and the future of the relationship between the Crown and Maori.
Philippa Yasbek
Philippa Yasbek is an economist with a background in public policy and a long career in the public service. She is the author of the Helen Clark Foundation’s work on improving transparency in New Zealand’s political and governance systems, setting out reforms across lobbying, political donations, official information, and beneficial ownership.
Alongside her work on integrity and transparency, she has a strong interest in public health and firearms safety. She co-founded a group advocating for strong gun laws, and is a member of the Advisory Committee for Global Action on Gun Violence. She currently works as an independent consultant.
In Facing Up to Our Future she writes on transparency and integrity, and on how New Zealand can become a world leader once more.
Emeritus Professor Peter Davis
Peter Davis is an Emeritus Professor whose long academic career at the University of Auckland spanned medical sociology, public health and social statistics.
His research and writing have consistently focused on the structures that shape wellbeing in New Zealand, from the health system to the distribution of wealth and the design of public institutions. As editor of Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand, he drew together the 21 contributors whose work makes up this collection.
In the book he writes on tax and the funding of our collective goods and services, on housing, and, with Robin Gauld and Dylan Mordaunt, on stabilising the health system.
Lucy Cassels
Lucy Cassels is an experienced global health policy specialist, researcher and former career diplomat. She has held a diverse range of roles at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Ministry of Health, focused on multilateral negotiations and global health diplomacy, as well as aid and development in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. She was most recently Deputy Secretary for Policy and Strategy at the Ministry for Pacific Peoples.
She is an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Helen Clark Foundation and a Senior Research fellow at Melbourne School of Population & Global Health, University of Melbourne. Her research interests sit at the intersection of environmental and health challenges, especially climate change in our region.
In Facing Up to Our Future she writes on why it is in New Zealand’s interest to invest in the global system. She chairs today’s session, and joins the panel to discuss her chapter.