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The 606 pairs of shoes representing each person lost in 2016 and 2017 to suicide in New Zealand.
The 606 pairs of shoes representing each person lost in 2016 and 2017 to suicide in New Zealand. Photograph: Mead Norton/Getty Images
The 606 pairs of shoes representing each person lost in 2016 and 2017 to suicide in New Zealand. Photograph: Mead Norton/Getty Images

New Zealand’s ‘wellbeing budget’ made headlines, but what really changed?

This article is more than 2 years old

Two years ago Jacinda Arden’s government committed to a new mental health strategy, now the world wants to know has it worked

It was September 2017, and shoes were strewn over the well-manicured lawns of New Zealand’s parliament. A pair of red stilettos pressed an imprint into the dirt, some trainers nestled in the velvet grass. Six hundred and six pairs of empty shoes – each pair representing a New Zealander lost to suicide, the culmination of a campaign demanding government action on the mental health crisis.

Addressing the crowd, Jacinda Ardern, then-leader of the opposition, had tears in her eyes. Arden spoke boldly, committing to a zero goal for suicide: “anything other than zero … suggests we have a tolerance”. Her comments registered as a fresh approach: a politician simultaneously setting the kind of firm target governments tended to avoid, and speaking movingly of the losses she’d personally witnessed.

Next month will mark two years since Arden’s Labour government introduced its first “wellbeing budget”, which, rather than bowing to economic metrics such as GDP, used a much broader range of outcomes, including human health, safety and flourishing, to assess the success of policies. The move was greeted with international fanfare, and in the UK, Labour’s leadership has said it is examining similar plans.

But has the approach worked? By many measures, New Zealanders’ wellbeing is still faltering. Suicide rates have barely flickered, housing is increasingly unaffordable, progress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is slow, and data released in recent weeks shows wait times for young people trying to access mental health care have increased since Labour’s election.

“It was marketing as opposed to substance,” says Arthur Grimes, former chief economist at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and now a professor of wellbeing and public policy at Victoria University School of Government. “But it came at a time when a number of other governments were so clearly not prioritising people’s wellbeing – stood in such sharp contrast to Britain and the US in particular – that it sort of looked like something novel and new and grand.”

Contrary to popular reporting, Grimes says New Zealand’s wellbeing budget was by no means the first in the world. He points to frameworks such as Bhutan’s Happiness Index, or the Welsh Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. More broadly, he says the words wellbeing and welfare are in essence identical in meaning – and while “wellbeing” might be a fresher arrival on the scene, welfare has long been core to the way many governments choose priorities and form legislation.

But the fact it’s not new doesn’t mean the idea is without value. The wellbeing budget was presented at a time when many leaders “seemed to be going in the opposite direction” Grimes says. And to have governments committed to prioritising wellbeing, in a measured and accountable way, is certainly better than the opposite.

Political analyst Bryce Edwards says one of the most useful and exciting elements of the wellbeing budget was that it shifted the centre of gravity away from purely financial measures. “It was a positive rebalancing of that focus – to realising GDP in itself, economic growth in itself isn’t the be-all and end-all,” he says. “I salute that shift – but am unclear about whether it has really changed anything.”

New Zealand has skimmed, relatively unscathed, through some of the very bleakest moments of the late 2010s, even as many affluent nations stumbled. It dodged the rise of populist and neo-authoritarian leaders, avoided mass death from the pandemic. Many countries have observed dramatic declines in trust –– especially in institutions and governments – but New Zealand’s has risen. Its successes prompted a slew of international headlines that evoke a kind of affable socialist-lite paradise: one that’s always serenely pursuing a four-day week, a steadily-climbing minimum wage, a “politics of kindness”.

But the country still struggles with deep-seated social problems that seem incongruous with its strengths: growing inequality; high rates of child poverty; the worst youth suicide rate in the developed world; stilted progress on climate change. Its housing affordability crisis has become one of the worst in the world and has countless flow-on effects. The waiting list for public housing has hit an all-time high, with 20,000 families waiting for a home – four times what it was when Labour was elected in 2017.

Edwards says for many New Zealanders, the gloss has worn off – and so politicians have stopped talking about it. He sends out a weekly newsletter of political headlines, and noticed over time, mention of “wellbeing” dropped dramatically – from 174 headlines in 2019, down to 29 last year, and this year a mere seven. “It has been striking how the government has pulled decisively back from using the term,” he says. “Although there continues to be a lot of international interest – especially among political progressives, globally”.

At the same time that they were announcing the wellbeing budget, New Zealand’s government re-committed to a slew of budget responsibility rules and spending limits. “Those became much more important at shaping what the government did than the wellbeing framework,” Edwards says. If you’re not willing to spend on social problems, a wellbeing ethos alone won’t help you.

A wellbeing budget sounds simple, but at its heart, there is a tangle of questions that are more philosophical. Grimes says part of the problem is New Zealand’s measures are overly complex. In the past, he has said Treasury’s 60 criteria are “59 too many”. He’s sympathetic to using a single metric instead: ask people to rate their quality of life, and track how different policy decisions move the needle. It sounds like a blunt instrument, but Grimes says having a single measure means “it’s a coherent approach and it helps to prioritise”.

Others argue that we can’t always rely on people’s own judgment of their wellbeing. Instead you can turn to objective measures, often based on human rights – how many people are housed or able to access education. “Public policy is an inherently ethical undertaking,” Prof Jonathan Boston told Treasury in paper in 2013. “It poses fundamental questions about how we ought to live”. A single measure – or a series of measures – can’t capture the many facets of human life and what makes it good, nor always say how to improve them. Those are ethical decisions, not just practical ones, and they can resist simple answers.

In the end, New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 might end up being the most enduring and transformative moment of Labour’s commitment to wellbeing in policy.

“There was a dichotomy that was set up at the time – and is still set up – between health and the economy,” says microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles, one of the key communicators of New Zealand’s Covid response. “But people are the economy.”

It’s unknown perhaps unlikely that the government was checking Treasury’s wellbeing dashboard as they weighed each of those initial, crucial decisions to shut the borders, lock down the country, and eliminate Covid-19.

But Wiles reflects that New Zealand had in essence the same models as other nations, predicting potential deaths, illnesses, and risk of health system collapse, and took a notably different approach to some of its peers. Here, she says, “the prime minister and cabinet decided that was simply not acceptable”. Based on a different ethos, they might have chosen differently.

Reflecting on the decisions last year, Wiles said: “We had the same evidence – then we acted differently based on values.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.

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