Enacting Forward-Looking Policy in a Democracy: Seven lessons from the United States Congress

The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop ideas about the conditions under which the United States Congress can enact forward-looking legislation to address critical issues. The framework for the study is the multiple streams paradigm developed by John Kingdon and modified with insights of subsequent scholars. Conclusions are based on four case studies of significant enactment efforts. Seven propositions about conditions for enactment of forward-looking policies were developed from the cases. Further research is planned to validate the propositions with a larger number of cases.

Sex, Gender and Women's Rights

Despite legislation proposing sex self-identification being deferred in early 2019, numerous government departments and agencies have implemented self-identification in their policies and practices. If a man can declare himself to be a woman, what, then, is a woman, and how can women’s rights as a political class be maintained? This article explores the tensions between women’s sex-based human rights and the claims of transgender advocates. In so doing, it discusses the nature and implications of gender ideology and highlights the failure of public sector institutions, in embracing key tenets of this ideology, to follow well-established policymaking processes.

A Critical Consideration of Current Social Insurance Policy Developments in New Zealand

Recent surprising announcements about the development of a social unemployment insurance (SUI) system by the Labour government are critically considered. Introducing SUI represents a major philosophical lurch from a welfare system mainly about family poverty alleviation towards one which has a stronger focus on market income replacement for individual low- and middle-income earners. We critically consider the policy process, the reasons why an SUI system might be desirable, and several alternative solutions to the likely proposal. We express scepticism about the democratic credentials of the process thus far and conclude that a persuasive case for such major reform has not yet been made.

Six ways to help fix energy hardship in New Zealand

Energy hardship is caused by the interaction of factors including housing quality, appliance efficiency, energy source and price, and occupant needs and income. Multiple policy approaches are needed to address these varied causes of energy hardship, and the lack of an official definition and a measurement strategy in Aotearoa should not preclude policy action to address this critical social determinant of health. Here we outline six ways to help fix energy hardship in New Zealand.

Social Unemployment Insurance: A case (more or less) in favour

Budget 2021 announced a social unemployment insurance (SUI) system, to be developed in partnership with BusinessNZ and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, and modelled on the accident compensation (ACC) scheme. This new policy addresses the needs of workers involuntarily laid off as industries restructure and seek new skills. This article considers concerns raised about the SUI proposal, drawing comparisons with the ACC experience. While SUI would perpetuate market income inequalities and may not do much to prevent poverty, it could also reduce other sources of inconsistency and disadvantage.

Local Alcohol Policies in New Zealand: An overview of their implementation and effects on crime

We document the implementation of local alcohol policies in New Zealand and then study their impacts on crime. A key contribution of our study is that we construct a detailed data set on local alcohol policies applicable across territorial authorities between July 2014 and January 2019. To our knowledge, we are the first ones to provide such a comprehensive overview. In a subsequent analysis, we find that local alcohol policies as recently implemented in New Zealand do not appear to have reduced crime. This result holds for specific policy dimensions and their stringency (e.g., closing times and geographic restrictions on issuing new licences), and is reasonably robust across crime types, days/times of occurrence, and socioeconomic subgroups. Our failure to identify significant reductions in crime following the imposition of local alcohol policies may partly reflect the policies being non-binding in some cases: for example, licensed premises had sometimes already operated within the restricted trading hours specified by a local alcohol policy.

The Holidays Act: Will proposed changes solve the headaches?

More than 200 organisations across New Zealand have been found non-compliant with the Holidays Act since its enactment in 2003. Thousands of employees have been underpaid by a combined amount in the millions and employers have incurred significant costs to remediate and maintain compliance. This article considers the issues with the Act, the impacts, and whether the changes proposed by the Holidays Act Taskforce will address these issues. It then sets out an alternative approach.

Resetting Benefits: Benchmarks for adequate minimum incomes

New Zealand’s successful management of the Covid-19 pandemic has emphasised the value of evidence-based policy. Government policy on income support payments is also changing significantly in response to the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s 2019 report. This article examines the report’s recommendations in the context of international and local research, considers whether benefit increases in the 2021 Budget deliver on those recommendations, and discusses the impact of high housing costs on welfare reform options.

Informing Anti-Racism Health Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand

Racism is firmly established as a determinant of health and an underlying cause of ethnic health inequities. As an organised system, racism operates at multiple levels (including structurally and interpersonally). Racism and its many manifestations are breaches of international human rights obligations and, in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, te Tiriti o Waitangi. This article considers approaches to anti-racism in health and disability policy in the 30 years following the foundational publication Pūao-te-Ata-Tū (Ministerial Advisory Committee on a Māori Perspective for the Department of Social Welfare, 1988), which was one of the first government publications to name and call out the harmful impacts of institutional racism. The article then examines the ways in which government health and disability sector organisations have talked about and responded to racism at a national level since 1980. The results of this research urge a stronger organisational-level approach to antiracism in the health and disability system for more tangible results, requiring multi-level solutions, and transforming what is considered ‘business as usual’ in health and disability sector institutions.

Anticipatory Governance for Preventing and Mitigating Catastrophic and Existential Risks

The world faces many large-scale risks. We describe these global catastrophic and existential risks and identify some challenges in governing the prevention and mitigation of such risks. We identify that risk reduction activity in Aotearoa New Zealand has not appropriately addressed these threats. On the basis of the challenges identified, we then deduce the desired features and functions of an entity for effectively governing risk reduction approaches. We argue for an entity that is: anticipatory, central/aggregating, coordinating, apolitical, transparent, adaptive and accountable. We offer structural options for such an entity and outline the merits of several options.