Facing Up to Our Future: Health, Education and Pacific Futures for New Zealand

New Zealand's biggest social challenges are rarely about a lack of good ideas. In health, education and Pacific wellbeing, we often already know what works. The harder problem is staying the course long enough to see it through, when reforms are routinely introduced by one government and reversed by the next.

Moderated by Peter Bale, this webinar brings together three contributors to Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand to examine the structural choices in front of us. Professor Robin Gauld on stabilising a health system weakened by underinvestment and the 2023 centralisation; Professor Stuart McNaughton ONZM on an education system with real strengths but widening equity gaps; and Professor Jemaima Tiatia-Siau on Pacific futures, equity, belonging, and the aspirations of Pacific peoples in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

A single thread runs through all three contributions: the decades-long work of health, education and belonging sits awkwardly inside a three-year horizon. The discussion turns to what New Zealand could do differently in these areas, and how reforms might be designed to survive a change of government.