Facing Up to Our Future: Productivity, Inequality and Prosperity Over the Long Term

New Zealand's economic challenges are rarely about a lack of money or a lack of ideas. More often, they are about how we design our institutions, how we hold them to account, and whether we can keep going long enough to see reform through, when each new government tends to reset the settings of the last.

Moderated by Fran O’Sullivan, this webinar brings together five contributors to Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand to examine the structural choices facing the economy. Matt Nolan on why our living standards look stronger than GDP suggests, yet the fiscal track is unsustainable without an independent institution to force honest trade-offs; Toby Moore on doing industrial policy deliberately rather than by accident; Professor Tim Maloney on refreshing the microeconomic settings that shape competition, infrastructure, investment and welfare; Jon Duffy on markets that have stopped working for consumers; and Dr Michael Johnston on closing the gap between academic and vocational learning.

Across all five, a common theme emerges: better outcomes depend less on any single policy than on the strength of our institutions and the willingness to stick with them. The session examines where New Zealand's economic settings could shift, and why durability matters as much as the design of the reforms themselves.