Facing Up to Our Future: Trust, Taxes and the Treaty

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.