Economy – Fragile and exposed: new report says NZ economy needs a new blueprint, not more band-aids

Aotearoa New Zealand’s economy is fragile, and we’re all feeling it. Our standard of living is being buffeted by global forces we don’t control and home ownership is slipping out of reach for everyday New Zealanders. Fewer than one in five New Zealanders (17%) believe the next generation will be better off than today. Taken together, decades of short-term thinking have left us dangerously exposed.

Today, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa is releasing Blueprint for Prosperity: 10 missions for a wealthier, more resilient Aotearoa at the Kia Tika, Kia Pono–For a Just Society Conference. A bold, practical roadmap to chart a way to a more resilient future. The Blueprint is clear: our interrelated crises, like the cost of living, housing, inequality, and climate change, share a common root cause. Which is an economic system that was designed in 1984 and hasn’t been fundamentally rethought since. Neoliberalism reshaped who our economy serves and it’s time we redesign it again, with everyday people and the living world at the centre.

Ambitious, yet credible, the Blueprint outlines 10 missions and 33 practical policies to chart the way to a more resilient future. One where Aotearoa is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, not just financially but in true wellbeing and resilience.

Among the 33 practical policies, the Blueprint calls for rebuilding public ownership of the energy sector for greater energy independence and resilience, lifting investment in research and development to make New Zealand one of the world’s smartest economies, putting everyday people back at the heart of local economies through Community Wealth Building, and ensuring the ultra-rich pay their fair share. Recent polling commissioned by WEAll Aotearoa shows two thirds of New Zealanders want the super-rich to contribute more to fund public goods like healthcare, housing, and climate action.

The Blueprint is part of an ongoing conversation about the kind of economy New Zealanders want and need. The next phase will involve interviews with academics, iwi, and community organisations, building towards a comprehensive briefing to the incoming government in 2027, complete with scenarios and pathways to give decision-makers the evidence they need to act with confidence.

Gareth Hughes, Director of WEAll Aotearoa, says:

“Right now, our economy is fragile and not fit for the challenges of the 21st century. When global shocks hit, and they will keep coming, we need an economy that can absorb them and protect all of us.”

“Decades of siloed, short-term, bottom of the cliff thinking by politicians has left most of us worse off and our parties now need to think systemically and deliver big change.”

“Our economy is a product of design, which means it can be redesigned. We’ve done it before. The question is whether our politicians have the courage to do it again, and to do it right this time.”

“Our current economic system is myopically focused on GDP growth as the only answer, without thinking smarter about what kind of growth, for whom, and at what cost. In New Zealand, economic growth has been accompanied by rising child poverty and inequality. We grow GDP while eroding the very foundations of long-term prosperity – shifting costs onto future generations, degrading nature, and underinvesting in the capabilities that people and businesses need to thrive. We should instead judge success by the outcomes we actually achieve: lower child poverty, better health and education, affordable homes, a lighter environmental footprint, and an economy that creates good jobs with rising incomes.”

“This is fundamentally about taking a smarter, more common sense approach to the economy. We look around and see that our economy is not working as it should, and we need to have the courage to say when the emperor has got no clothes. Too often, governments have responded to crises with costly band-aids that don’t address the root cause, essentially paying to fix what we continue to break. Our global Failure Demand research found that governments are caught in a cycle of spending money to respond to harms created by an unjust and unsustainable economic system. Those costs are avoidable. Preventing social and environmental damage from happening in the first place should be at the forefront of our approach.”

“There’s a real sense in the community that the track we’re on leads somewhere we don’t want to go. If we keep heading in the current direction, we risk becoming an economy like America where ordinary people are charged ‘user-pays prices’ for everything, like hospital care. That’s not who we are as New Zealanders, and it’s not who we want to become.”

“This is an election year. We are telling our politicians to stop tinkering at the edges, and that big problems need big answers. New Zealanders want to put down roots here, raise families here, grow old here with dignity, so we are demanding our leaders think boldly about the future.”

“The Blueprint for Prosperity gives them the tools to do exactly that. We already know what works. We can build a richer, more resilient economy, we just need the political will to choose it.”