New Zealand put wellbeing at the heart of policy on COVID, and the economy is now thriving.

New Zealand has had just 22 COVID deaths, no community transmission for 80 days and, apart from international tourism, the economy is now pretty much back to normal.

“We made public health the number one priority”, explained James Shaw, co-leader of the New Zealand Green Party and a cabinet member in Jacinda Ardern’s government. James was speaking at the Happy Workplaces online conference last week.

The New Zealand government had already adopted a very different approach to most countries. “For any policy, the question is how it adds to New Zealanders’ wellbeing, in terms of the environment, social wellbeing, human capital and built or financial capital.”

“Public health is the number one, that’s what we focus on, and then all the other benefits flow from that. Its reversing that usual thing that society, the environment, has to serve the economy’s outcome. If you flip that on its head and focus on the social outcome, the economy takes care of itself."

And, with the Green party involved in Jacinda Ardern's coalition government, there is a real focus on climate change.

A budget based on wellbeing

Back in 2019 The Guardian reported the New Zealand coalition government had become “the first western country to design its entire budget based on wellbeing priorities and instruct its ministries to design policies to improve wellbeing.”

Finance Minister Grant Robertson told parliament: “Success is making New Zealand both a great place to make a living, and a great place to make a life,”

Wellbeing in the COVID crisis

“When it came to the virus”, continued James. “We had this realisation in the cabinet that there is this kind of trade-off: public health versus the economy. Both of these are important so which one do we do? A little bit of lockdown so as not to damage the economy. Or do we do a heavy lockdown for the sake of public health?”

“Because we’d been using this wellbeing framework it became quickly apparent that it wasn’t a trade off that one equalled the other. And economically the safest thing to do was a really strong public health response.”

A Public Health Response

“It was one of the most remarkable sets of decisions I’ve ever been a part of. There is one outcome, and its a public health outcome, that is the most important thing and we will literally put everything as subservient to that.”

“We could see from Italy, Spain, etc that anything like a partial lockdown, keeping the economy going, led to increased infection rates.”

“We had to get the timing right. New Zealanders don’t like being told what to do. Because this thing has an exponential curve rate, we got to 14 cases and then the next day we got to 46 and that was the moment everyone in the country went “oh crap”. The numbers were still small but you could see the exponential curve. We had to wait until people were in a state of readiness.”

The UK, of course, took a different approach and didn’t lock down until deaths (not cases) were above 400. As well as currently having the second worst level of deaths (per capita) the UK appears to also have suffered the largest fall in GDP in the developed world.

The Economic Impact

What has been the economic impact in New Zealand? “We’ve had a rubber ball bounce. Everything fell off a cliff for 28 days , and now everything has bounced back. You’ve got this v shape in economic activity.”

Of course, like all governments, that involved spending billions on a wage subsidy programme, social support and more. But life is back on track although James does warn that their greatest worry is “complacency”.

That is what happens when you put wellbeing at the heart of government policy. I wonder how the UK government’s decisions would be different if it adopted that approach?

Check out James Shaw's new podcast here.

Notes on James Shaw's talk from Karla Rimaitis of the NHS Innovation Agency North West Coast.