New Zealand needs to learn from Nordic nations on long term multi-party policy making on sustainability

New Zealand has an opportunity to learn from the Nordic experience of establishing consensus policies on sustainability issues.

Issues like climate change and fresh water management are 20 – 50 year challenges that have proven hard to align with New Zealand's three year electoral cycle, the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, Peter Neilson, has told the Northern Lights conference at Wellington.

"We have an opportunity to learn from the Nordic experience with establishing consensus policies on sustainability issues.

"The Prime Minister's call for New Zealand to become the first truly sustainable country and the National Party's commitment in the Blue Greens Document to solve New Zealand's environmental issues within one generation challenge us to create institutions which can be custodian's of the 'long view' on sustainability issues," Mr Neilson says.

"In the areas of monetary and retirement incomes, after painful experience of parties' over promising and underperforming, we now have broad based multi party support for an effective set of policies. The experience of the Nordic countries suggests it is possible to create stable coalitions for a set of sustainability policies even while parties compete to meet targets earlier or provide more resources.

"New Zealand politicians have struggled to come to terms with the change from FPP to MMP politics but the recent convergence of Labour and National policies on climate change indicate that trends are changing for the better."

Mr Neilson says new Ecologics research indicates how New Zealand can get better decisions out of our democratic institutions that look at issues that will have an impact over many three- year electoral terms, and at how we can green our market economy so it encourages us toward, rather than away from, sustainability.

"The best definition I have ever heard for sustainability is 'What you would do if you definitely knew you would live for ever'. The public get it and accept that doing the best thing for New Zealand in the long term is a no brainer. Ecologic's research will help it become the reality of how we act going into the future."
Eighty seven percent of the public want the political parties in Parliament to reach a multi party agreement on managing climate change, according to a ShapeNZ nationwide poll last month (results available at http://www.nzbcsd.org.nz/project.asp?ProjectID=37

ENDS

© Scoop Media