1. Is It Paradise? --or-- Is it XX??
Some Reactions to Nick’s Reflections
When you tell people that you just got back from six months in New Zealand, as my partner Tina and our two children and I did in August, people give you this look: a mix of incredulity, and admiration, and jealousy. And when they say “how was it” they say it in a way that really means:
Was it Paradise?
And I thought that might be a good way to frame this portion of the agenda. Now you might well say, How can these guys fill 45 minutes saying “God, yes it’s Paradise.”
But I was inspired to this topic by a truly wonderful and inspiring that Alice Cain sent to all the other Axfords last week, in which she pointed out that she’d lived for 9 months in a country where she could safely drink the water right out of the streams, it was so clean, and where she marvelled that no child was killed by gun violence, and where the Prime Minister was a woman (and not the first). And because conferences like this are more fun if we can pick an argument here and there, and maybe because I’ve got a bit of a cynical streak, I wanted to point out to Alice that you can’t drink out of the streams anymore, and that during my six months there were certainly cases of violence against children and even gang violence, and that the Prime Minister in the last year has engaged in some pretty stunningly cynical behavior.
Now to be fair to Alice, whom I’m only meeting today for the first time, she didn’t claim it is paradise – only that there are some things about New Zealand that are pretty inspirational for us Americans, such as low crime, a clean environment, broad access to health care, and a culture in which women can rise to the very top. And I agree with all that.
Nonetheless, in the realm of public policy, New Zealand does have an awful lot to recommend it: not just in its outcomes but in the whole way that policy is made – much of which grows out of the economic and management reforms of the 1980s, as well as out of the electoral system which is sometimes described as an “elected dictatorship”. One of the things I wanted to find out when I went there is what it is like to be in a country where major policy change – dare we even use the word reform - actually has a chance of happening. As one American-born New Zealander said to me shortly before I went to New Zealand, “This place runs on policy.” Which certainly no one has ever said about the United States.
Jodie Levin-Epstein * Axford 2004

2. Government’s social vision
An inclusive New Zealand where all people enjoy opportunity to fulfil their potential, prosper and participate in the social, economic and cultural life of their communities and nation
This language is the government’s. It can give you goose bumps – the sheer audacity of the commitment to care

3. The WH Y
Factor