Arthur Grimes

It goes back to the, I've just been giving a talk on the Enlightenment, and it really goes back to the whole agenda of the European Enlightenment in the 17th, 18th centuries.

The job is to make people happier and lead a more fulfilling life.

It's the job of governments.

Or is it?

Not systematically, shall I say.

I think behind the scenes, as a vague sort of notion, it's probably there.

But I don't see anything systematic in governance in New Zealand, whether that's officials or politicians, anything systematic to improve things.

It's sort of piecemeal.

And vague, very vague, yeah.

I mean, the last administration was extremely vague, apart from, to their credit, the child poverty targets, one or two other things.

But that's where I think the key English government actually were less vague.

They had some explicit targets, which I thought was a definite move forward, although they didn't tie it to general wellbeing in any sense.

I mean, around the world, we've now got this movement towards looking at life satisfaction, which the Gallup poll surveys for 150 countries or so.

The OECD recommends it as a strong thing to look at.

I recommend it on part of the World Wellbeing Panel, which has as our sort of guiding force, you know, that promotion of people's well-being should be the aim of government.

And there are measures of these things that we can track over time and we do track over time.

New Zealand has generally done pretty well.

Until 2020 or so, we were always in about the top 10 of the world.

And then between 2020 and 24, we dropped quite substantially.

It came up again in 25 a little bit.