Creating a Government Commitment to Well-Being

Abstract

Abstract This chapter describes how the New Zealand Government in 2019 demonstrated its commitment to well-being as a public policy with the release of its Wellbeing Budget. It details how the New Zealand Treasury’s Living Standards Framework (LSF) has guided the Treasury’s policy advice to governments in New Zealand, using the Wellbeing Budget as a key example of the application of the LSF in practice. The LSF is a population-level economic framework with a multidimensional well-being outcomes focus and associated measurement, analysis, and assessment tools. It helps the government to express, analyze, and implement its well-being objectives in the form of concrete policy action. As well as government budget management, the LSF has been applied to strategic fiscal and economic policy development. Priority policy areas for funding and other interventions addressed in the Wellbeing Budget included mental health, family and sexual violence, and sustainable land use. The chapter then looks at the experience of applying LSF tools to various stages of the policy process, including examples of cross-agency collaboration and the resulting policy packages informed by the LSF.