Tim Ng, Director of Economic System at the New Zealand Treasury, discusses the long term economic and policy priorities that New Zealand faces at day one of the three-day ForesightNZ workshop in Wellington on 27–29 April. You can watch the video of his presentation on the McGuinness Institute’s YouTube channel, or you can view it below.
Tim Ng’s role in Treasury focuses around forecasting New Zealand’s economic performance to support the government and help inform a Budget that works for New Zealand. Tim asserts that forecasting is made difficult by challenges such as climate change, ageing population and the growth and changing nature of social media. New Zealand is also both small and isolated from economic markets. Policy makers and economists therefore need to think about ways to overcome these disadvantages.
Tim asks, ‘how are we going to meet the challenge of continuing to grow the economy to manage the government’s finances to match spending pressures with the revenue we are able to collect?’
He outlines three key themes:
- To create and maintain a business and NGO sector that is flexible, diverse, resilient and internationally connected.
- To ensure that government activities (taxation, spending, ownership, rule-making) promote a strong and durable New Zealand society efficiently and affordably.
- To build a strong base of physical, social and environmental assets to underpin future prosperity.
To watch more videos from the ForesightNZ workshop, head to the McGuinness Institute’s YouTube Channel.
The ForesightNZ: Untangling New Zealand’s long-term future workshop is a collaboration between the New Zealand Treasury and the McGuinness Institute.
About the ForesightNZ workshop
Project: ForesightNZ aims to build public policy capability in New Zealand by encouraging long-term, agile thinking around our uncertain future. Initiated in 2008, ForesightNZ is about conceptualising the broad range of possible futures for New Zealand through up-to-date tools and conceptual approaches used in the field of futures studies. The primary focus of the ForesightNZ workshop was to develop a way to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty in the world around us. After careful consideration of how best to achieve this, we decided to use this opportunity to create a robust foresight tool in the form of a card game. Participants decided on the cards that they believe will significantly shape New Zealand’s long-term future and designed a number of card games (using those cards) in order to develop a deeper understanding of the possible futures that might occur if a small number of those cards played-out in real life.