Good Policy
Book Review
Love you: public policy for intergenerational wellbeing
by Girol Karacaoglu (Tuwhiri Project, 2020 $27)
Reviewed by George Ritchie

Girol Karacaoglu
We are in the middle of a systemic environmental, social and economic crisis.
So says Girol Karacaoglu, a former Chief Economist at the NZ Treasury who these days heads up the School of Government at Victoria University.
And he’s not alone – Girol stresses to me over Zoom that this is a view shared by “the most orthodox institutions you can think of” referring to the Treasury in its evidence for the 2019 Budget and the Secretary-General of the OECD, Angel Gurria, in a 2019 speech.
His new book is intended primarily as a challenge to young people: change the way that New Zealand debates and creates public policy. Help us get out of this crisis.
Thirty years ago, NZ was something of a fashion-setter in terms of giving its central bank statutory operational independence and responsibility to maintain consumer price stability. It was also ahead of the game in terms of the degree of its statutory fiscal management transparency.
The urgent predicament these days is how best to institutionalise greater transparency, inclusivity, and clearer accountabilities for advancing the wellbeing of current and future generations. You might be excused for thinking, well, why get so animated as to release a book about this? Didn’t the Government release a Wellbeing Budget in 2019 and 2020? Doesn’t the Public Finances Act now require the Treasury to produce a long-term report on wellbeing every four years?
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