New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks during the 2019 budget presentation at Parliament on May 30, 2019 in Wellington, New Zealand. Budget 2019, known as the Wellbeing Budget, has a heavy focus public welfare alongside economic growth. Credit: Hagen Hopkins/Getty
Pledging to follow through on her promise to form a new kind of government focused on benefiting those often overlooked by lawmakers, the prime minister of New Zealand on Thursday unveiled her proposed spending plan for the coming year—the world’s first “wellbeing budget.”
The proposed 2019 budget includes billions of dollars for mental health services, support for indigenous people and victims of domestic violence, and funding to help pull children out of poverty.
“We said that we would be a government that did things differently, and for this budget we have done just that,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “Today we have laid the foundation for not just one wellbeing budget, but a different approach for government decision-making altogether.”
Ardern and her finance minister, Grant Robertson, shared a video on social media ahead of their budget […]
Wonderful news in today’s troubled world of increasing collective fear and pain. I hope NZ will be able to stay the course as their neighbor to the north has been unsuccessful so far. Maybe being islands in the south Pacific will help insulate from the energy of fear and anger that increase military and police budgets while cutting social wellness.
As an aside, has anyone watched “Borgen” a Danish TV series 2010-2013? Birgitte Nyborg is the first female PM who runs to end the old boy network and bring the government back to the people. It is a close election so she has to form a coalition government. The series follows her efforts to be true to her ideals when confront with the practical realities of working within the self-interested duplicities inherent in human political systems. The show feels very realistic and I imagine true to the difficulties inherent in creating and seeing through a truly beneficial system of wellness that is not used gain political ascendancy over rivals though that may be necessary to stay the course. Greed, fear and self-aggrandizement are patterns in our collective consciousness that are unavoidable.