Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand

17/06/2026

Like to***co, should we ban advertising for ultra-fast fashion? We think we should. This level of excess is not normal, it’s not natural, and it’s not inevitable. It’s a symptom of an economic system built on overproduction and overextraction. But the economy is a product of design and (say it with me) can be redesigned. Read about the other big systemic levers we could pull to move to a regenerative circular fashion industry in NZ, in our new report on our website (link in bio)

15/06/2026

In many ways, this headline is one of the most distilled examples of what the Wellbeing Economy movement is all about.

Although the conventional economy is booming in Christchurch, homelessness is surging. What kind of system is this? Instead of growth for growth's sake, we should be asking: “what growth, where, and benefiting who?” Because, as this headline shows, economic growth in and of itself does not guarantee progress (like ensuring people are housed and warm).

It is the same with child poverty: over the past 40 years our economy has grown about 50% - yet child poverty has doubled in the same time.

In reality, as our country got richer, the fruits of economic growth did not trickle down to families with young children (or ordinary people), they got hoovered up.

We need to move beyond the assumption that a BIGGER economy is always a better economy.

The challenge before us isn't simply to enlarge the economy, it is to improve it. Our challenge is to build an economy that delivers decent housing, meaningful work, healthy communities, a thriving natural world, and opportunities for everyone to flourish.

Structuring our economy to get those outcome is the conversation we should be having - and it is the conversation we are pushing in Aotearoa.

If this sounds like you, follow along, join us for our events (weall.org.nz/events), and help us design an economic system that serves people and planet - not the other way around.

Remember, the economy is not natural or inevitable. It is a product of design, and we can redesign it.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/homelessness-surges-in-christchurch-despite-citys-economic-growth/L4QVFA7B3VAMZLT5OCVSUWBC5M/

15/06/2026

We will be there!

09/06/2026

Why does someone working full time pay a higher share of their income than someone making millions? It's time for Mission 4: create a fairer tax system that funds what matters and
supports better lives.

Right now, our tax system is unbalanced and New Zealand depends more than any other OECD countries on a relatively narrow range of taxes on income and consumption. That means working people pay tax on every dollar they earn through wages and salaries, and on what they spend on everyday essentials, while the wealthiest can face lower effective tax rates, benefit from untaxed capital gains,
and large corporations can take advantage of loopholes.

A rebalanced tax system would share wealth more equally, raise revenue more fairly, and provide greater capacity to deliver universal basic services, protect pay equity, and support public investment so we can have better schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. Essentially, supporting us to invest in the things we need. Tax can also shape behaviour, to reduce the things we don’t want, like environmental harm, public health harm or speculative economic behaviour. By changing the costs and benefits of different choices, tax can nudge individuals and corporations toward or away from certain actions.

08/06/2026

"There’s a moment in the movie Oppenheimer when the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, played by Bennie Safdie, reveals the nuclear bomb they are about to test in the New Mexico desert could destroy the whole planet. There’s a risk of a runaway fusion chain reaction, he explains. It’s a very small risk, but it’s bigger than zero. They took the risk (and Teller, finding himself still alive, went on to become a cheerleader for hydrogen bombs).

The Cambridge researcher Luke Kemp has a question. What would happen, he asked during his visit to the Auckland Writers Festival last month, if you asked a group of ordinary citizens to make that decision? Get them together, ask them to be open-minded and curious, brief them on all the relevant circumstances, encourage them to ask questions and debate the issue, and then ask them to decide: is that small risk of global annihilation worth taking?

Kemp thinks such a group would say no. His audience seemed to agree and so do I."

Read more from the untouchable Simon Wilson on citizens assemblies below...

Deliberative democracy in action in Auckland

07/06/2026

If we keep talking about the Government's books like a household's we will keep real households struggling. This is an unhelpful and untrue narrative designed to prop up the status quo.

Guest post by Searchlight

06/06/2026

Congrats to New Zealand Geographic for being the first media outlet in the world to assess their magazine against planetary boundaries.

Read all about it here: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-true-cost-of-this-magazine/

03/06/2026

On the colonisation of imagination and how to move past it. As Elena Vasileva writes: "There is a reason so many people can imagine ecological collapse more easily than regenerative economies ... This has very little to do with a lack of intelligence, creativity or vision. It has everything to do with the conditions people have been shaped within."

"People are repeatedly told that certain things are unrealistic: universal care structures, regenerative economies, shorter work weeks, collective ownership models, radically different educational systems, cultures organised around interdependence rather than extraction. Yet societies are simultaneously expected to accept ecological breakdown, chronic loneliness, emotional exhaustion and widening inequality as unavoidable side effects of modern life."

How to engage with stories that expand rather than narrow perception + speculative storytelling prompts

03/06/2026

We need to redesign our economy so it actually delivers a good life. Part of that is public ownership for the public good. Everybody gets healthcare! Water! Education! Everybody gets a house!

03/06/2026

The "GDP-based growth model" that's driven global development for 200 years "is obsolete," a world-renowned scientist has told RNZ.

In an interview on 30 with Guyon Espiner, Rockström said people must now achieve prosperity with innovation and more efficient use of resources within the nine planetary boundaries.

"We've reached what I call a saturation point on planet Earth," Rockström said.

"Nowhere is there any more opportunity to operate according to the old economic paradigm … when one could admit that we were still a small world on a very big planet.

"You could add pollution to the atmosphere, you could overfish, you could kill whales, you could cut down trees, and it didn't have massive planetary scale impacts.

"That era is now over. We've filled up the whole planet. It's all saturated."

The man who introduced the concept of 'planetary boundaries' says living within them requires new ways of achieving prosperity.