Recording: The rights of future generations

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: Thank you very much for joining us at today's event.  Before I begin, I would, of course, like to acknowledge that where I'm meeting is on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.  This land was never ceded.  It was, is, and always will be Aboriginal land.  I want to pay respects to the Elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge them as traditional custodians of knowledge for the land on which this university is built.  For those of you also out there in the cyberverse, feel free to also acknowledge the land upon which you are meeting us today.    

 

So my name is Verity Firth.  I'm the Pro Vice Chancellor of Social Justice and Inclusion here at UTS.  It is my extreme pleasure today  I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation.  I'm joined by the distinguished Sophie Howe, the former and first ever Future Generations Commissioner for Wales.  I'm also delighted to have Professor Susan Harris Rimmer and Professor Michael Thomson here as well, and I'll introduce them all properly in just a moment.    

 

So in terms of today's discussion, Wales was the first country to pass a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act in 2015.  In 7 short years, the Act has demanded long-term solutions to the country's biggest challenges to improve the country's social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing. We're really delighted and honoured to be joined today by Sophie Howe, who is described by the Guardian as the world's first minister of the Unborn. During her time as Commissioner, Sophie led high profile interventions in education reform, climate change, transport planning and challenged the Government and others to demonstrate how they are taking into account the needs of future generations. We're really looking forward to hearing from Sophie's insights and some of the other lessons she learned in driving these innovations.  We're obviously keen to see that these innovations could perhaps be adopted in Australia.  But first I would like to introduce Professor Susan Harris Rimmer and Michael Thomson, who are going to give us some context of the work that has been done and is being done to embed a Future Generations approach to policy in Australia.  Professor Susan Harris Rimmer is the Director of the Griffith University Policy Innovation Hub, which helps policymakers solve policy problems through evidence-based collaboration with multidisciplinary experts.  She is the founder of EveryGen, which is a coalition of multidisciplinary policy experts collaborating to create an equitable, just and transformative path towards intergenerational justice.  Over to you, Susan.    

 

  

 

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: Hello.  It's really lovely to see you all online.  I live and work on Jagera and Turrbal lands in Queensland but I'm from Coonabarabran and I pay my respects to the Elders of the Wiradjuri people, where I grew up and where I'm from.  I am delighted to be with you.  I wanted to just quickly introduce you and my colleague Michael to tell you about his work but just in terms of the EveryGen project, so I'm a human rights lawyer by training and a transitional justice scholar, so I'm very interested in thinking about how Australia makes large transitions, one of which is around the Voice to Parliament, which I know we're all thinking about very hard, but also in the human rights community, we are facing such intense challenges around climate rights adaptation that is rights promoting and rights compliant, which is simply not going to happen on the trajectory that we're on, and we're also very interested in issues around a right to a healthy environment and influencing the new parliamentary inquiry into the National Human Rights Framework, which so many of us have been working on for so many decades without quite getting to that spot of having Australia protect human rights at a Commonwealth level.  But we have had some success in Victoria, the ACT and Queensland. So, we're looking at multijurisdictional approaches.    

 

So, our research looked at all the different ways different jurisdictions had thought about future generations.  A lot of countries around the world have some constitutional protections.  Some of them think about future generations in terms of just natural resources or environmental resources.  Some think about the rights of young people in a more considered way, especially as stakeholders, but when we our research really did focus on the Welsh model.  We thought that's a country that has it going on because also that’s the technical term!  so it also has machinery of government that we want.  So, what we want is to influence the culture of the Australian Public Service in the same way that we wanted human rights legislation to influence the practice of policy making.  So, we also want a future generations approach to influence culture in Departments and policy making and that's what the Welsh model offers, as well as quite a high level of transparency and social dialogue built into the model.    

 

That's why we partnered with our lovely friends at the Centre for Policy Development here in Sydney.  We brought out Sophie to inspire us all and start a national conversation, whilst being respectful of the Voice dialogue that's going on at the moment.  Our ultimate goal with our group   EveryGen group has people from other universities, it has people from the tech industry, it has environmental experts, it has education experts for that future skills agenda and it has a whole lot of young people on our group, and we're working with the new Parliamentary Friendship Group for Future Generations that has just been created in Australia, chaired by Sophie Scamps from the Teals and Bridget Archer, and we're trying to influence parliamentary inquiry at the moment.  So that's where we're at.    

 

The long-term vision is serious law reform, so that's why we're so thrilled to talk to the people in this group and we're also thrilled to start sharing more research agendas.  We know there's lots of interesting work going on at a range of universities in Australia and we're really interested in cross fertilisation, so a very collaborative space.  That's all from me.  I'll just pass on to Michael.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: I'll just quickly introduce you, Michael, because I want to give your bio to the audience so they know how good you are.  Professor Michael Thomson is a Professor of Law at UTS and the University of Leeds.  At UTS he is the Director of the faculty's research centre: Law Health Justice.  He is also Convenor of the Women and Children's Health collaborative within INSIGHT, the University's new health institute.  His research spans health law, children's rights, and legal and political theory.  His current research with Beth Goldblatt explores how to legislate for future generations.  Over to you, Michael.    

 

 

PROF. MICHAEL THOMSON: Thank you very much, Verity, and thank you to the two of you as well. We are sitting in the law school on the campus.  I suppose I should start with how we have started to engage with questions of future generations within the law, and it's a mixed picture. We've recently joined the ranks of countries from around the world where we've seen climate change litigation engaged as an attempt to protect future generations, and in the Sharma case in 2021, we had eight young people who brought an action arguing that in deciding whether to approve a coalmine expansion in New South Wales, the Federal Minister for the Environment should be forced to bear in mind the health of future generations as she made her decision, And to take on board the catastrophic effects that carbon can have for future generations through climate change.    

 

The judge who heard the case in the first instance agreed with these eight amazing young people and, while the world applauded, the result: the Minister, then, of course, appealed. The finding was overturned in March of 2022 and, whilst this hasn't reached our highest court, it is agreed by many that the door is still open for climate change litigation in Australia.    

 

So, whilst this avenue has been closed down for now, it's still a potential, and while this is all going on, academic work, of course, is still taking place.  And that, of course, includes Susan's important EveryGen project. In Law Health Justice here at UTS and Verity has already mentioned this  my colleague Beth Goldblatt and I have come to these questions from our shared interest in health, the environment and, importantly, inequalities.  This doesn't reflect the Welsh experience as well, which we both want to see adopted in Australia, but in many other ways where future generations are discussed in the literature, there is, we would argue, a lack of appropriate attention to this question of inequalities.  So, inequality is only really recognised on one plane, so it's between now and the future, so it's an idea that there is an inequality between the way we live now and the way people will live in a much depleted future.   

 

What we want to argue or what we are arguing is that we need to attend to inequalities now and social injustices now in order to reach a more just future, not just a liveable future, but one where inequality is much more reduced. We are foregrounding the idea of inequality in three interconnected ways.  First, we start with the need to address inequalities that are experienced now by our communities and populations.  Secondly, we're also making a strong argument that we need to acknowledge the fact that planetary threats that we're all very aware of will compound and deepen existing inequalities.  So those who are most disadvantaged now will be most disadvantaged in the future, probably, unfortunately, more so.  And we see this in climate change, like we saw with the ICCC report in 2022, that those most affected by climate change are those who are poorest, the poorest populations and the poorest nations.    

 

Finally, we believe we need to address the fact that many contemporary social inequalities are caused in part by historically rooted inequalities and harms, so this includes the historic practices of colonialism in its different forms that have caused enduring and intergenerational harms, and we argue that we must prepare the past if we are to have this more just future.  That's probably a good place for me to finish.  Verity started her introduction with this acknowledgment of where Sydney campus is, that we are on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and the Eora Nation are the 29 clans who are the traditional custodians of the lands that we know now as the Sydney basin.  The experience of First Nations people in Australia and in other countries around the world demands that when we talk of future generations, which we really must, that we must attend to the fact that past, current and future inequalities are not divisible and that a fair future is only really possible if we do repair the past and address the present, and Beth and I are addressing this through the lens of health inequalities and the pursuit of health justice.  Thank you.   

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: So, Susan, over to you.   

 

 

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: Wonderful.  So I just want to further introduce Sophie and explain the purpose of why we were so interested in bringing Sophie out.  So we're basically inspired by the work that they've done, so just for a bit of context, Wales created the Wellbeing and Future Generations Act seven years ago.  Sophie was the first Commissioner and she's just finished her term, so she's able to give a very frank and fearless assessment of that period.  So I thought we might start, if that's alright, Sophie, with a bit of a discussion about what the motivations were, the genesis of the idea, and I particularly love that it all started with the concept of sustainable development and the environment.  So it would be lovely if you could tell us a little bit more about that.   

 

  

 

I wanted to also tell people  Sophie has an amazing CV but one of the things that I think is really interesting is that you were the youngest ever elected local councillor in Wales.  So she's adopting this work as a Future Generations Commissioner as someone who strived for leadership at a very young age and experienced what it's like to lead as a very young person.  I think that's very informative to your world view.  So we might start there.  Take us back to the beginning, Sophie.    

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: OK.  Thank you.  And Sue is right, I started my career  well, let's say I started my life in a part of Wales, a part of our capital city, which is what we describe as a deprived area, often in the headlines for the wrong reasons.  Huge amounts of inequality, worklessness, high rates of teenage pregnancy, all those sorts of things: first in my family to go to University.  Passionate about changing the lot of the people that I grew up with so that where you're born shouldn't determine your future but increasingly what we're talking about here is when you're born shouldn't negatively determine your future.    

 

So I was elected at the age of 21, with that as my sort of passion and mission.  I've worked in or around political environments for a number of years.  I am not a politician now. I've been into rehabilitation and I'm now clean! (Laughter).  But I am still passionate about how do we drive change, and so the role of the first Future Generations Commissioner for me was an unprecedented opportunity to be able to do that.    

 

So how did it come about? Well, I'll give a little brief history of the sort of devolution context of Wales.  The Government of Wales and the Parliament of Wales was established in 1999 following a successful referendum to devolve power to Wales.  The Government of Wales Act, which established the Government obviously and the Parliament, or the Assembly as it was called then, the Senedd as it's called now, actually had a clause in it which said that sustainable development should be a central organising principle of the Government.  So that's a kind of lofty ambition and a good thing to have in law.  What did it mean in practice? Absolutely nothing.  The best that we really saw from that was the Environment Minister would bring a report to the Senedd once a year telling the Senedd, or the Assembly then, stuff that was vaguely happening, vaguely connected to sustainable development.  It was very difficult to get the buyin and the real focus from the Economy Minister, the Housing Minister, the Transport Minister.  It was very much seen as the domain of the Environment Minister.  We had one particular Environment Minister back in around 2009, a longstanding Minister.  She had been Education Minister.  She had been Senedd Business Minister and various other things but a passionate environmentalist.  She became the Environment Minister.  Often, as these things happen  this was around about 2010  where in Westminster, Labour lost the election and a new conservative LibDem coalition were created.  It is also important to say Labour had always run the Government in Wales back from 1999.  They have always been left of centre  the first or the second First Minister talked about  even when Labour was in power in Westminster  a clear red water between the policies of Labour in Westminster and Labour in Wales, so much more progressive generally, and I think that has a big significance in terms of our ability to do some of these progressive things.    

 

  

 

So political opportunism because the UK government, previously under Labour, had established a nonstatutory Sustainable Development Commission, a kind of advisory body to the Government, and the new conservative and LibDem coalition abolished that nonstatutory Sustainable Development Commission, which led Jane Davidson, the Minister in question in Wales, to say  particularly because Wales always likes to have this clear red water between itself and Westminster  to say, "Ah, not only will we not abolish our nonstatutory Sustainable Development Commission; we will put it on a statutory footing and we will also be more specific in that legislation about what we mean by 'sustainable development' being a central organising principle for government but also make it a central organising principle for the whole public sector in Wales".    

 

She then got a commitment from the then First Minister to put that in as an election pledge for the next election.  She then retired from government.  So the new government were left with this thing, the baby, if you like, of Jane Davidson, not really knowing what it was that they had signed up to.  There was just that one line: "We will legislate for sustainable development".  These things can go two ways, can't they? Either that means that noone picks it up; you know, nothing really happens, or there is a kind of absence and a vacuum and bright and brilliant people come in and fill that vacuum, and fortuitously in Wales, that is what happened.  A bright team of civil servants looking at what might be possible; a big push from civil society, seeing the potential of this one line as an election pledge, which translated into a program for government; and a push for that to trigger  because the Government didn't know what exactly it should mean  a national dialogue with the citizens of Wales, which was called 'The Wales We Want'. So we posed the question to the citizens of Wales: what is the Wales you want to leave behind to your children, your grandchildren and future generations to come? And those citizens of Wales came up with what eventually became our seven longterm wellbeing goals, looking at what they said, what was happening at an international level with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and bringing that down and localising that into our seven wellbeing goals, which is the vision that our country has set out for Wales.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That is absolutely fascinating.  So you had a process, I suppose, of community engagement, participatory processes, that developed these seven goals.  So what are the seven goals of the Future Generations Act?   

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: So, their titles are probably nothing that you might not expect to see.  So a prosperous Wales, a resilient Wales, and that's about ecological Resilience and enhancing, restoring, maintaining econature and ecosystems.  A healthier Wales, which is about physical mental health and wellbeing, maximising the conditions within which those  that mental, physical health and wellbeing can thrive.  A Wales of cohesive community, wellconnected vibrant communities, a more equal Wales, a Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language, and a globally responsible Wales.  I just want to pick out then a couple of those to perhaps give a little bit more detail.  So first off, you might note, if you come from a knowledge base around sustainable development, we talk about sustainable development generally as a three-legged stool.  It is about social, economic and environmental sustainability and wellbeing.  We have a four legged chair, if you like, in Wales because we have that addition of culture  our culture, our heritage, our language  and that I think is an important addition and has actually been quite transformative in and of itself.    

 

The other thing that was quite interesting is we started off with six wellbeing goals, and through the passage of the Act in Parliament, the goal of a globally responsible Wales was added in.  So this is really recognising, of course, that, as Michael describes, the things that we do in Wales, as a small nation but predominantly in the global north, have these generally terrible knock-on consequences to poorer people in the global south.    

 

The other really interesting thing is the goal of a prosperous Wales, and I think this is the statutory definition of a prosperous Wales  a productive, innovative and lowcarbon society, one which uses resources efficiently and proportionately, including acting on climate change, and which develops a welleducated population with the skills to enable them to access decent work.  So it's not a catchy definition but it is a really exciting definition of prosperity, one, because of what it doesn't reference  GDP  two, because it firmly puts prosperity in Wales within the context of planetary boundaries; it focuses on skills; and it focuses on giving our population access to decent work or fair work, not just any old work, and so those are the kind of goals.  The duties on all of our main public institutions, starting with 44 public institutions, all of our local Councils, our health boards who are responsible for running all of our national health care system and services in Wales, our national organisations like our environment agency, our public health agency, our national parks and then significantly the Welsh government itself, they must set objectives which maximise their contribution to all 7 of those wellbeing goals.  That means every one of those organisations must work beyond their traditional boundaries, if you like.  The number of bodies covered has now gone up from 44 to 50 public institutions in Wales with this vision for Wales being the objectives that they all must seek to achieve.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That sounds incredible, but I imagine that there must have been  like, that's great, you've set the vision, these 44plus institutions/organisations now need to be meeting that vision.  How on earth do you keep them accountable in policy decision making?   

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: Yes, yes, so there's the challenge.  On accountability, perhaps I'll just outline another important part of the Act which relates back to that accountability because there's the vision for Wales through those 7 wellbeing goals, and the law then sets out this sort of toolkit, if you like, of how then do we work, how do we need to work differently in government and Public Service delivery and so on, to deliver those goals.  It sets out five ways of working.  So our public institutions must demonstrate how they have considered the longterm impact of the things that are thinking of doing and the longterm in terms of how they set objectives to maximise the contribution to all of those 7 wellbeing goals.  They must seek to prevent problems from occurring or from getting worse.  They must integrate their actions, so these are duties to recognise, one, the positive potential connections between each of those wellbeing goals, so we're not going to achieve our goal of a healthier Wales, for example, if the planet crashes and burns because we'll all die.  We're not going to either achieve the goal actually of a more prosperous Wales with access to decent work because there are no jobs on a dead planet.  Equally, we're not going to achieve our goal of a more equal Wales if we don't address the issues around health inequity that exist in Wales.  So that duty to think of things in an integrated way.  Then duties to collaborate  so to work together  and there are specific new structures that are established by the law to require public institutions to do that, something called Public Services boards in each of our local government authority areas or regions, and also to work together across the public sector but also with the voluntary sector and private sector, and then to involve citizens  and note that word is "involve", not engage, consult.  "Involve" is a deeper sense of co production.  And then it establishes an independent Future Generations Commissioner and my job  I describe it often as both coach and referee.  So powers to advise and support the institutions on steps they should take to meet the wellbeing goals and then duties to monitor and assess.  The overarching purpose of the Future Generations Commissioner is to be the guardian of the interests of the future generations of Wales and to encourage and monitor and assess the extent to which public bodies are taking account of the long term.  But it also provides accountability mechanisms via the AuditorGeneral for Wales.  Commissioner's duties are primarily related to the goals.  AuditorGeneral is about the ways of working and, throughout the approach that the audit office take to their audits of public bodies, their performance audits, they are looking at how those five ways of working have been applied and then there are particular mechanisms in the legislation, i.e., provide advice to the auditor, for example, on how he conducts, how he meets his duties.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That is really interesting.  I love the way you describe the role as "coach and referee", because that is exactly what you have described.  So you're the first Commissioner.  You've established the role.  What were the  I suppose the unexpected challenges that emerged that you might not have thought about at the time or in that frame too, the unexpected opportunities that emerged that may not have been predicted?   

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: I don't know if these were unexpected but I think they were unappreciated in terms of the scale of the challenge.  So, first of all, this is a piece of law and, by definition, I suppose, laws require people to do particular things.  So our public bodies have to set wellbeing objectives which maximise the contribution to all of the goals.  They have to establish public service board infrastructure. They have to undertake wellbeing assessments.  The Welsh Government have to publish a Future Trends report, which all of the rest of the public sector can use and so on.  I suppose those of you who are listening who might have had some experience of working in government or the public sector will probably appreciate  because I think this is a universal issue  the public sector love a bit of bureaucracy.  So they love a plan, a strategy.  They think that once they've written their plan or strategy, that their work here is done, and so what we saw in those early years where they were in a very comfortable space of meeting the bureaucratic requirements of the Act  they were setting wellbeing objectives, they were going through the motions.  They weren't actually doing anything differently; they were just using wellbeing words to describe what they were already doing and they thought, "Well, there we are.  That's all done".  Hence, the importance of the Commissioner to come in and challenge and say, "Not good enough".  We also have some issues around people redefining the wellbeing goals, so you would see lots of decision reports talking about, "Well, we need to build this road because we're meeting the goal of a prosperous Wales".  Wrong, because the goal of a prosperous Wales is prosperity within planetary boundaries and so building a road is not the answer to that, and there's a really good case study, which was the first major test of the Act in that regard.    

 

Issues around the goal of a resilient Wales, just some of the terminology, so unpicking all sorts of things from Resilience being about  from a social services perspective, people were saying "we're meeting the goal of a resilient Wales because we're building Resilience in mental health".  Well, that's good but that's not a goal of a resilient Wales because this is about ecological Resilience.  I saw people saying "we have set up an emergency services Resilience forum so therefore we're meeting the goal of a resilient Wales".  No, not correct.  Lots of things like that.  The two biggest challenges I would say is this is a law but actually it's the biggest cultural change program that Wales has ever seen.  It requires completely different mindsets.  It requires us to unpick the way in which career, civil servants, Public Service officials, before you even get to the politicians, are thinking about the way that they do their work.  They have grown up in a system where they've been rewarded on the basis of how they've managed their individual Department rather than taken a systemwide approach.  They've been brought up in a system where managing your budget within a year cycle rather than looking to the longterm is what you do.  So unpicking all that was hugely challenging just to get that mindset shift.  And even more challenging when everything that had come before the Future Generations Act really was in conflict with it.  So we want you to plan for the long term but here's your annual budget; we want you to work across boundaries but we can't quite understand the governance and audit of so we're just going to hold you individually accountable; we want you to involve citizens but we've stripped away all of the resources during austerity that you actually have to do that work.  So all of that was hugely challenging, unpicking that system of old, which was a barrier, as well as inspiring people within the system to have this kind of mindset shift.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: Yes.  I think that idea of that complete cultural change across the  I think that's absolutely spoton.  How interesting.  I'm going to go to some of the questions from the audience now because there's a lot of really good questions and I want to have time to actually ask them.  The one that has the most votes  here I am, I'm on the side of democracy here  is from Michelle at ACOSS who says Australia has the second lowest rate of income support in the OECD; how do you see this impacting future generations?   

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: Well, I would say if you were taking a wellbeing lens to that, as we are required to do in Wales, it would be hard to justify that in the context of taking a long term approach to improving people's physical and mental health.  We know that the biggest determinant of life expectancy is about income security.  35% of what makes a difference between whether you live or die young, according to the World Health Organisation, is about income security.  It would be very difficult to show how we were meeting the goal of a more equal Wales or a more equal Australia on the basis of that continuing to be the case.  If you applied both a longterm and preventive lens to that, as we are required to do in Wales, what you will find is that if you invest earlier on in improving that situation, that is likely to pay for itself through reductions in health care admissions, improved educational attainment, improved economic output and so on and so on.  So actually taking that longterm view, it's a nobrainer that you would invest in tackling poverty.    

 

One of the responses now in Wales, devolved settlement means that we don't have responsibility for welfare reform or welfare policy.  We have responsibility, however, for a number of related fields: health, social care, equality, education, housing and so on. But one of the things that we are doing in Wales, which was as a result of the Future Generations Act and was seen as kind of completely impossible just four or five years ago, is we're having the first governmentsupported trial of a universal basic income.  We're doing that because exactly of what I just described because investing in taking people out of poverty pays longterm dividends.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That's really interesting.  So you're doing that  welfare payments still coming from Westminster.    

 

  

SOPHIE HOWE: So initially the pilot the U built of the universal basic income is not where I want it to be because the basic income pilot is targeted towards young people leaving the state care system, a hugely important population and deserving population, and probably a group which are likely to see some significant impacts.  So, they are currently receiving 1600 pounds a month of unconditional income over a two-year period, and we have a big evaluation wrapped around that to see what the outcomes of that are and whether the case is made for extending that further.    

 

  

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That's really interesting.  The next question is from Lexi RandallL'Estrange, and hers is about housing.  "Access to affordable, secure, appropriate housing in Australia is undermining many people's capacity for a life of basic wellbeing.  What can we learn from Wales in terms of housing frameworks to support health and social justice?".    

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: So the way in which the Act works is that it should both be the underpinning and overarching framework for government and our other public institutions to both decide what they're going to do  so how they're going to prioritise investment policy initiatives and so on  and they should choose to do the things which make the biggest contribution across all of the wellbeing goals. So there is a very good case to make that housing is one of these areas.  In fact, when I first started as Commissioner, I did a big involvement exercise saying, "What are the things, the policy areas, that if we got them right, would make the biggest contribution across all of those seven wellbeing goals", and housing was one of those areas, because connections to how we build it in terms of carbon, the cohesive community, the health of the nation equality aspects a and so on and so on.  The Government have had a big focus on housing but we still have the same challenges.  We have social housing infrastructure in Wales and we've seen big additional resources going into that social housing infrastructure.  However  here is an interesting sort of example of how the Act starts being implied in its entirety  the Government decided the "what", housing  that people need housing, build more houses  was a good thing to do.  They're absolutely right.  Commitment in the manifesto, in the election documentation and program for government, for the Government to build 20,000 new affordable homes in Wales, so a population of 3 million people, 20,000 new affordable homes.  Good.  However, the Act doesn't just apply to what you do; it applies to how you go about doing it.  So we could build 20,000 affordable homes, that's good, but what if we're not accounting for future trends around an ageing population? What if we're not accounting for climate in the way that we build those homes? What if we're missing opportunities to develop jobs and prosperity through that and so on? So the challenge to government that I levied is 20,000 homes isn't good enough.  They must be 20,000 lowcarbon homes.  They must be fit for the future in terms of the regulations around how they're built and how they might be able to change over time.  We must be looking to do things like building green infrastructure and so on.  They must be built in a way through the planning system, which facilitates them to be connected communities rather than outoftown areas where you can only use your car to get anywhere, and we are looking to base them on 20minute neighbourhoods, for example.  So that was the shift that we started to see and that's where the power of the Act comes in in terms of permeating strategic policy.  What I think often gets lost is those strategic initiatives is all about how you do that as to whether you really maximise those wellbeing wins and avoid any wellbeing pitfalls.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: Yes.  Marianna asks the question around sustainable development. She says: "In your opinion, why was sustainable development as an organising principle difficult to practise? You mentioned it was seen as a responsibility of just one Minister, the Environment minister.  What, in your opinion, was missing to ensure that the principle was practised?".    

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: I think and this is my view as someone who has been around the public system for all of my career and an ex politician, if you like  I think it's all about the terminology.  First of all, the general public do not understand what sustainable development is generally.  I think if you ask them, they would probably say it's something to do with the environment and it's something that happens within the bowels of the UN somewhere.  Now, shifting that  but essentially sustainable development is how do we act in the interests of the future generations? That is a much more powerful concept.  And my massive learning  and, as I said, as a politician myself, I have been an adviser to two First Ministers, is the kind of assumption that politicians will understand these concepts that perhaps academics are talking about, perhaps experts are talking about, but actually their biggest connection is back to what people on the ground in the pub, in the local community, are talking about.  People in local communities are not talking about sustainable development.  They are, however, interested in the longterm  in many cases, they're interested about their grandchildren and the hopes and aspirations and opportunities that they have.  So I think that it's not surprising, therefore, that these things don't really have resonance in government, within "a system of government", the whole official system, because the UN is saying do sustainable development, and, yes, if you apply a sensible policy lens to it, that is where you get Departments "doing sustainable development".  I can guarantee you they will have a framework.  I guarantee you they have some metrics around it.  I guarantee you it is solely the responsibility of one Minister and I will also guarantee you that no other Department will pay any attention to it unless they are asked to give some reporting to it.  There's the problem.  You have to make this matter to every Department.  So it has to be for the Health Minister, this is about how you're improving the health of the nation; this is about how you're going to keep people out of your hospitals because your hospitals are flooded.  It has to be about education.  This is about how you're going to equip our young people for the skills that they need in the future.  And it also has to be back to the Health Minister, our education system is about how we keep our young people or how we prevent our young people from adding to this upward trajectory in terms of poor mental health and so on.  You have to make it matter in that way.  The term "sustainable development" I think doesn't resonate.    

 

  

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: Just to add to that, Verity, we asked 70 young people yesterday in a room, mainly from youth organisations, advocacy organisations, all different types  a lot of them run Headspace centres and all sorts of different folk  but their idea was  when we said what should a parliamentary inquiry look at, they said, "Why don't we look at what would be the life of a child born tomorrow and look at the life path and the life choices?".  So very interesting.  From those of us who are kind of seeped in sustainable development principles, it was a very nice framing of that, to keep the human at the centre.  Sustainable development is systems thinking, right? That's quite hard for a lot of people.  I think the idea of putting the human being and the narrative of the human being at the centre  and remember Close the Gap, Verity? When that came in, a lot of that was about an Aboriginal baby born tomorrow should have a different set of outcomes and let's work from there.  It's become a bit of an exercise but that's the heart of the Closing the Gap process as well.    

 

  

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: Yes, and there's something innately human and understandable in that question, isn't there? People get that.  I know you have talked about the toolkit and simplifying in essence what the problem is but also recognising we do still have these complex systems and we need to way to measure and capture progress.  So progress towards the Act's objectives are measured by a framework called the maturity matrix.  So can you describe the maturity matrix and how do you measure wellbeing and the impact of policy on future generations through this matrix?   

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: Yes.  So at a countrywide level, the Act is  or the goals are measured by 50 national indicators.  They're not a perfect set of indicators because often indicators are things that we're sort of capable of measuring rather than things that we might want to measure.  They do, however, have  a number of the indicators relate back to the National Survey for Wales, which is interviews with the survey and interviews with people.  So it does measure things like: how many people feel that there is a sense of community in the area that they live in, how many of you are volunteering, when did you last feel lonely?", those sorts of things.  Those are the softer measures which are an important part, as well as the harder measures.    

 

  

 

In terms of  so there's a few things.  So this has really come from the work of my office as Commissioner.  So first of all, we developed what we called a future generations framework, so for different types of decisions the Governments might take.  So for infrastructure, for example, if you're deciding what infrastructure a country might need, how would you apply a Future Generations Act lens to that? Likewise, if you're looking at policy or service delivery, how might you apply a future generations lens to that? Perhaps I can just  and I'll go on to the maturity matrix in just a moment. Perhaps I can just give a live  a real example of how that worked in practice.   

 

So the first big test of the legislation was the Government had plans which had been on their books for a long period of time, hadn't come into fruition, but they were just in 2017 started to proceed with a plan to deal with the problem of congestion on way of our major motorways by spending the entire of the government's borrowing capacity on building a 13mile stretch of motorway, a kind of relief road, to deal with this problem of congestion.   

 

So I was sort of less than a year into post, just starting work on this framework for infrastructure, and this particular decision had sort of accelerated that.  So using the development of this framework on how they should apply the Act to that decision, I asked them to explain how they had done it, how they had considered longterm trends, what metrics and data they had used to consider in terms of prevention, how they were looking at things in an integrated way and so on.  But particularly how they were applying the wellbeing goals.  So how they considered that goal of prosperity.  As you can imagine, this was played out as a "This road is essential for our economic prosperity" and, in fact, the Conservative Secretary of State, who had a role in releasing these funds for the Welsh Government to borrow, said that, "This congestion was a spot on the throat of the economy in Wales and, therefore, it needed to be built".  All well and good.  

 

 I disagreed with him.  But actually the law says the definition of 'prosperity' is productive, innovative, low carbon, using resources efficiently, proportionately, and acting on climate change.  I then asked him to explain how it was in line with a resilient Wales.  It was going through a nature reserve.  Our environment body said there would be irreparable damage to that nature reserve  nature and biodiversity.  How it was in line with the goal of a healthy Wales, because we have illegal levels of air pollution, we have increasing rates of obesity.  What trends had they taken into account there? How it was in line with a goal of a more equal Wales because 25% of the lowest income families don't own a car, so are you seriously proposing to spend the entirety of the country's borrowing capacity on a program that will only benefit the already better off? And it was really interesting because it went to a public inquiry, and the Inspector at the public inquiry recommended that it should still go ahead.  That's back to what I was talking about there, that even when you start to change the system and culture within government, you still have all these other organisations that play a role whose culture has not necessarily changed.  But following those interventions which were played out very, very publicly as a spat, if you like, a fight, between the Commissioner and the Government, the First Minister changed his mind.  He cancelled the roadbuilding scheme and he set up a Commission to instead look at the  the terms of the reference of the Commission were based around the wellbeing goals and the Future Generations Act: what is the solution to this congestion problem which best meets the seven wellbeing goals? So those are the requirements of the Act and that framework sets out the sorts of things that bodies should think of and apply to demonstrate that they've applied the Act to their decision making.    

 

  

The maturity matrix is a sort of next iteration of that, if you like.  So the Commissioner has powers under Section 20 of the Act to undertake reviews.  Those are, I suppose, the toughest powers of the Commissioner because the Commissioner can't force anyone to do anything or stop anyone doing anything.  They can call out, they can commission research, they can convene people, and so on and so on.  The Section 20 review powers gives the Commissioner powers to go into a particular organisation and review a particular decision or a way in which they're operating.  The Commissioner can make recommendations which the public body either have to follow or, if they don't follow, they have to publish their reasons why they're not following those recommendations and what it is they're going to do instead. So it's kind of name shame powers, if you like.    

 

 

So one of my last acts, if you like, was to really go into government with the exam question: how well is machinery of government embedded in the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act in the way that it operates? Because what we have seen across Wales is some massive transformational policy initiatives, the universal basic income, following that the motorway issue, a moratorium on road building in Wales, transformation of our school curriculum, commitments around zero waste and a range of other things.  But I could not be assured that every decision in government was applying the Future Generations Act in the way that our civil service was going about doing that.  So what we looked at is what was happening in terms of the people and culture element of applying the Act in government, what was happening in terms of process, and what was happening in terms of their role as public sector leaders.  From that, we agreed a joint improvement plan with the Government, which sets out what we call a maturity matrix, which is an assessment really of where on the journey the Government  and it could be used by any public sector organisation actually  where on the journey on those three topics they are.  So are they right at the beginning where there is no evidence they are properly applying the Act or are they being a bit more adventurous is how they might apply it, or are they really kind of leading the way? And it takes us through each of those five ways of working and says  so, for example, on prevention, one of the things we say is you need to understand the root causes of the issues that you're dealing with.  So we would see no evidence as being no understanding and challenges viewed in isolation.  We would see being a bit more adventurous as research.  Perhaps they might commission research to understand causality.  We might see big challenges considered across an organisation and then we would see leading the way in this area as a clear plan to tackle root causes of issues and all challenges are considered and acted upon in a systemwide way.  So what enables a Commissioner to do or anyone to do really, and for government themselves to use it, is to see how do they move from no evidence to making simple changes to being a bit better, a bit better, and then actually getting to where we want to in terms of leading the way.    

 

  

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That's really interesting.    

 

 

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: About as far away as we can get from the announceable culture we have.  What I like is that actually if you study public policy studies in Australia, you would think that's what happens.  That people are carefully, carefully designing longterm integrated root cause strategies.  And it's fascinating to hear Fiona Stanley at the Menadue Oration which Sophie delivered in Melbourne.  She was saying she's so frustrated with politicians not understanding the causal pathways to outcomes that she's struggling with, and what she wants them to focus on is understanding those causal pathways.  So she was interested in anything to do with  I think that's very important in this work.  I was thinking a lot of it is just good public servant thinking, right? Already our public servants are meant to in their code of conduct consider stewardship of resources and systems, but there's no incentive, there's no structure around that.  There's no reward for that thinking and it often puts you in conflict, like the Robodebt Commission, which is a terrible, terrible example of shortterm horrendous thinking.    

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: And they're marking their own homework, aren't they.  

 

  

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: And they're marking their own homework, exactly.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: There is definitely an element of the transparency element and being able to have some of the fight out in the open, right? So Sophie's description of that road issue is a good example of that, putting the fight out in the open applies political pressure as well.    

 

  

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: Yes, what Glenn Davis would call contestability, an enhanced sense of contestability inside and outside the Public Service.  He would be all for that because you have to explain yourself and provide your evidence for your decision as opposed to jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, which we've had for God knows how long.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: I am mindful of time and I am going to move to the final question but it's a good one and I encourage Michael and Susan to join in as well because, of course, Susan and Michael have an agenda, bringing Sophie out here and taking her around.  Wales is leading the way with the Future Generations Movement.  There are other countries like Sweden and Scotland and the United Arab Emirates who are taking a similar approach, but many countries, including Australia, are of course still yet to take on official future generations approaches to policy, and part of the point of having Sophie out here is to advocate for transformative change in Australia.  So first I'm just going to ask Sophie about what's your advice to us, what's your advice to Susan and Michael and all of us who will be advocating for this transformative change, and then we might also even give you an opportunity, Susan, to tell the audience what is going on in this space in Australia.    

 

  

 

SOPHIE HOWE: So I suppose my advice would be you kind of have to start where people are at and it might not be where you choose it to be, and where people are at here it seems to me is you've got an opportunity with the Treasurer's commitment around a wellbeing budget and so on, that is, from what I can see, not a perfect approach.  The big missing part of his jigsaw I think is the national dialogue, having those  whatever those wellbeing themes, goals, objectives, whatever you might call them in the budget, kind of owned by the people of Australia, so I think that there's a really important moment in time in terms of how do you get a commitment from the Federal Government around that.  Again, we don't have the sort of federal system as such in Wales but I think that there are some real opportunities with some of the states in Australia who are perhaps a bit further ahead of the game and a bit more willing and there is an open door to perhaps a smaller scale moving model out what this would look like if you take a really comprehensive approach.  So I think there is something there.    

 

  

The two other final bits of advice that I would give is in moving this forward, it is absolutely essential that it doesn't  it might start at treasury but it doesn't stop in treasury, and there's a real critical thing around building that momentum out across government and there's a role for civil society, academia, trade unions, business and community for actually doing that.  So I think there's something incredibly powerful about a connection with the unusual suspects.  The magic that I see now in Wales between our arts Council developing what we believe is the kind of first approach to arts and climate change, the magic of the nature organisations saying we're not meeting the goal of a more equal Wales because actually we're all white  we might be doing good stuff in environment but we're not doing good stuff over there  you have to have that broader engagement with people who might not agree with you and with people who are coming from a completely different perspective than you, to try to find those connections, because that is where the magic happens.    

 

 

The final thing I would say is don't obsess about metrics.  You have to metrics to measure all this stuff ultimately, I agree, but if you start from a position of metrics and not a position of inspiring leadership interventions, and I'm talking leadership, of course, at senior level but I'm also talking about leadership interventions in communities around the Future Generations Act, people will get turned off by metrics.  Civil servants will love them because they can write framework and can tick boxes and do all those sorts of things and that is where it will remain.  You have to inspire action in the broadly right direction towards these wellbeing goals and then bring your metrics behind rather than the other way around.   

 

  

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: That's great advice.  Really good.  Is there anything you want to conclude with, Susan, before we close the session?   

 

  

 

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: Sure.  I am sure Michael and I would both like to hear from any of the researchers in the audience who are interested in this sort of research so we can carry on the conversation with you.  So please get in touch with us and just tell us what you're doing and I would like to have an academic workshop on this subject reasonably soon.  For those of you in the audience who are advocates, practitioners, one of the things we would really like to do is start providing some information to people who might be interested in putting a submission into the national human rights framework around calling for a future generations approach.  Also we're also working on a right to a healthy environment based off what has been happening in the ACT.  So if you want to have an input, like do something practical, that would be where we would love to collaborate with you.    

 

 

There's lots of resources on the website EveryGen.online that you can have a look at but we will have some more research coming out.  I want to say there's other people doing wonderful things.  The University of Tasmania has a really cool Climate Justice and Future Generations group.  There's people at the Australian Human Rights Centre at UNSW.  So in this space, we need to model a wellbeing approach.  We need to be very collaborative and supportive of each other's work and as joined up as possible, and for us to think really hard about what is the role of universities in supporting these types of changes, it can be quite difficult to think about how to be that facilitating, convening space that is valuesdriven and making knowledge accessible to those who might want to use it.  So very interesting with people who are in that sort of space.    

 

  

The Queensland Human Rights Act is also coming up for review at the end of the year, so for those jurisdictions  Queensland, ACT and Victoria  that have Human Rights Charters, I think they're the easiest bet in that sense because it's hard to promote the rights of future generations when you're not promoting the rights of current generations.  I couldn't agree more with Michael's assessment that it has to be intergenerational trauma informed current understanding of human rights issues and then in the future.  And I like the wellbeing framework.  I mean, I am not used to it because I am used to thinking of minimum standards of human thriving, which is the human rights framework, and wellbeing should be a step above that.  It should be thriving in a more  I love the addition of culture.  I like all of those issues where we don't just survive; we thrive.  And I agree with Michael that the most we can do now, the better it is going to be, so the kind of way that we have thought about it at EveryGen is we don't know what the future generations might want but we want them to have choice and options so we're interested in things that don't cut off avenues of choice for them.  So we're trying to make sure that an element of choice is preserved.  I feel like my grandchildren will have very few choices in the sense of the way their lives can go in terms of climate impacts.  So we're trying to create as many pathways so that future generations have as much agency as possible.  That's the goal.    

 

 

PROF. MICHAEL THOMSON: It is sort of like the idea of an open future, Joel Feinberg's idea of an open future, and that's what we want.  We can't judge what people in the future might want but we know that they need to be healthy.  We have to choose their life futures.  So I think that's really important.  Yes, healthy and empowered, be healthy, wise and have great education.  I think one of the things that was strongest in your very inspirational talk and the conversations that we have had is just how interrelated everything is. So take it away from Treasury and assess these things in terms of what it offers our own people.  So the poorest 25% who don't have the cars, how should that money be used? It should be used more broadly with a wellbeing lens.  I love what you were saying about housing as well.  These aren't just homes.  Of course, homes are important.  But these are jobs.  These are meaningful jobs.  These are skills.  These are models for a more sustainable future.  So it was very inspirational, to how interrelated and integrated it should all be.  Thank you.    

 

 

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: I would like to thank you  sorry, Susan?   

 

  

PROF. SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER: I was just going to say we have to make good quality decisions and not in crisis mode.  That's often where we go wrong.    

 

  

THE HON. PROF. VERITY FIRTH: Absolutely.  Well, I'm mindful of the time.  We have gone a little bit over time so I will close the session.  Thank you so much, Sophie.  That was absolutely inspirational.  What an interesting, interesting approach that's been taken in Wales and I think something that everyone who has been tuning in is very interested in advocating for in Australia.  So everyone stay in touch.  In the chat you will see that we've put links to both the EveryGen Online information that's available, as well as the Future Generation Wales website, as well as the matrix.  It's all there.  Find out more, and as Susan and Michael both said, please feel free to reach out and be part of this broader conversation as we seek to influence government in this country.  Thanks, everyone.  You will be sent a link with the recording so please feel free to share far and wide and thank you again Sophie Howe for that really inspiring and interesting address.  Thank you.    

 

 

SOPHIE HOWE: You're very welcome.   

 

  

(End of webinar)