Sustainable development and equity

Abstract

This report draws on the New Zealand experience to explore how intra-generational equity might relate to sustainable development in a New Zealand context. After a summary of different approaches to equity found in the international literature, the report considers Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi, which imparted to Māori all the rights and privileges of British subjects. The report then discusses how this Article’s widely accepted interpretation as implying that the Crown must equally protect the social rights of all New Zealand citizens, has been applied in the creation of a system of social security to protect New Zealand citizens against poverty and social exclusion. This discussion focuses on the central roles of employment, income support, housing, health and education. This is followed by a survey of a recent debate in New Zealand that focused specifically on pay and employment equity. This approach is adopted as the basis for the proposals towards an equity indicator made in the report. It takes the core elements of New Zealand’s social security – employment; income; housing; health and education – and defines standards for what would be meant by equity for each element. The chapter proposes a statistical series for measuring departures from each standard and then combines these statistics into a proposed equity index. The index is illustrated using New Zealand data in 1996, 2001 and 2006. Data for 2006 record almost no disparity between the male and female populations, but a substantial difference between the European/Pākehā and Māori opulations.