How policy decisions today can hurt your kids in the future — are we even trying to get it right?

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**Natasha Mitchell** (0:37)
Think about all the decisions being made right now in those corridors of power, in boardrooms, in budgets, decisions with outcomes that you might never feel the full consequences of, but kids will, so will your kids' kids.
Today on Big Ideas, can we stop kicking the can down the road? For their sake, is it time to end polycrastination? Hey, welcome to ABC Radio National's live event show, bringing you big thinkers on live stages everywhere. My name is Natasha Mitchell.

**Elise Stephenson** (1:19)
Right now, we're at a critical juncture, actually. A lot of the policy making domains that we are looking at, whether it's housing or anything else.
I work a lot in space, climate change, artificial intelligence. We've got this opportunity where there is actually a lot of national attention. There is intention as well, intention to do something. There is floods of funding. There are often new institutions, new laws, new policies. If we could tweak some of those right now, we can actually produce much more intergenerationally just outcomes. That's not just, I guess, forgoing the needs of those living now, but also just also taking care of those in the future.

**Natasha Mitchell** (1:58)
Dr Elise Stephenson, Deputy Director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University.
Policrastination is the word she uses for this pervasive political culture that rewards putting off what we know needs doing now, even when we know the costs and consequences of delaying. She joins you today from the Hill of Content Bookshop in Nga, Melbourne, with some of her co-authors of a book called Future Generations Policy, Governance and Leadership, Ending Policrastination. Taylor Dee Hawkins is Managing Director of the non-profit called Foundations for Tomorrow. Professor Susan Harris Rimmer's research focuses on International Human Rights Law at Griffith Law School. And hosting this chat is Human Rights Lawyer Caitlin Reiger, who is CEO of the Human Rights Law Centre. Let's go meet them.

**Caitlin Reiger** (2:51)
Maybe I'll start with you, Taylor, but how have we got to this point? And where did this book come from?

**Taylor Dee Hawkins** (2:56)
These concepts used to be quite fringe, now they're really at the forefront. We're seeing them in the media all the time. The journey sort of starts about six years ago, where I guess we ran the experiment of what happens when you put an A-type personality in their room during a pandemic. They start a non-profit, can confirm.
We ran a national youth consultation, heard from 10,000 young people, and that was powered by an incredible team of 32 young volunteers.
And much credit to my co-founder, Holly Crockford, at the time, we did in-depth analysis of what we found. And yes, young people were concerned with housing, mental health and climate, but really, there was a stronger undercurrent in what we found, which was they didn't have the belief that their future was being safeguarded by the way parliament functions and that leaders were being supported, incentivized and held accountable to think about the long-term future. And that started an 18-month relationship between me and a spreadsheet of every country in the world going line by line and seeing what are they doing in different countries to try and combat this issue of short-term thinking that's really governing our policy more than any of us would ever hope that it would.
And much to my dismay, Wales and a few other countries, it's pretty far down in the alphabet. But in doing that work, we found the Singapore Centre for Strategic Futures, we found the incredible foresight work being done in Finland, we found the Future Generations Commissioner that's been set up in Wales. And that spurred ongoing work over the last few years, which has been really stewarded and supported by the incredible mentorship of both Sue and Elise, which included setting up the parliamentary group for future generations, trying to educate our parliamentarians on the opportunity of this work. And I can tell you, having been banging this drum in Parliament House for about four years now, people used to look at me like I'm an alien, and now it's kind of a buzzy word to use, so it's feeling a lot easier to talk about this now. We also set up the Intergenerational Fairness Coalition, so bringing together civil society to really support this work. And we developed the For Our Future Policy brief, which became the recommendation backbone for the Wellbeing of Future Generations bill, introduced into Federal Parliament in February of last year. And it must be said, all of this work is fuelled by an incredible team of young people that now totals about 58