Voting in local elections is a future health investment
COUNCIL decisions shape our lives and our health. That means your vote in local elections is an important health action.
City and regional council decisions make a huge difference to whether we have safe drinking water, clean air to breathe, can enjoy leisure activities at the local park or beach, and can safely, easily and affordably get to the places we need to go.
Councils can also help ensure these building blocks of health are fairly distributed for everyone. The collective rates we pay are an important investment in community health and fairness.
This year’s local body elections are even more important than usual for health.
Our local and regional councils have a large tray of important issues to deal with. Things like climate change adaptation, reducing emissions, transport funding, air quality, and investment in water and sewage infrastructure.
Most of these decisions will affect our health in the short and long term. We all need to make sure we elect people to councils who are willing to make changes that are good for both people and the environments we depend on.
One of the most important actions councils can take to improve health and fairness is to invest in better public transport, walking and cycling.
Doing so will provide immediate benefits for population health by reducing depression, anxiety, asthma, and hospital admissions for heart and lung disease, while increasing sense of community.
It will also reduce health care costs and help us keep pressure off our hospitals, which are still under massive pressure from Covid19.
In the next three years, our councils will need to make transformative changes to ensure we are wellprepared for climate change — our most pressing public health issue.
They are already having to make and implement decisions about reducing our climate pollution and adapting our cities to climate change effects that we’ve built in through collective inaction.
Climate change will cause deaths and illnesses directly through heat waves and severe weather, and also intensify the health (and other) problems we’re already seeing in Dunedin — with water quality and the price of food, housing and transport.
Difficult landuse decisions will need to be made to ensure our housing is resilient to flooding and sea level rise, our children can grow up in affordable, healthy homes, and our streets are reoriented towards towards healthy, equitable lowcarbon travel.
Planning will be needed to shape local, resilient and climatefriendly food and energy systems that address poverty.
And major changes to freshwater management are also needed to ensure we can all have clean drinking water, and our coastal fish and shellfish are safe.
These issues will play out at city and regional levels, making the Dunedin City Council and the Otago Regional Council both major players in public health.
This is an exciting opportunity for us — cities that take proactive climate action are likely to be healthier and more liveable with green spaces, shade, trees and safe spaces for people to move around by walking and wheeling.
To ensure these changes are effective and address existing health and social injustices, they need to be grounded in Maori knowledge and value systems.
Changes need to benefit everyone, contribute to redressing breaches of te Tiriti, and avoid creating further injustices — the only way to ensure that occurs is through real powersharing and partnership with iwi and hapu.
The benefits for health and wellbeing of such cogovernance partnerships will be felt by everyone, especially when decisions are made with future generations in mind.
Sometimes the people standing for regional and local council are so unfamiliar that choices can be overwhelming.
But there are standout candidates in Dunedin and Otago who are putting health, fairness and climate action at the centre of their policies and commitments.
These candidates have committed to making tough choices — decisions that will fundamentally change our cities and regions, but which are necessary to create healthier and fairer communities now and into the future. They deserve our votes.
It’s crucial that everyone’s voices are heard in these local elections, so look out for the candidates who are following good evidence, and committing to policies that will improve and protect health, especially by acting on climate change.
Make your vote count before noon on 8 October.
Alex Macmillan (tangata Tiriti) is a public health physician and associate professor in environmental health at the University of Otago.
Rhys Jones (Ngati Kahungunu) is a public health physician and associate professor in Maori health at the University of Auckland.