Our latest paper, The Quest for Prosperity: How can New Zealand keep living standards rising for all? written by the Legatum Institute, contains no major surprises about the challenges we face going into the next decade: inequality in education, falling housing affordability and how to grow our prosperity by lifting our global competitiveness.
Inequality, particularly in access to education and to affordable, warm, dry housing, threatens our future prosperity.
The paper also highlights the interconnectedness of inequalities in education, housing and health faced by low-income earners and Māori and Pasifika communities.
And how technological disruption in workplaces will disproportionately hurt these New Zealanders.
It is the same group of people on the wrong side of education, employment, health and housing numbers.
A recent New Zealand Herald editorial threw down a challenge for business leaders to get out of their comfort zone of talking about tax policy and financial regulation and comment on social issues as well.
Tackling the issues highlighted in our paper is not the sole preserve of our Government. Businesses, as well as our politicians, and community leaders, have to step up to ensure that the nation's prosperity is shared more effectively across our communities.
Only by doing so can we make real progress in addressing inequality and lifting living standards for everyone.
We should do this because inequality makes us all poorer.
Better education and housing outcomes for low income, and Maori and Pasifika communities in particular, benefit us all.
We cannot afford to entrench disadvantage.
Doing so will erode the country's relatively strong social capital, based on family and whanau, participation in our communities.
The Quest for Prosperity also identifies the need to improve our global competitiveness and so create more prosperity - particularly by improving our environmental credentials.
New Zealand has a strong brand overseas.
The natural environment we have inherited is critical to that brand, but we have more work to do to protect it.
The Prosperity Index shows we have fallen to 13th in the global rankings for natural environment measuring the quality of our environment, environmental pressures and preservation efforts.
Our members, the country's Chartered Accountants, work across the spectrum of New Zealand's economy, in business, the public sector, public practices, social enterprise and not-for-profits.
So the concept of prosperity - shared prosperity - is an important one for us.
We recognise that there is no silver bullet. The issues are complex and multi-layered, but in the same way though, there is scope for multi-layered solutions.
The Quest for Prosperity is our way of helping, whoever is in government after the General Election in September, make the decisions needed to keep New Zealand moving forward.
The paper is available at www.charteredaccountantsanz.com/futureinc