A version of this article was originally posted on The Point.
Many policy discussions centre on how to spend more and spend better, patching up after the fact. But this investment framing misses a crucial third pillar of prevention: stopping harmful activities from happening at all or before their impact gets even worse. Check out the latest reflection for our series ‘Building the economy we could have’.
Gambling advertising is a hot topic in Australia right now, with a range of groups and political players calling for more to be done to stop ads popping up on our screens.
Taking action to stop an activity known to be causing so much harm to so many Australians and their families is not really in question: the push and pull between the parties is more how much action to take and how firm government needs to be.
Banning gambling ads is a great example of how important stopping bad things is. Yet it seems to be the exception that proves the rule: so often policy discussions instead swirl around spending to patch up after the fact. It is rare to focus on stopping bad things from happening in the first place.
Compared to how and how much to spend and on what, far less attention gets paid to avoiding costly repair and remediation, and yet this can be much cheaper than the vast sums of public money spent fixing the damage caused by policies that allow, and sometimes even subsidise, harmful activities.
There are so many examples. Think about the ‘direct costs from extreme weather events, which are estimated to grow by 5.13 percent each year (before inflation) and reach $35.24 billion (in 2022 dollars) by 2050.’ Or what about the health impacts of pollution in the air from truck and bus exhaust, which costs about $6.2 billion each year. Children at childcare centres on busy roads are exposed to air pollution that is equivalent to eight cigarettes a day, according to scholars at the University of Melbourne.
In relation to chemical pollutants, the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) reports that if they had ‘been regulated early, the enormous cost of clean-up – and the impacts on human health – could have been prevented’, but now, as the CPD explains, the ‘cost of remediating Australia’s approximately 160,000 contaminated sites is impossible to quantify, but a thorough clean-up would almost certainly amount to hundreds of billions of dollars’.
And because of child poverty, various Australian governments spend at least $16 billion annually on government services like child protection, health services, legal system costs, homelessness services and education services, and the need for Jobseeker and Family Tax Benefit in later life.
These costs are illustrations of failure demand: demands on public services and budgets that arise because various systems, institutions, policies, and practices fail to prevent harm in the first place, let alone create the conditions for people and planet to thrive.
What is needed is upstream prevention that stops problems before they start. This is 3-4 times more cost-effective than treating them later. This is further evidence of the very real fiscal benefits to be obtained from creating an economy that better aligns with what people and planet need. Preventing harm would deliver benefits for communities and the natural world (most importantly), while also reducing avoidable public expenditure: a potential prevention dividend.
Taking prevention upstream to the economy
Conversations about prevention tend not to go as far ‘upstream’ as the economy. Yet how the economy operates and for whom matters to people’s ability to thrive, and that of the planet. Going as far upstream as the economy makes it necessary to ask which activities are enabled; who benefits from them; who bears the costs; and how are resources treated and distributed?
There is ample evidence of the environmental impacts of how we produce and consume, and inequalities within them. The socio-economic determinants of health are not disputed, but what is seldom acknowledged that much social policy is necessary because of economic policy that does not share our wealth and resources effectively.
Acting on this evidence requires investment spending and early intervention, which is all well and good. But the investment framing misses a crucial third pillar of prevention: stopping harmful activities from happening at all, or before their impact gets even worse.
Currently, many laws, taxes, and subsidies still permit or actively encourage activities known to cause harm, creating downstream costs for government and society (incidentally, these downstream costs align with the International Monetary Fund’s definition of ‘implicit subsidies’).
Stopping the bad
Addressing the fact that our economy actively encourages harm and causes downstream costs would require governments not just focus on adapting to shocks, but become more proactive in stopping the causes of harm in the first place.
The first task is to identify what is permitted, but which is proven to:
- Damage health, the environment, or economic security
- Shift costs onto the public while profits remain private, or
- Persist only because they are familiar, not because they work.
Then legislators need to regulate out activities and behaviours that create more harm than good via bans, phase out, tax hikes, subsidy removals, tighter licensing, restrictions and limits, or withdrawing other forms of government support.
Crucially, this would be accompanied by transition plans and support to avoid unfair burdens or unintended hardship for affected groups. Alongside nurturing the new, the task is to let go of the old and no longer necessary: ‘hospicing the old’ in systems thinking terms.
Fairness: to individuals and enterprises doing the right thing
Taking steps to ‘stop the bad’ would shift the onus away from blaming individuals and avoid infamous ‘lifestyle drift’: a phenomenon ‘where policies tend to recognise upstream factors in their rationale but drift downstream to “life-style factors” when recommending action and defining impact measures’.
It is also about fair competition: if a practice is profitable only because its costs are borne by the public, that’s implicit subsidies, not efficiency nor genius entrepreneurship.
Already happening
The biggest quality of life improvements often come not from new spending, but from deciding that certain harmful practices are no longer acceptable.
Around the world there are examples that show the effectiveness of stopping bad things happening:
- South Australia’s wide-ranging plastic bans.
- New Zealand’s restrictions on zero-hour contracts.
- Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and the Australian Capital Territory are restricting the use of outdoor advertising (either outright or for certain goods, such as SUVs).
- Scotland’s smoking ban twenty years ago has seen rapid reductions in heart attacks and respiratory admissions (including reduced admission for child asthma by 18 percent), and healthier workers.
- Scotland’s Minimum Unit Pricing has cut alcohol related admissions by 4 percent and deaths by 13 percent.
- Asbestos is banned in new buildings in many countries.
- Brazil’s “Dirty List” of firms using forced labour.
- France has banned short haul flights for journeys where there are suitable alternative train options.
- Wales has a moratorium on building major new roads.
Conclusion
If efforts to stop the bad were to become more deliberate than simply sporadic, debate would move from the Treasurer’s calculator to the auditor’s assessment, and ultimately to the legislator’s pen. We’d spend less time and money fixing preventable damage, and more time building an economy that doesn’t create the damage in the first place. The gambling advertising debate shows that when the case is clear enough, stopping the harm becomes common sense. Imagine if we applied that same common sense across the board.
The ideas that have informed this piece were first mooted at an event hosted by NESTA Scotland at the Edinburgh Futures Institute in early 2026.
Check out our series, ‘Building the economy we could have’ for more.