What if the solution isn’t always more spending? Preventing harm before it starts

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 about how much action to take and how firm the government needs to be.

Banning gambling ads is a great example of something we don’t see often enough: harm prevention, rather than spending to patch up the damage afterwards. As a result, we spend an enormous amount of time and public money focusing on fixing problems after the fact, but far less time asking: why do we permit, or even subsidise, the activities causing these problems in the first place?

We spend downstream rather than preventing harm upstream

Think about the cost of extreme weather events, ‘events, which are estimated to grow by 5.13 percent each year (before inflation) and reach $35.24 billion (in 2022 dollars) by 2050’.

Chemical pollution remains a problem today: the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) reports that if pollutants had ‘been regulated early, the enormous cost of clean-up – and the impacts on human health – could have been prevented’. Instead, the CPD explains that 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’.

Turning to social and economic policy, the two are deeply connected. A lot of social policy is, if we are honest, necessary because economic policy doesn’t share our wealth and resources effectively. For example, because of child poverty, various Australian governments spend at least $16 billion annually on government services like child protection, health, legal systems, homelessness support, and education, plus the need for Jobseeker and Family Tax Benefit in later life.

We treat the symptoms rather than addressing the causes.

And yet, preventing harm is 3-4 times more cost-effective than treating it later. Avoiding the damage in the first place would deliver benefits for communities and the natural world; it would also reduce avoidable public expenditure. So why does so much policy discussion swirl around spending to repair and remediate, rather than stopping the harm before it starts?

Policy can enable harm

Part of the answer is that conversations about prevention tend to stop short of the economy itself. We talk about early intervention and investment spending, which is all well and good. But that framing misses a crucial third pillar: stopping harmful activities from happening at all, or before their impact gets even worse.

Right now, many laws, taxes, and subsidies still permit or actively encourage activities known to cause harm.

Stopping the bad

So what would it look like to change this? Governments would need to move beyond just adapting to shocks, and become more proactive about preventing harm.

The first task is to identify activities that are currently permitted but are 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 act, using tools such as bans, phase-outs, tax hikes, subsidy removals, tighter licensing, restrictions and limits, or withdrawing other forms of government support.

Crucially, this must be accompanied by transition plans and support to avoid unfair burdens or unintended hardship for affected groups. The point is not to punish people, but to stop the harm. Alongside nurturing the new, the task is to let go of the old and no longer necessary.

Fairness: to individuals and enterprises doing the right thing

There’s a fairness dimension here too. Policy often starts by recognising that broad, structural factors shape people’s lives, but all too quickly turns towards the individual: telling them to change their behaviour instead. It might be easier to tell people to make better choices, rather than to tackle the systems and fix the environment around them, but that doesn’t make it OK to ignore that task.

It’s also about fair competition. If a practice is profitable only because its costs are dumped on the public, that’s not a level playing field. When a business is profitable only because the public bears the cost of the damage it creates, that’s not efficiency or genius entrepreneurship: it’s a subsidy. The International Monetary Fund calls these ‘implicit subsidies’, and they represent a massive hidden cost to government and society.

It’s 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. And around the world, there are already examples showing how effective this can be:

• Scotland’s smoking ban, twenty years on, has seen rapid reductions in heart attacks and respiratory admissions, including a 18 percent reduction in child asthma admissions, and healthier workers.
• South Australia’s wide-ranging plastic bans.
• France has banned short haul flights for journeys where suitable train alternatives exist.
• New Zealand’s restrictions on zero-hour contracts demonstrate that employment practices once treated as inevitable can be reined in when the harm is made clear.
• São Paulo, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and the Australian Capital Territory are restricting the use of outdoor advertising (either outright or for certain goods, such as SUVs).

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.