Governance for health and equity: a vision for our future

It is 2030 and the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation is hosting a seminar on the history of health promotion in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era. COVID-19, which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, was first reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and led to a pandemic. Part of the seminar focused on governance for health and equity and assessed how the COVID-19 crisis helped Australia take a healthy and sustainable path out of the pandemic. This chapter is the background paper prepared for the seminar. The seminar was also informed by the chapters in this supplement on the social determinants of health (Chapter 1), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health (Chapter 2), urban planning (Chapter 3), planetary health (Chapter 4), the commercial determinants of health (Chapter 5), and digital transformations (Chapter 6). The seminar used the United Nations Development Programme definition of governance as “the system of values, policies and institutions by which society manages its economic, political and social affairs through interactions within and among the state, civil society and private sector”.