Turia Tariana: Budget Debate 
Turia Tariana: Budget Debate 
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Hon TARIANA TURIA (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector) 
: 
 I too am really pleased to be able to stand today to talk about the Budget. A typical budget in any household would look at all the costs to be accounted for and weigh up the essentials alongside the luxuries. It would provide a plan for how best to pay the bills and perhaps deal to the debt. Our Budget is no different except that Budget 2011 is all about essential spending with no room for luxury items. 
The essential items that I want to focus on are Budget lines associated with rheumatic fever family violence and sexual health. I define these as essential items in that they are intimately and directly associated with the health and well-being of a family yet too often they are the issues that have been associated with poverty prejudice and pressure. Consequently they have not received the attention they warrant. Throughout all of our decisions in Budget 2011 we have tried to advocate for those who are the most vulnerable those who need it most. 
I have to say that one of the most promising pieces of policy advice I have ever seen from Treasury is John Whitehead’s swansong statement on living standards in which he declared that tighter Budgets require an even greater focus on making sure that resources go to those who most need them. The report  
Working Towards Higher Living Standards for New Zealanders 
 addresses the need to improve the living standards of those who have had a poor long-term outlook which is a theme dear to my heart. 
Maori Party members from our first day in this Parliament have raised questions about the quality and efficiency of the annual spend across the State sector. Is it getting to those who need it most? Is the trickle-down theory working for the people who should benefit? Is there a better use of limited funds so that we actually make the difference that we seek? These are the questions that have motivated us in Budget 2011. 
In the family violence prevention field all the evaluations of the It’s Not OK campaign told us that it is not enough just to raise awareness and that families and friends want to know exactly what they need to do to get help. The research told us that people felt that the television ads had helped them to understand that violence was unacceptable and change was possible. Budget 2011 builds on that research and is targeted to help create the long-term changes that are needed to prevent violence from reoccurring. 
I have to say that the new direction has not been universally popular but I have no regrets about our decision to focus on front-line services—services that are focused on restoring family safety and family well-being where violence has occurred. Although I can appreciate the concerns of providers when their programme funding has been cut or when potentially they stand to lose workers as a result of the new direction at the end of the day we have to think of the bigger picture—that is of course what we can do to protect our families from harm. 
Our greatest campaign must be our fight to support families to bring back the balance in their lives and to encourage them to be violence free. The great bulk of the funding will now go into the Family-Centred Services Fund which will encourage flexibility for families to achieve longer-term transformational change in their environment. 
In the current climate funding is limited and we have to make sure that every taxpayer dollar is invested where it will have the most impact. There was no new funding so I wanted to channel the $11 million that I have responsibility for into services at the front line so that families in crisis are kept safe and are supported to be resilient and strong. I make no apology for that. The focus of the funding in the family violence prevention area is also to encourage providers to work together to reduce service fragmentation duplication and gaps in order to provide more effective front-line services that better respond to local need. 
Those are very much the same factors that influenced me in redirecting the $1.5 million of funding that is spread across thousands of groups in 37 various regions under the mantle of the Community Organisations Grants Scheme. We all know that we have communities with significant issues that have little or no funding. Funding has been small in the past and this does little to create sustainability. So rather than have the widely dispersed lolly-scramble approach which gives a little to a lot I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bit bolder and to place our trust in communities to address their own issues in an approach that encourages existing groups in a region to work together for the good of the community. 
When it came to our initiatives in health again we looked for what would give the greatest gain. On top of my list was doing something about the appalling rates of rheumatic fever that have come to light. No Government can ignore the fact that our rate of rheumatic fever is 14 times higher than in any other OECD country. We should all be ashamed of that. Although I am sure there will be questions at some stage about how we got to this point especially after years in which we should have been addressing significant issues in housing and right across the social sector my focus is firmly fixed on what we can do to make a difference not on what we have not done. 
The concern for us in the Maori Party is to observe that the large disparity between ethnic groups appears to have worsened over the past 20 years. The mean incidence rates for Maori and Pasifika children aged between 5 and 14 are now between 20 and 40 times higher than for other New Zealand children of the same age. This is catastrophic when we consider the whole way in which rheumatic fever impacts on our children in the long term and certainly the impact on families. Rheumatic fever is an entirely preventable disease but it can have serious consequences during childhood and throughout one’s whole lifetime. The $12 million investment announced in this Budget will support a number of initiatives such as an increase in front-line community staff school-based sore throat clinics and a range of research and training programmes for health professionals and community health workers. 
I think there is a really important message here also for general practitioners who are at the front line of community health—that when a child from a Maori or Pacific w’anau presents with a sore throat those practitioners prescribe Amoxil immediately rather than wait test and then fail to see that child come back for treatment. They must treat it right there at the point of contact when the family brings in their child. 
The other announcement I made in health was about targeting the particularly high-risk groups in the sexual health and reproductive health arena. We have put a focus on a range of areas: addressing the incidence of chlamydia in rangatahi supporting African communities and expanding health promotion initiatives aimed at reducing the stigma faced by people living with HIV and AIDS. 
There are other highlights I am really proud of in this Budget. There is $6.5 million to expand family-based literacy programmes to all decile 1 2 and 3 schools—I say thank you to Minister Tolley. There is funding of $3.3 million for community-based initiatives to increase digital literacy and connection. Of course the major highlight is the investment of an additional $30 million in Whanau Ora. This investment confirms and validates the momentum and potential of the Whanau Ora approach uplifting w’anau to increase their capacity and capability and reducing over time their reliance on Government-funded services. 
We know that several hundred w’anau including several thousand individuals are already engaged in planning and development at the w’anau level and are connecting to existing service delivery and increasingly to the Whanau Ora service providers. Our w’anau are the greatest source of our strength; their needs cannot be put aside as a luxury item for another year. The investment we have made in placing Whanau Ora on everyone’s agenda could not have come soon enough. Today as I said when I started my speech I am really proud to stand and support the Budget of this Government. Kia ora.