Bennett Paula: Families Commission Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Bennett Paula: Families Commission Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 July 2012. Volume:682;Page:3834. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development) 
: 
Tenatatou e te Whare. I move  
That the Families Commission Amendment Bill be now read a first time. 
 I nominate the Social Services Committee to consider the bill and at the appropriate time I will be moving that the committee reports back to the House finally on or before 27 November 2012. This bill will allow the Families Commission to be more relevant efficient and purposeful than ever before. It will focus the commission on independent monitoring evaluation and research specifically filling current gaps within the social sector as well as its current function of acting as an advocate for families generally. 
 The purpose of this legislation is to enable the technical changes that underpin this restructure. The amendments to the Families Commission Act will introduce a new function in research monitoring and evaluation; establish a social science experts panel; remove the title of commissioner from all but one member who becomes the sole Families Commissioner; require the Families Commission to develop the annual Families Status Report; and give the commission access to statistical information in accordance with the relevant sections of the Statistics Act 1975. These changes give effect to the National and United Future confidence and supply agreement. Essentially the bill enables some technical changes to be made so that we can refocus the Families Commission to get the best out of it. I welcome the select committee scrutiny of this bill in respect of these technical changes. 
Let me explain the vision though that will follow these changes. Although it was outside the scope of the bill for the select committee’s purposes I think it is helpful in terms of explaining the context. We are taking $3.5 million of the $8 million a year in funding and channelling it into the new Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit known as SuPERU. This unit will independently monitor and evaluate programmes and initiatives in the social sector—a job currently done largely by Government departments. I believe giving that role to a more independent body is beneficial and will see more NGOs entering into more robust evaluation and monitoring. The truth is how many NGOs are actually going to go to the body that funds them to get a true evaluation done on their effectiveness if they feel that at some level that funding might be under jeopardy depending on what that sort of outcome is? Having a more independent body where they can get that robust research and evaluation done I think gives a level of distance from Government which is important. I hope that we eventually see it being even more independent than what it currently is and that we set it up accordingly. 
In New Zealand there is a serious lack of evidence of what works in this country. We have thousands of social organisations working in the community often with very vulnerable and at-risk families and individuals. But we often lack sufficiently robust evidence through monitoring and evaluation to be able to confidently say whether they are making a positive and tangible difference. The Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit will be able to radically change that picture over time. It will not be an overnight kind of change. But unless we start setting out the right avenue and the right place for that to happen then we cannot get the change that we need. 
An important part of this is the rigour that will be alongside of it—academic peer review and guidance from a social science experts panel. This is being headed up by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser Sir Peter Gluckman. That panel will bring academic and scientific rigour which will ensure the Families Commission’s future as a highly regarded centre for evaluation. The type of research that I anticipate a unit of this calibre will commission will be pertinent relevant and really useful. It may not be doing all of the research itself but currently we do not have a place of excellence where the research that the Government is commissioning as far as research from universities goes has somewhere to go through and actually collect all of that data. So individual departments do it at the moment—quite well in some cases—for specific purposes but it is not actually being collected in one place and having that right kind of avenue to go through it. I think that is going to make a huge difference. 
Let me give you a bit of an example which I think is the best way to describe it. An example could be that a town has decided that it wants to set up a youth programme because anecdotally it believes there is a need for it. They are seeing young people in the street—and we hear this all the time. I see them being able to go directly to the Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit. So they may get money from a philanthropist they may have saved some funding themselves or they may get money from Government—and that is a reality—to fund that bit of research. The first thing they will do is get the scoping work done. They will scope what really is there get it done slightly independently and then they can have the research done and get an idea of what is best practice. I imagine that the Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit will have the five components that are really necessary to make a successful youth programme and then they can design it around that to be the best programme. 
At the moment we have it done in a very ad hoc way. A good organisation will go out and meet other good organisations and ask them what they do and how they do it. They may try to get a bit of research done themselves or look at what research is available. But it is not done in a way where it is collected easily and it is at the whim of usually an individual who goes out and does it. Imagine having a place that has that kind of rigour behind it and has that kind of academic research. I eventually see Governments accessing more research through this unit. I see them asking for assistance from it. 
The other thing is that the Families Commission with the other $3.5 million will be doing what it does already: the White Ribbon Day campaign and the family violence prevention work it does. We will also be requiring a families status report which for the first time will be really analysing each year where families are at and how we measure that against it which I think is very important. 
The organisation remains an autonomous Crown entity. There are changes to the governance structure. So there will be one commissioner as I have said and then there will be a board underneath that. That board will be made up of everyone from people on community organisations to philanthropists and others. Then there is this I think very important experts panel under Sir Peter Gluckman that will have that academic rigour behind it which I think will really enhance the quality of the work that is coming out and its relevance. 
The one thing I have learnt in this job is that you cannot go backwards and start collecting information differently from how you do collect it so that you can analyse it and get the right evidence. The truth is that in the first year when I was there and looked at what programmes were working for my own Ministry of Social Development’s $550 million spend on about 4500 contracts to 2300 organisations I could not tell the New Zealand public how effective they really were. Then when I did an analysis of all of those which took quite some time what came out of it was: 20 percent were evaluated and doing a very good job 20 percent were doing an absolutely shocking job and in some respects may actually have been doing harm and the truth of the matter is that for 60 percent we did not know. So we have dropped the contracts for the 20 percent that were doing such a poor job and we have backed the 20 percent that are doing a great job. For that 60 percent which is obviously most of them that are in the middle we are now trying to collect information get their outcomes more focused on what we are trying to achieve and in many cases work our way through what is such a massive job of building up that kind of evidence base that we need as to what does work. But it is not a job that happens overnight. 
I think this bill and this research unit are going to make a fundamental difference to how we get that kind of evidence behind it to be used by NGOs to be used by financial institutions and to be used by government and have that level of independence. I commend this bill to the House.