Turei Metiria: Urgent Debates — Whānau Ora—Auditor-General’s ReportText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Urgent Debates — Whānau Ora—Auditor-General’s Report[Sitting date: 06 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3238. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green):Whānau Ora is a new and innovative approach to working alongside whanau and it has enormous potential to be successful. But Whānau Ora is at great risk of death by a thousand cuts due to mishandling by the Minister for Whānau Ora and Te Puni Kōkiri and by a lack of commitment from Government agencies. That is what this Auditor-General’s report shows really clearly.I want to describe the report in a bit more detail than has been given so far because actually it is very balanced and I think the Auditor-General has done a great job. But she shows very clearly that between failing to address issues that have previously been raised around evaluation and reporting and failing to give clear indications of progress and success Te Puni Kōkiri and the Minister have failed. Alongside that a complete lack of investment or commitment from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Development now means that where there is potential for progress and change it is being hindered by progressive Government agencies.Pita Paraone: Patch protection.METIRIA TUREI: “Patch protection” my friend says. The report shows that there have been some really good outcomes but it also indicates where those outcomes are at great risk. I understand the Minister’s saying that he believes in this programme but with respect Minister it does not matter whether you believe in the programme. Your job is to instil confidence and certainty in the rest of the country that this new and innovative approach is working and is cost-effective. That is what will ensure that it is able to continue and build and do better. If you cannot instil that confidence and certainty the programme will eventually be cut. We can see that happening. We can see the progress of that. So right now is the time to be most concerned with doing the best work for the programme and making sure it has all the best aspects of evaluation monitoring and reporting. It is not a time for sitting back.We all know that Māori programmes just like Māori people have to do significantly better than others in order to avoid the extra scrutiny if you like that we all attract. We know that that happens. Māori programmes get additional scrutiny; so do Māori people. We have to do three times better to get anywhere. So one of the major problems that this report responds to is a failure to build resilience into the system from the start acknowledge that there is extra risk and therefore make sure the programme would be able to stand up to that risk.This is not the first report that has criticised Whānau Ora. There was in 2012 a serious report showing issues with the funding assessments. We were assured then that there would be new evaluation and monitoring put into Whānau Ora that would improve those systems but the Auditor-General’s report shows yet again that that has not been done and that is a failure of the ministry and Te Puni Kōkiri.But I will say that the report does talk about favourably about the programme. It is not just a criticism. The Auditor-General says: “I have no doubt that some commentators will make light of the successes described in this report and make much of the criticisms.”—and I think that has been true—“However an innovative idea should not be abandoned just because of implementation problems. I earnestly hope that those involved with the next phase of Whānau Ora are able to take my criticisms on board and learn from them.”She also went on to describe a couple of examples where Whānau Ora has worked effectively one of which was where a woman who had had mental health issues for 40 years had a Whānau Ora intervention. A person went to her home every week for more than a year to assist her to build up her capacity and resilience to operate well within the whānau. After a bit over a year her family were able to say: “Yes we trust you with our kids. We are able to engage with you as a person of our whānau and we can wrap around you with some sense of security and certainty.”I do not know of any other agency that can consistently provide weekly support to someone in this situation in their own home. She did not qualify necessarily for major mental involvement from the health agencies but Whānau Ora was there to give her and her whānau the support that they needed.The report also has an example—a very tragic one in my view—of a Whānau Ora navigator who was involved with a man who was an insulin-dependent diabetic. He suffered amputations and he needed more assistance. This navigator worked with this man’s children to get him prosthetic legs and other aids that he needed and that meant a huge amount of advocating writing letters working with the ministry and other agencies and getting funding for vehicle modifications and bathroom alterations. It meant helping him to resolve delays in getting his financial entitlements—he was not getting all that he was due—and it also meant that not only did he get some back-pay in terms of money he had not been paid but that he was in an improved financial situation. He was also connected to a rural nurse to help him manage his diabetes.This whānau needed someone to intervene on their behalf and advocate for them and this is what Whānau Ora did. This is what Whānau Ora does today with whānau. But alongside every story of success is the fact that every time there is a legitimate criticism of the funding the management and the evaluation the programme is at risk of being cut. So the Minister has to take these criticisms from the Auditor-General very seriously and make a very firm commitment to fixing this because otherwise it will be lost.The Auditor-General also made significant criticisms of other agencies—the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Development. One criticism in particular is the fact that these ministries were not able to describe Whānau Ora how it works and what it does. Actually I think it is a failing on their part. It is not that difficult to understand actually and they have been working on this now for some years. The fact that people in the ministries could not describe it is their own failing in terms of not investing enough in understanding how the programme works.There was criticism of the agencies for their funding failures and the mismatch of services. The Auditor-General talks about the fact that the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Development engaged with Whānau Ora and Te Puni Kōkiri but had an individualised funding approach. There is a significant mismatch she says between the services that providers must deliver under their contracts with those ministries compared with Whānau Ora and Te Puni Kōkiri. She goes on to say that the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Development have done no work on changing the way they operate—and have no intention to—so that they are working with the Whānau Ora approach as opposed to working with an individualised approach.She describes in this report that providers are very concerned that they may have been doing this work with this woman with the mental health issues for 12 months under a Whānau Ora contract and that once that ends there is no funding to enable them to continue to support that whānau in the same way because the Ministry of Health does not have a contract approach that allows for a whānau approach to her needs. When the Ministry of Health funding and the Ministry of Social Development funding is for different purposes when they have different kinds of contracts and when they are not engaging with the new approach that is needed and changing their own systems so that they can help to manage the gaps that will always occur when you have one service or agency involved in the whānau and another coming in behind afterwards well of course there are going to be problems. Of course there are going to be failures. Those failures are not failures of the programme. They are not failures of the approach. They are not failures of Te Puni Kōkiri or the Minister. They are failures of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Development and their leadership and their Ministers in that they have not been properly engaging with Whānau Ora and committing to the approach.So at the end of all that you end up with a man in similar position a man who has not yet engaged with Whānau Ora and a man who what—never gets his prosthetic legs a man who never gets the vehicle or the bathroom modifications? At the end of that is the woman with decades of mental health issues never to be trusted by her family to look after her grandchildren because she cannot get the intervention she needs to become safe? Those are the kinds of families in Aotearoa that we in this Chamber will allow to fall through the cracks because of the failure of the Government its agencies and this Parliament in general to commit to an approach that actually works for the people we are here to serve.This report is very serious and does need to be taken very seriously. It is a severe criticism I think of Whānau Ora Te Puni Kōkiri and the Minister but also other agencies involved and the Government’s lack of commitment to the concept of Whānau Ora. Thank you.