Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): I want to go right back to the start of this general debate and Mr Tabuteau's speech because what Fletcher Tabuteau said in his speech was that this was a Government that was obsessed with the 1980s. Well that is the irony of ironies because the parties in this House that want to wind the clock back to the halcyon age of the past are in fact the parties opposite. Labour the Greens and New Zealand First want to wind the clock back to the 1970s when New Zealand was opposed to free trade when New Zealand was hostile to migration to foreign capital and to foreign labour and when we had a Government that thought that the Government had the solution to all our social problems. It is a sad irony of today's situation that it is the so-called progressive parties opposite—Labour and the Greens—that want to hark back to the past. They do not want to take New Zealand forward but want to go back to another time. They need to realise that the halcyon age of New Zealand in the 1970s was not in fact that—that it is not a time that New Zealand should go back to. In fact we need to move forward.The other thing that unites parties opposite in the House today is their absolute hostility to innovation in social services. That has been one of the themes of the Government members in today's general debate. We have been talking about social investment and as my good colleague Brett Hudson pointed out this is a Government that is focused on outcomes rather than Government outputs. For too long we have had the scenario in New Zealand—and this has been the settlement for probably 30 or 40 years—that the solution to every social problem in New Zealand society is just to spend more money. That in fact is still the prevailing political philosophy of the Labour and Green parties.Let us make no mistake: as a Government we are prepared to spend more money where we can get outcomes that make a difference. But what we are not prepared to do is to just shovel taxpayers' dollars out of the door to organisations or to Government programmes or to NGOs or to bureaucrats or to anyone who receives Government cash with basically the idea of hope—to just shovel money to the organisations based on the assumption that that they will be able to do something about it. We have got to invest where we know it will make a difference. That actually is a giant upending of the traditional orthodoxy of the way in which Governments think about the way in which they spend money. So as Anne Tolley and Hekia Parata and Bill English have said we are prepared to spend money where it will make a difference but what we are not prepared to do is to just shovel money out the door on the basis that it will end up going to some useful end. We want to critically analyse proposals. We want to use data. We want to actually make investment decisions based on evidence. The thing is that now with technology and with the integrated data set we have all of that information so we need to make use of it. We need to break down those barriers and those silos between different Government agencies and make our investment decisions based on that.Too often we have the mistaken idea that good intentions always make good policy. Government for so long has been run on the basis that we intend the money to go in the right direction we intend social outcomes to happen and we equate that with good Government policy. We also equate the level of care with Government cash. So if we say we are spending more money—we are making an investment of X Y or Z billion dollars—that somehow equates to the level of care that the Government has for people. That actually treats disrespectfully our young people our vulnerable children and those in need of social support. It actually disrespects those who are trapped in the welfare-dependency trap and those who are actually at the heart of these intractable social problems that we are trying to confront as a Government because what it means is that you have a passive Government shovelling money to them on the basis of hope.We are trying something new as a Government in the ways that I have already mentioned. We are not opposed to innovation in social services. We are prepared to try something new. We are prepared to do Whānau Ora. We are prepared to do social-sector trials. We are prepared to have a look at charter schools and partnership schools because for too long there has been a long tale of underachievement by Māori and Pasifika children in particular in our schools. There are people out there in the community who do not think that the Government has all the answers. There are people in civil society and in the social sector who have ideas about how to confront these problems and why would we not as a Government want to back them? Why would we not want to back up the people in Northland at the charter school up there or the people in South Auckland at South Auckland Middle School backing our young people trying to succeed? This is a Government focused on innovation not status solutions.