English Bill: Urgent Debates — Whānau Ora—Auditor-General’s ReportText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: Urgent Debates — Whānau Ora—Auditor-General’s Report[Sitting date: 06 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3242. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister):Can I just start by acknowledging the considered speech by the front-bench Labour Party spokesman on Whānau Ora. It was a bit surprising. The Labour Party has been deeply confused by this policy. It cannot quite decide whether to be for it or against it. It cannot quite decide whether it is for it or against it but on the day it made the right decision which was to critically analyse the Auditor-General’s report support its conclusions and urge the Government to implement them and that is good.Surprisingly given the political advantage Mr Peters now has over the Labour Party he took the wrong tack. I mean to have the member for Northland say that he needs another $60000 and that that would fix things is frankly ridiculous. There is no shortage of Government money in Northland—no shortage of Government money in Northland. Now the member of course faces the challenge that as he moves on apparently from his career of “egregious self-advancement” of which he accuses everyone else he is now going to have to come to grips with the reality of the continued ineffectiveness of many traditional Government programmes in Northland—programmes and services that as often as not undermine what resilience the families in those lower-income communities in Northland actually have. They have resilience they have aspiration and too often the chaotic crisis-driven interventions of Government in the lives of those families make them worse not better—worse not better.The reason we are having this debate today is that the Māori Party rightly came to the view that something different needed to be done. Is there evidence of the need for something different to be done? Absolutely—absolutely. If you look at the data for communities around New Zealand there are three factors that combined predict pretty bad outcomes. They are a Child Youth and Family notification in respect of children in the household one parent who has had a custodial sentence—that is more common than people think; in Rotorua 10 percent of all children have a parent who has had some kind of corrections-related sentence—and the third factor is spending 75 percent of your life on a benefit. In Rotorua there are 470 of those families and I would defy any member of this House to dispute what the Auditor-General is saying which is that something different needs to happen because it is a deeply embedded pattern of persistent deprivation and social failure.I saw an example of this the other day in Palmerston North. I saw a video of the male from a household that had had in 12 months 161 calls to the police station—161 calls. We know that that is a sign not just of great expense for every one of those calls and the concern about the welfare of the parents and the children in that household. We know that it shows all sorts of other problems which are long running and intergenerational. It also denotes a pretty miserable household having an impact on the community that is very negative.The interventions that have gone with in that case the Whānau Ora provider mean that in the 6 or 8 months since they started there have been no phone calls to the police—none. That is a dramatic shift. I would not mind betting that if you went and looked at that family’s interaction with public services for the last 20 years it would be regular it would be crisis-driven it would be chaotic it would be very expensive. What we know is that a lot of it had not worked.That is why the Government has backed the approach embedded in Whānau Ora. The Auditor-General’s report draws attention to the nature of the spending. We could go into that in a bit of detail but one of the ironies here of course is that one reason there was significant administrative cost was to absolutely ensure that the money could be tracked so that it could be demonstrated that it was used carefully. For instance there was a requirement that a number of Whānau Ora providers did not like nor the families that if the Government gave money to a whānau it had to be to a legal entity. Yes it is a bureaucratic compliance requirement but I can guarantee that if that was not there New Zealand First would be ranting about that today. New Zealand First would be saying “Why do you just give money to some individual citizen out there? Aren’t all 4 million of them entitled to the same thing?”. Well that would have been a fair question.The other issue that has come up is around evaluation. It is interesting to hear New Zealand First taking the same argument as officials who do not want anything to change. That argument goes like this: how can you put that programme in place when it has not been evaluated? Well the answer is because it did not exist that is why. If we followed that argument we would just stick with the programmes that we know consistently fail—that we know consistently fail. Part of the money here has actually been to set up the evaluation to find out whether it has an impact—to find out whether it has an impact.In that respect can I say that Whānua Ora has been subject to more audits more examination more testing of outcomes more oversight than any other social programme. Among the Government’s spending these numbers over the years add up to $100 million. Over that period we have spent billions on programmes that have been unexamined. I would not say they have been unaudited—they have certainly been audited. They have been subject to high-level oversight and are not subject to anything like the expectation that they will have an impact as Whānau Ora is.The Auditor-General is criticising the outcomes framework. If we knocked on the head every Government programme that does not have an outcomes framework we would have been in surplus 5 years ago. Most Government spending has not had an outcomes framework and that is why we are changing it. A lot of it has no obvious intent to make an impact. It has got well-intentioned people it has got providers who can lobby and get the media and who do really care it is just that it does not make much difference.Whānau Ora is a programme—the only one I know of actually—that from its inception has been required to make a difference to the lives of people who desperately need that difference. In some cases it has. In some cases the value for money in year 1 of a programme and year 2 of something new with quite a different view cutting across the way that the Government is traditionally organised and quite a different aspect on our families and communities—in some cases that money may not have been applied in exactly the best way. We accept that. The Government accepts the recommendations of the Auditor-General. We made changes back in 2013 that deal actually with a number of the Auditor-General’s issues though not all of them and we will make sure that that contributes.I invite every member of Parliament to look at this and I welcome today the considered debate from most parties—except New Zealand First. There is one challenge for New Zealand First: show us what difference it is going to make in Northland and what is the magic new recipe? That is what we want to hear from New Zealand First. All we heard today was: “Don’t do this.” All we heard today was: “Don’t try to work with families to help them stand on their own two feet.” Somewhere there is some other magic recipe that is going to fix Northland. You know what? I wish New Zealand First knew—because it is a long hard road and a lot of solutions have been tried and failed—as much as it says it does. I just suspect that maybe it does not.