Goodhew Jo: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoodhew Jo: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10714. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JO GOODHEW (Associate Minister for Social Development): I rise to my feet with the privilege of being the Associate Minister for the social development portfolio. I want to cover off on a couple of things this evening. The first thing I want to say is that this landscape is changing and it needs to. That is because this Government is tackling some really hard things. I refer to the Child Youth and Family reforms. I refer to the fact that instead of chucking money at people who are for whatever reason relying on a benefit or chucking money at young women who are pregnant at a very young age we are assisting those people to realise the full potential in their lives.In my home patch of Rangitata we have seen an enormous drop in the number of teenage pregnancies. In fact we have a unit at Timaru Girls’ High School which not so long ago had 17 young women and I understand has only about four there now. In fact what I also know is that for those who were there they now have a goal. They will achieve what they want out of their lives. They will finish their education and they will therefore have a far better future for the children in their lives. What we are doing is not just simply dreaming up an inventive solution or a way of getting into the lives of these people and trying to help; we are also requiring that we measure what we do and that we make sure that the taxpayer dollars that we spend assisting people actually have an outcome—that it is measurable and that we have some research and evaluation going on which has been woefully lacking in years gone by.I want to bring this around to just a short commentary on the social policy evaluation and research unit. We are within that unit developing an effective evidence base for the social sector so that those making decisions can actually improve the lives of vulnerable New Zealanders. This is our social investment approach. It is about increasing the use of targeted evidence-based investment that will get better long-term results not for some ephemeral sort of group of people but for real New Zealanders for real vulnerable children for vulnerable adults for vulnerable families—real results.I have to say though that the work that is going on within this portfolio and across Government is not easy. It is much simpler to just throw some money at it and hope it works or even to instinctively think that it works when the reality is that going out there and seeking the evidence and then channelling the funding through to where that evidence shows us we are making a difference in the lives of New Zealanders is really much tougher. But it is worth it. It is absolutely worth it. And we have seen that with the way that we have assisted young teenage mums wrapped around them the assistance to keep them in education to keep them in training to assist them into jobs to help them with budgeting and to help them with parenting skills. I just know because I have seen it and I have met them that it makes a real difference in their lives.Within the community investment portfolio we spend more than $330 million a year. Now we are doing a line-by-line review of what we spend to ensure that it is directed towards the most vulnerable New Zealanders—those vulnerable children who really need us to make a difference in their lives not just pat their mothers or fathers on the back and say: “There there you have our sympathy.” They need real interventions—real interventions that result in changes in their lives. We need to get better results from what are in fact billions of dollars that we are currently spending. We know the Opposition hates it because what it shows is that the Opposition did not measure outcomes. It was too afraid because what that really meant was it is not intentions—it is outcomes. So in fact what we are doing within the Government is tackling the hard stuff. It is not that easy to work out how to measure whether what you are doing is actually being effective and so that is a challenge for us.