Source: New Zealand Government

Kia ora koutou katoa. Nau mai, haere mai, piki mai.  Ki te mihi atu ahau, ki te manwhenua nei, Te Atiawa, Ngāti toa rangatira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Thank you, Andy, for your introduction. Let me acknowledge you as the new Chief Executive of the Social Investment Agency, and express my appreciation for the depth of experience, compassion and mana you bring to the role.   

Let me also acknowledge the Social Investment Board here with us today: Chairperson Dr Graham Scott, Debbie Sorensen, Helen Leahy, Julie Nelson, Laura Black, Mike Williams, Katie Murray,  the Honourable Te Ururoa Flavell and David Woods.

This is an outstanding group of people with a diverse range of perspectives and practical experiences who hold in common a sense of optimism about how much better we can do for New Zealanders in need, and who share my impatience to challenge the status quo.   

The Board has been set up to help drive the social investment approach across Government. They are here today to listen to you and capture your insights on how we can make change happen, fast. 

I’d also like to acknowledge all of you for coming here today, ready to engage and innovate and contribute to new ways of delivering for those who most need help.

The providers and iwi who work tirelessly to improve the lives of our most vulnerable; the philanthropists, investors and funders who provide advice and money to support their work; the researchers, evaluators and data analysts who provide evidence about how things are working and how they could work better; and the academics and social sector experts who contribute their expertise. 

You might have heard me recently call on public servants to bring forth their best and boldest ideas. 

Today builds on that. It’s about recognising that government does not have all the answers, and that we need to work with you to get the best outcomes for all New Zealanders.  

We need your help to better understand the perspectives and realities of those receiving Government-funded services. 

We need you to help us solve the problems in how we commission and contract those services. And we need your wisdom about how we can do more of the right stuff and less of the stuff that just doesn’t work. 

Jack

I’m going to begin this speech with a story. 

Sadly, it’s a story that may sound familiar to many of you.

I want you to imagine Jack. Jack is 22 and he’s just been arrested for assault. This is his third charge and he knows that this time he’ll likely be spending time in prison. 

Now, if this was the start of a Hollywood blockbuster, this is the point that you’d get a freeze frame and a “how did I get here” scene, with a fast rewind through a mishmash of dangerous exploits and thrilling feats.

But in this room, without the Hollywood megabucks and latest high-tech visuals, we can already guess Jack’s likely backstory. 

He is someone we know. 

Jack has been receiving multiple government services and his family has been in regular contact with Government agencies and various community service providers since before he was born. 

At 22, he has no qualifications.  Jack was largely absent from school during his teenage years after concerns about his behaviour led to multiple stand-downs and a frustrating spell in an alternative education programme.

Jack has been to the emergency department repeatedly, has relied on food grants, he’s been couch-surfing, and from a young age he was exposed to violence in his household. He and his siblings had multiple interactions with Oranga Tamariki and Police.

We also know what happens next for Jack. 

By 22, Jack is on a pathway to a harder life. By age 27, there’s an 80 per cent chance he will have died, have had a child die, have had a child placed in state care, served a prison sentence or experienced family violence. 80 per cent.

There is no shortage of evidence that tells stories of people like Jack. Individuals with a tally of risk factors that predict a depressing life trajectory. According to government data, in 2017 eight out of every 1000 22-year-olds had a similar story. By 2022, that number had risen to 12 in every 1000. That’s a 50 per cent increase in the number of young people with a story like Jack’s. In just five years.  

And we know from the data that told us Jack’s story that his parents, and most of the parents of children like him, have had similarly difficult lives.

And here’s a real kicker. Jack, at age 22, has a son of his own.  

And so, the cycle continues.  

So why haven’t we done better for Jack?

After all, Jack has been in full view of multiple government agencies since he was born.  

Jack is the kind of person that well-intended Ministers of successive governments have had in mind when they added a new layer to the stack of hope-filled policies, programmes and initiatives for people in need.

Yet despite all of that, the system has been unable to respond in a way that makes a significant difference to Jack’s trajectory.  

There’s been no lack of trying. Various teachers, doctors, police officers, social workers, whānau navigators and youth support staff have worked with Jack over the years. 

All wanted to help him, but too many felt that they were only able to offer sticking plasters: that their hands were tied by the narrow mandate and resources they were given.

Make no mistake, a huge amount of taxpayer money has been spent on Jack and his family. He met the criteria for all sorts of supports. He has brushed-up against multiple providers who in turn hold multiple Government contracts that they’ve won from multiple different agencies. And each of those contracts has been commissioned, tracked and audited by dutiful public servants who’ve tallied up a host of seemingly important outputs.  

But despite all those good intentions and all that money, none of it has delivered the outcome we want for Jack.  

Jack, a human being, born with boundless potential to contribute positively to his family, community and country, is instead creating a trail of social harm, social pain and social cost.  

This needs to change.

We shouldn’t be looking at Jack at 22, and be resigned that his life, and his children’s lives, will unfold as inevitable tragedies.  

We shouldn’t look at Jack and pat ourselves on the back for trying our best for him. For spending more on him this year than we did last year.  

Success is not about whether we “get money out of the door”, it’s about whether that investment gets results in terms of changing peoples’ lives. 

Success is not an evaluation sitting on a shelf, beautifully describing a theory of what might work for Jack.  

Success is not another government contract.  Success is Jack out of prison, positively contributing to the life of his family and community. Success is permanently changing Jack’s life for the better.  

Social investment

Let me be clear: the data is not determinative. Many outstanding New Zealanders have emerged from extremely challenging circumstances. They prove that there is reason for optimism, and that it is possible to break the cycle and chart your own life course.  

Social investment is about building a system that enables more of that.

Instead of leaving it to luck, we want to see more focus on using data and evidence to create more success stories and fewer Jacks:

• to understand who most needs additional support, where to find them, and when there’s an opportunity to make a difference;
• to understand what works (and what doesn’t), what are the promising interventions we should build on and who is best placed to deliver them. 
• to understand what real change looks like, how we should be measuring it, how we can generate more of it.

I want to see locally-led innovation: a government funding model that gives non-government organisations, communities and iwi more power to do what works and more accountability for really changing people’s lives.

We want to be able to invest for the long-term, acting early, rather than waiting for the inevitable crisis, so that we can look ahead to getting dividends in terms of better lives for many years to come. Investing now so we can save later. And a government budgeting approach that accounts for those savings and better describes the return on investment that comes from growing human capital.

The philosophy underlying social investment makes sense to everybody.  

Today’s hui is about how we can better deploy our collective resources to make it reality. 

Doing things differently

I’ve got to say to you: I’m impatient for change. I want you with me, pushing against the status quo that has failed us. Let me describe the change that I seek. 

I want to see a change in the way that government conducts its business. I want to see agencies lifting their game in terms of their focus on delivering outcomes. I want to see that they are interested in finding out who needs support, in order to achieve which goals, and what the evidence says about what works. I want to see that they are asking themselves big questions about where they currently invest, and whether they are getting the results they sought from that investment. 

I have established the Social Investment Agency as a central agency for that very purpose: to lead, guide, cajole and persuade. To say to agencies: let’s look at all of this spending collectively, and ask ourselves tough questions about whether it delivered what we wanted.

I want to see a change in the way that government contracts providers. 

I want providers to feel that government is an engaged and committed funder, holding them to account for results but not putting up barriers to effective service delivery. 

I’ve tasked the Social Investment Agency with developing prototype social investment outcomes contracts to replace the current set of crisscrossing and overlapping outputs-focused contracts. This will provide a blueprint from which we can overhaul the way government commissions social services. 

My vision is one in which we break-through the agency silos, pool our resources and drive them much closer to the 500 or so families in each regional community that really need our help. Resources commissioned not through the lens of a particular Vote or agency, but deployed instead to organisations who can take a 360 degree view of the family whose trajectory we seek to change.

It’s a vision where we use data to learn more about what works for who, and then ruthlessly hold ourselves to account for changing more and more lives for the better. 

I want to see a change in the way we conceive of responsibility for investment in social services. To much better harness the enormous good will and resources that exist outside government.  

I want government to be a catalyst for philanthropic and social impact investment. I want us to be open to the rigour and discipline that private capital and commercial logic can bring. I want us to think of this as a collective effort, and a shared endeavour. 

I see a future with government budgets that factor in not just the money we intend to invest in social initiatives but that also credibly account for the savings those investments will create.  

In support of this vision, I’ve tasked the Social Investment Agency with establishing and managing a Social Investment Fund, to cut through the vote silos we’ve created for ourselves and test innovative approaches to both delivering and funding for social outcomes. I see the fund as a testing ground for ideas which – when successful – can be applied more broadly in the social sector, by the government and NGOs alike.

Conclusion

Let’s get back to Jack. Let me assure you, all is not lost for Jack. As the whakatuaki says, ka mate kāinga tahi, ka ora kāinga rua. One door closes, another door opens.

He’s 22 and going to jail, but we still have the opportunity to put things right for him. We can invest in his future through rehabilitation, we can support Jack’s partner, we can invest in their son.

But wouldn’t it be even better to invest earlier in Jack to reduce the likelihood of him spending time in prison cells or state care or relying on welfare payments? 

Instead of pretending a new government designed programme will make all the difference for Jack, let’s acknowledge those closest to his family know better. And that what works for Jack’s family won’t be the same as what works for other families.

As a government we are not interested in treading the same path that has denied opportunity to some of our most vulnerable. That is where you come in.

We are intent on making a difference. And we need your help. We need you to help us shape this ambitious, important work.

I think that a lot of the questions about how we drive social investment forward can be answered by the people in this room.

Those of you who work with individuals and families most in need have seen what it takes to turn lives around. You know what kinds of interventions make the difference.

Those of you who fund the work know the meaning of patient capital. You understand what it takes to support organisations to do this work really well.

Those of you who interrogate the data and evidence know where we need to be focusing and what we need to be trying, and you know how we should be thinking about what success looks like.

And for those of us in government, the question is how do we get out of your way and help this to happen? How do we move out of our mode of delivering a set of services and get into a mindset of enabling you to deliver outcomes?

I wish you well today. 

Jack and his whānau need our help. 

Thank you. 

MIL OSI