Getting all your ducks in a row

Hon Tariana Turia
Minister Responsible for Whanau Ora

New Zealand's Welfare and Social Sector Policy and Reform Conference 'Exploring the issues in our communities to stimulate effective policy and reform outcomes'
(or Getting all your ducks in a row)
Amora Hotel, Wellington
Monday 20 June 2011; 10am Speech

When I accepted the invitation to speak at this forum, I did so on the understanding that this was an ideal opportunity for a conversation to take place about how we support our communities to stimulate effective policy and reform outcomes?

It seemed to me the ultimate question - how do we re-orient our thinking to focus on the resilience of our communities for a better future? These questions challenge me every single day.

In fact, such questions have challenged me all of my working life - when is it the right time, the tipping point, to achieve transformation?

I note that I was given another subtitle for this address - ‘How Whanau Ora can provide practical solutions to Maori inter-generational welfare dependency”.

I choose not to focus on the despair of dependency. There is plenty enough evidence of how our people have actively fought against the culture of reliance on the state.

Indeed, I have spoken on many other occasions about my concerns that the systems of support have ended up entangling people in a net from which they do not escape.

Composers Henare Waitoa and Tuini Ngawai, leader and politician Sir Apirana Ngata wrote passionately against the introduction of the benefit fearing that it would undermine the work ethic of a people.

Tuini Ngawai claimed the end result would be the destruction of the people, it would attack the memories, it would erode the essence of their souls. “Patu tangata, patu mahara, patu mauri” .

I remember at the time of the 2008 elections a kuia writing to me, her message echoing the tupuna of an earlier time. She told me “welfare does not promote purpose, dignity, pride or hope”.

And yet here we are today, all of us aware that Māori are significantly over-represented in the beneficiary population and are more likely to spend long periods on a benefit.

Almost 31 per cent of working age Māori find themselves trapped in the welfare net – that’s 112, 000 of our people or the equivalent of the city of Tauranga.

I will not stand by and accept this position as our fate.

Of course, there. is a context to our contemporary position.

Urbanisation in the 1950s saw Māori move in large numbers to provincial towns and cities to find work. This was a time of relative prosperity -the level of participation of Māori in paid employment was comparable with non-Māori.

Film archives express the burgeoning hope and aspiration among our people as they moved to Wainuiomata and Lower Hutt, Hamilton and Hastings, in search of their dream - a home of their own, a steady job, access to quality schooling and free healthcare and participation in a safe and secure neighbourhood.

Tragically, for too many of our whanau, it remains a promise unfulfilled.

The period of economic structuring and rising unemployment in the late 1980s and 1990s impacted particularly heavily on Māori, particularly those employed in manufacturing and industry. The Welfare Working Group was told that, even today, there is a sense of shame from whanau not being able to provide for their own after the heavy job losses of this period.

How sad is it, that in this land of milk and money whanau continue to experience poverty and hardship and the consequential impacts these have on our families and on our children.

At the same time as the urbanisation project was becoming adrift, tangata whenua were reeling from the long-term impacts of land alienation, confiscation and fragmentation. The loss of the whenua, the depletion of the paramount economic, physical and spiritual resources of the people, was to have severe consequences on the wairua of whanau.

And so we saw gradually, over the century, enduring damage to the psyche of tangata whenua as the Treaty partner. What does it do to a sense of purpose, dignity, pride or hope when you are denied equal political participation, when you experience the stripping away of sovereignity; the promise of rights articulated under Article two of the Treaty of Waitangi gradually, but surely slipping away?

So this is where I come to the concept of getting all our ducks in a row.

You might have heard the story of five ducks sitting on the fence. Two decide to fly south. How many are left?

Most people would say three. But actually it’s five.

You see, deciding to fly isn’t the same as doing it.

For decades we have been saying, we want to reduce benefit dependency, but good intentions are not enough – we have to point ourselves in the right direction, jump off the fence, work our wings, and keep flying until we get to where we want to be.

And when I say we – I mean all of us.

We have some way to go before we will have a genuinely national view of what an appropriate level of living standard all our citizens should have – rather than just an ongoing discussion about the haves and have not.

Every child, every young person, every whanau has a right to dream about a future able to be fulfilled.
And yet for successive generations we have accepted chronic under-achievement in educational performance. We have allowed specific groups in our nation to experience and to expect that they will not be offered the same access to treatments, the same referrals, the same quality of health services that other New Zealanders have enjoyed.
Long years of benefit receipt erodes confidence and self-esteem; both which detract from employability. How have we allowed this ongoing prescription for tragedy occur, right under our watch?
I’m talking about achieving our article three rights as promised in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Until we as a nation, have lifted the outcomes of those who have least – far too many who are Maori – we can not, hand on heart, say we have achieved the Treaty guarantee of Maori being entitled to benefit to the rights and privileges of British subjects.

So there is no doubt that the State’s approach to supporting Māori into positive and life-long pathways to economic security and wellbeing could do with a good shake-up. The position of many Māori families has been intolerable for some time and successive Government’s should accept responsibility for this.

We have desperately needed to get all our ducks in a row, to focus collectively on what is holding us back, and agree to actions to move us forward.

Interestingly, support has come from an unexpected quarter. The Treasury’s recently released Living Standards report concludes that tighter budgets require an even greater focus on making sure that resources go to those who need it most.

It is a striking change in ideology that the Treasury would be willing to see the position of New Zealanders from more than the traditional profit and loss or taxation and liability type approach that we have become accustomed to.

We have also had a congruence of thinking from the report of the Welfare Working Group which concluded that

“With improved co-ordination and integration of health, education and social provision a more enabling environment for whānau to achieve whānau ora will be possible. At the heart of the proposed changes is the recognition that every element of society, the Government, the individual, employers and the community have a part to play to achieve greater workforce participation.”

Not surprisingly, this resonated with me as Minister Responsible for Whānau Ora. And of course the greatest opportunity for change, has come through the introduction and momentum of Whanau Ora.

Whanau Ora is challenging work. It cuts across so many issues that go to the heart of our approach to social service delivery and in fact to servicing the needs of our citizens.

The first and most obvious point I want to make is that Whānau Ora is about whānau. Everything we do must connect to improving outcomes for whānau. To do this we must think beyond the individual. We must recognise that they belong to whanau who have aspirations and needs and skills that they can offer.

Whānau Ora seeks to reflect the aspirations of whānau, support them to be self-managing, and to take responsibility for their own social, economic and cultural development. This requires a profound change in the way in which policies, programmes and services are currently designed and delivered across the social sector.

Recognising that family members are inter-connected and do not live in isolation of each other, service providers must align their interaction to better support whānau wellbeing. It is also vital that whānau are empowered to build on their strengths and minimise their weaknesses.

Whānau must be the architects of their own futures and they must be committed to seeing and supporting the realisation of their own aspirations. The Government will not and cannot fix people. Whānau Ora is an approach designed to change that dynamic.

This means returning the power to whānau to take responsibility for themselves.

Over the last year or so, the Whānau Ora philosophy and approach has resonated with whānau and resulted in stronger than expected participation by providers across the social sector.

We now have 25 collectives comprising some 158 providers and encompassing literally thousands of whanau members.

I have been confident enough that this approach will make a significant difference for New Zealanders that I have sought agreement from my colleagues to expand it to provide for nationwide coverage over the next two years. Consequently, the Government has invested an additional $30 million in Whānau Ora.

Central to the development of more holistic service delivery to whānau has been the work to progress integrated contracts.

These integrated contracts will bring together into a single contract, funding currently received from Government funders. Such contracts will be outcome-based and relational rather than output-based. This is a key change for Government service delivery.

Alongside the implementation of Whānau Ora services, there has been a steadily increasing demand for support for whānau planning and associated activities resourced from the Whānau Integration, Innovation and Engagement Fund.

Around 1200 whānau (involving around 14,000 individuals) are engaging in planning at the whānau level and are connecting to existing service delivery, where they need to.

Research, evaluation and monitoring to provide information on the achievement of results is also built into the Whānau Ora Approach. Action research with whānau to gauge success of the design, implementation and impact of the approach will be a vital benchmark for our ongoing progress.

Of course Rome wasn’t built in a day – and there are many different facets of the transformation exercising our minds.

One of the issues that has been troubling me, is the context of privacy. If we are to truly transform the dynamic of dependency on the State we need to ensure that whānau have access to their own information and have the capability to understand how to turn that knowledge and action.

Timeliness is another issue. Last week when I appeared before the Maori Affairs Select Committee, one of the opposition MPs asked why we didn’t progress to changing the State Sector Act?

He intimated that if you really want to change the hearts and minds of the bureaucrats running the system then you change the foundation levers that they are required to work to. It is certainly another dimension worth considering.

Finally, I come back to the focus of this conference in welfare and social sector reform.

Whānau Ora is about wellness, health and resilience. Wellbeing encompasses social, cultural, economic and environmental dimensions and has particular implications for whānau health, education, housing, income, employment, relationships and wealth.

As a consequence, then Whānau Ora and economic development and sustainability go hand in hand. Each is a hand-up for the other.

We need to line up all the factors, from the Government side of the equation, we need to be listening to whanau, and we need to support their solutions; their strategies, their suggestions as providing us with the pathway forward.

There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Let us all grab this moment with both hands, and create a future we can all be proud of.

ends