Te Ururoa Flavell: Budget Policy Statement 2010
te-pati-maori
Wed Mar 17 2010 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Te Ururoa Flavell: Budget Policy Statement 2010
Wednesday, 17 March 2010, 5:02 pm
Speech: The Maori Party
Budget Policy Statement 2010 and Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update
Te Ururoa Flavell; MP for Waiariki
Wednesday 17 March 2010; 4.15pm
Mr Speaker, the Maori Party welcomes the opportunity to focus on solutions that will lead to economic recovery and improved economic performance.
This debate is timely as we reflect on the residual effects of the worst of the recession and concentrate on the six key areas that the Government is proposing to prompt growth in the economy.
The number one area being promoted is an investment in productive infrastructure; which includes ultra fast broadband network, new roads and transport initiative, school buildings; and over three hundred million dollars spent on one prison.
Now to get a sense of the value added that a new prison will add to our economy I took a trip last week out to Spring Hill; it is located at Te Kauwhata. If we base our assumption that the average sentence cost per inmate is approximately $52,000 – raising to $71,000 for maximum security – and we take into account current projections that by 2016 our inmate population is projected to hit 10,700; we are certainly talking about a multi-million dollar investment in what some may say is based on the industry of misery. I’d have to say why do we have pour money down the gurgler in such a negative way?
This House is saturated with pieces of legislation which add to the investment in the prison infrastructure, including the use of container cells to meet the excessive volumes of prison numbers planned for.
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And yet when I looked around at me at Spring Hill it wasn’t an investment that I, for one, can say I felt proud of as leading our nation forwards.
This is an industry in which Maori are grossly over-represented; in which the average length of sentences imposed has increased; and which is characterised by a high rate of reimprisonment particularly of Maori. The Maori Party believes we have to change this paradigm.
Mr Speaker, one has to question an economic framework in which we measure our wealth through the growth of criminal activity. The $71,000 a year it takes to keep an inmate in maximum for a year exceeds the average teacher salary by $20,000. If we were to add up the amounts spent on courts, probation officers, police, and the Judiciary one really has to question the economic value to the nation of the true costs of crime.
And so it leads me logically to another of the six key areas proposed to act as a foundation for our economic growth – the area of lifting skills.
Mr Speaker, during the recess I chose to also play a visit to two schools, Lytton College and Wairoa College in the Ikarao Rawhiti electorate.
In my visit to these schools I got a first hand view of the Kotahitanga programme in action and I have to say I was really really impressed.
I found all of the teachers involved in this programme absolutely committed to the change process we so urgently require in our schools.
Going back to the issue of criminal justice, I remember when Judge Becroft reported to the Education and Science Select Committee back in 2007 and told us that almost all of the young people seen by the Youth Court are not actively engaged in education. He spoke of them as drifting, having been excluded or exempted from school. They await placement in another school, alternative education, a training course, or employment. Anything.
He also advised us that since the early 1990s young Maori have made up almost half of both Police apprehensions and youth justice cases.
And he concluded that getting young people back into education was the king hit that we should be looking at in youth justice.
So let’s go back to Te Kotahitanga. At one of the schools, the teachers had been involved in the programme for just four weeks. One of the break through moments for them that as a team of teachers they would sit together, and talk about the students that gave them the most concern.
It wasn’t rocket science – but there was an amazing sense of similarity across the team.
And so together, they shared strategies about how they could make schooling a more meaningful experience for these young ones; working through ideas that could lead to changing the way that they each responded to these individuals; and in doing so, working in a way which would support aspirations and ambitions, rather than focusing on discipline and control.
Another approach was as simple as the basic respect accorded to the way teachers greeted students. As simple as saying kia ora and that was all about shifting the paradigm.
Another part of the Budget Policy Statement focus on lifting skills was that of National Standards. I want to say that as a former teacher myself, I know that simply introducing national standards by itself is the type of largescale change that we need to improve the educational experience of what is commonly known as the 20% who under-perform and under-achieve.
But it will be a gauge for us to be able to address the longstanding issues that have impacted on poor rates of numeracy and literacy; or have lead to consistent patterns in truancy, suspension and exclusion statistics. And maybe, a good place to start would be in rolling out Te Kotahitanga nationwide.
Another key area in the Budget statement is the commitment to improve services in the public sector. It is certainly an interesting time to respond to this objective when today’s breaking news is that nearly 1500 jobs have been cut from the public service in the past year.
The Maori Party policy position has been that we want to see more community services and less government bureaucracy for the outcome of whanau restoration.
And so welcome another of the six key ideas for economic growth which is to remove red tape and improve regulation.
Many of the Maori providers that have spoken to us about our whanau ora approach have raised their concerns with the practice of Government in which the compliance and transaction costs emerging from multiple contracts with multiple funders has serious disadvantages for providers and often restricts their capability to be more responsive to whanau.
I have heard reports from some providers that they are reporting, or completing auditing and monitoring accounts to Government every third day; there are other stories of providers being hamstruck by the compliance costs of different reporting schedules and the administrative overload of meeting contract outputs.
So we in the Maori Party want to see far greater investment in what counts – and that is outcomes.
We don’t want to know how many posters were pinned on a wall; how many phone calls made or pamphlets distributed.
We want to be able to measure the true wealth that can be achieved through improvements in whanau capacity to undertake the functions necessary for healthy living and contribute to the collective wellbeing of the whanau.
Whanau ora – we would suggest – would also fall within the framework of another one of the Budget policy pillars – and that is supporting business innovation and trade.
My colleague Tariana Turia, has frequently spoken of whanau ora as being the most transformative concept that we could ever invest in. It is about investing in aspirations; investing in the innovation and initiatives of whanau to be self-managing and take responsibility for their own social, economic, and cultural development.
While whanau capacity will be a primary outcome, I believe that we should also expect to see considerable improvements in the business of Government as part of the success of this policy. Instead of being trapped by output based, tick-box contracts we would hope to see better, smarter services which will focus on real results for whanau.
And finally, we come to the last pillar of the six policy planks in Budget 2010, and that is the concept of strengthening the tax system.
This too, was a key idea that I took on the road over the last two weeks, to gauge the views of the people about proposed changes to the tax system.
While I was hearing first hand the fears of our people about the projected rise in GST, a report came out from the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services which suggest that our most vulnerable citizens are still feeling the impact of the recession despite what the Budget Policy Statement tells us when it says the worst of the recession has passed.
The Vulnerability Report reported that recession impacts are hitting youth, Maori and Pacific peoples and benefit-dependent households the hardest. It suggests further that these households are the ones needing the most tax relief and are the least likely to get it because such a high percentage of their income has to be spent on products that carry Goods and Services Tax.
[speech interrupted].
ENDS
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