LINDSAY MITCHELL: Is social investment the new panacea?

There are individuals born in NZ who will, over their lifetimes, cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars in welfare, child protection, justice, corrections and mental health services. They will physically and emotionally hurt others, possibly take a life or lives, and in that respect inflict even greater indirect costs on society. 

Social investment suggests allocating some of that down-the-line cost to up-front intervention and prevention. By necessity it would have to focus on the child, the beginning. Later is often too late.

There have been past tentative efforts in this direction. For instance the predictive risk modelling work done at Auckland University. This identified the common circumstances around the birth of a child who'd go on to be the subject of abuse. For example:

“Of all children having a finding of maltreatment by age 5, 83% are seen on a benefit before age 2, translating into a very high “capture” rate.”

Early reliance on welfare was significant. But there was a host of other predictive indicators, for example having a parent who had served a custodial sentence, or a parent undergoing addictive substance treatment. 

Ultimately, though, then Minister for Children Anne Tolley rejected application of the model. The professor behind the work is now assisting north American states in child protection practice.

But the exploratory work proved that it isn't difficult to identify where the future trouble begins.

The absence of data and knowledge isn't a barrier to informed intervention.

The problem lies with issues of privacy (or avoidance of stigmatisation), and race. 

The last National government introduced a law to enable a baby to be uplifted from a mother whose earlier children had been removed due to substantiated abuse. That didn't play out well when Maori advocates actively blocked the process.

Similarly with Section 7AA, whereby cultural considerations must be paramount when placing a child into care, some Maori will attempt to thwart non-Maori intervention.

While he was Police Commissioner, Andrew Coster oversaw a regime of Treaty training and courses aimed at unlearning unconscious bias. His woke credentials were earned.

Next year he will take charge of the new Social Investment Agency where the budget provided for practical intervention will be available to iwi providers. It will be no surprise if he is highly sympathetic to the 'by Maori, for Maori' sloganeering. (We could all be confidently sympathetic if violence against children was diminishing but it is not.)

So where will that leave the current tension between the Minister for Children and Oranga Tamariki bureaucrats? Might we see a Minister for child protection and CEO for social investment with competing philosophies? As if there isn't already enough conflict between the public service and coalition politicians.

But there is another aspect of social investment which suggests to me the government still isn't taking the concept seriously.

Literally billions are spent on incentivising the type of lifestyles that create future criminals. A third of Maori babies are dependent on a welfare benefit by the end of their birth year. They don't grow up in working households. Sole parents are now expected to spend a future 17 years on welfare; if they enter the system as a teenage parent, 24 years. Too often their own parents were subjected to woeful upbringings devoid of examples of how to raise a child well. This malaise isn't just a Maori problem, but a child in need of intervention is more likely to be Maori.

Those billions make a mockery of 'social investment' at $12 million annually.

We seem to be simultaneously stoking a massive fire while standing by with a watering can.

Lindsay Mitchell blogs here