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.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 5/8/24

Seymour keeps count of truants while his colleagues are counting on being able to halt the slide in Kiwi maths results

Our leaders in the past few days have focused on education and what they are doing – or will be doing – to improve the schooling of our children.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour is braying about school attendance improvements over the first two weeks of term three, brandishing data to show “that when the government takes education seriously, so do New Zealanders”.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: Labour's Former Head of Health NZ, Rob Campbell, lectures us (incorrectly)

Labour's Former Head of Health NZ, Rob Campbell, lectures us (incorrectly) about Economics & the Pointlessness of National's Social Investment Method

The former Head of Health NZ, Rob Campbell, has written a treatise on the new Coalition's "Social Investment" approach, labelling it merely a political "slogan". Newsroom, by the way, is partly funded by the Universities of Otago, Victoria, and Auckland, as well as the likes of Bell Gully law firm, to enhance public understanding of important issues. Let's see how Mr. Campbell's explanations of how the new Coalition's Social Investment approach to deciding whether public money is being well spent fulfills that aim. He says that:

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 9/5/24

What’s new? A social agency with an emphasis on “investment” instead of “wellbeing” – but (psst!) we have had one of these before

A new government agency will open for business on July 1 – the Social Investment Agency.

As a new standalone central agency effective from 1 July, it will lead the development of social investment across Government, helping ministers understand who they need to invest in, what works for those people and how to measure progress.

But wait.

Peter Dunne: Social investment

New National MP James Meagher broke the long-standing convention that Maiden Speeches should be non-controversial. His speech not only raised a few eyebrows but also would have struck some raw nerves.

Meagher described himself as a "walking contradiction" – “a part-Māori boy raised in a state house by a single parent on the benefit. Now a proud National Party MP in a deeply rural farming electorate in the middle of the South Island." He went on to chide parties of the left that they "do not own Māori", "the poor", or "the workers", and that "no party and no ideology has a right to claim ownership over anything or anyone".