Estimates Debate — Vote Community and Voluntary Sector

This year we have seen some very important changes for the community and voluntary sector. It is interesting, and should be noted, that the drivers for much of that change have been the fulfilment of the 2005 supply and confidence agreement the Labour-led Government has with United Future. From 1 April this year all donations to registered charities from individuals are able to have a 33.3 percent tax refund, with no cap on giving. The only limit on companies is a company’s own net income. Unlisted companies can now participate and Māori authorities can now participate. That single policy gained by United Future has the potential to deliver a level of support and cohesion in New Zealand communities that is unprecedented.

Civil society is not solely reliant for its health on Government action. It is also sustained by strong families and connected communities. The community and voluntary sector provides us with all the chances to belong to, to contribute to, and, where necessary, to be the recipients of caring community networks. We have not finished just with that, and in this recent Budget our party also continued our support for the charitable sector—the community and voluntary sector—by introducing some mechanisms to make payroll giving a possibility, so that people who give on a regular basis to a registered charity can enjoy receiving the rebate in their pay packet that week, rather than having to accumulate details of their donations and put those in with their tax return at the end of the year. That is the first bit of good news that has been happening for that sector, and the response and feedback that we have had has been substantial.

The second reason the sector has much to celebrate is that the new Community Partnership Fund, over 4 years, has been established. The Government is prepared to invest in strengthening the operations of community and voluntary organisations around their information and communications technology capability, and that is a very good thing. But even more substantial is the $446.5 million announced by the Prime Minister to fully fund contracted essential services delivered by New Zealand community organisations for vulnerable families, children, and young people. That includes $133.1 million of reprioritised spending, and those organisations will also receive regular funding increases to reflect changes in cost and changes in demand. Although I do not want to throw any dampener on the great gain that that has been for the voluntary sector, it is unclear yet what will happen to the new projects that typically arise within a community in response to needs as they arise from time to time.

What I celebrate, and United Future celebrates, about the new investment in the community and voluntary sector is the greater emphasis that is being placed on fostering more collaboration within local communities, so that the safety nets that should characterise our communities do not have holes in them. If anybody had asked me 8 years ago about contestable funding I would have been a great supporter of it for this sector, but now I am not a supporter of it. I have witnessed firsthand the devastation that was caused as we pitted service against service and provider against provider. The discord that that brought into local communities, as groups competed with each other for the few precious Government dollars, is still yet to be repaired, I believe. Therefore the need for collaboration in communities and the emphasis on that in the funding are very important. I will be interested to see how the Government implements that, because it is not an easy task. The requirement for agencies to work collaboratively together now, when in the last 5 or 6 years up till now they have actually competed against one another—often very aggressively—for the precious dollars that were available is a tall order.

I personally think this sector is the most vital third sector in New Zealand, when we look at what it does with the resources that it gets. It works throughout New Zealand and across the board in such a range of services, from the volunteers at surf lifesaving clubs and in sports and clubs with our young children, to the volunteers who work in essential social services. They do it, without a doubt, better than the Government can, every time. When we are in our communities and look around, we see people who are addressing the needs and the wants of their community in a way that no Government can and no Government should, in my view. The Government has a role to play in leadership, direction, and in some of the resourcing. It is quite interesting, because in looking at these estimates, and from what I hear from the sector, they were so grateful to John Key when he raised, in January last year, the role of the not-for-profit sector and what a vital role it will play in New Zealand.

They needed to have a wake-up call. Someone needed to deliver it. They needed to hear what the issues were, and all of a sudden we have had John Key, in what was possibly his most important speech—his first speech as leader of the National Party—saying he would stand up and put a stake in the ground. He said we could not deliver what we needed to deliver for New Zealanders without the not-for-profit sector. We cannot do it without that voluntary and community sector; it is absolutely vital and critical to this. We need to bring in a level of trust and a full funding model, and we need to address a lot of the discrepancies. I would like to take my hat off to United Future, which has stepped up and said we need to fix some of the payment and the tax stuff, and we are delighted to see our policy coming through like that.

We are equally delighted to see full funding being part of the language, finally. It has taken a while to get there. It was certainly John Key who turned round and said in January last year that it was a key focus and that that squabbling should not be happening. The example we often use is, if we pitch for a service and it is something that has to happen, then why would we say that 60 percent or 80 percent of the funding for it to happen is enough? It simply is not.

We hear it everywhere we go. In my role, as the spokesperson on community affairs and the voluntary sector—which I love; I just think I am the luckiest member of Parliament because I have that role—I get to go out there and talk to people in these services. I constantly hear from people out at the coalface and who are doing some pretty gut-wrenching jobs, to be honest. They are certainly often working with people around abuse stuff. They do some counselling and it is pretty gut-wrenching. We hear about the contracts they have, and they say there is no way it is anywhere near covering the actual cost, in some cases, to provide counselling and trauma services to young children.

So they often fudge those sorts of numbers. We all hear those stories, and I know that the Minister in the chair, the Hon Ruth Dyson, would not be surprised to hear these stories, as well. People in these services say their contract is to see 15 children for X number of hours, and because they are not for profit and they care—which is the main reason they are doing it—they then turn round and see, say, 25 children during a lot more hours that do not fit into that funding, but their commitment to deliver that counselling is to the community, so they do it.

We have a responsibility to step up and acknowledge that, and to make sure that the funding, the support, and the resources are there. We do not do it for either of the other two sectors we have in society. In fact, what we do with the Government sector is to put more money into it. We put more and more people in, and we grow the bureaucracy. We grow the bureaucracy to such an extent that it is stifling and crippling the not-for-profit sector, which is what it is doing at the moment. I had someone from a not-for-profit group talk to me just on Friday, who spends half the time introducing a bureaucrat from one department to a bureaucrat from another department, just so that the two bureaucrats will talk in order to make the funding and resourcing of that not-for-profit group easier. For example, when volunteers are talking about a health contract with people from the mental health services, they will also talk to other people about housing issues, which steps into the area of the Housing New Zealand Corporation. They do not see people from those agencies talking together, so they step in.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to take a call on the community and voluntary sector part of this debate, because it is an opportunity to pay tribute to the 75 percent of New Zealanders who say that they volunteer in our communities in one way or another. There are 97,000 community organisations operating in New Zealand. If it were an Olympics, we would win gold medals for setting up and operating community organisations—97,000 of those organisations, run entirely by volunteers. That is a huge commitment from New Zealand citizens to supporting their community in one way or another, and I do not think it is something this Committee should take for granted. I think it is something we should respect and value, and we should ensure that our central government policies work alongside those people in our community who give so much of their time, their energy, and, often, their money—either through lost opportunity or through direct giving. This debate is a very good opportunity to pay that respect.

At the end of 1999, when Labour was elected to lead the Government, we made a clear, conscious decision to try to rebuild the relationship that central government had had with the community and voluntary sector. We set up a representative group—a working group of people throughout the country—to tell us how we could rebuild that relationship. The Pathways to Partnership report that came back indicated to us that the sector was burnt out, frustrated, and bordering on angry. There was a high level of mistrust between the community and voluntary sector and central government, because the late 1980s and the entire 1990s had been fuelled by an individualised, personal success model rather than by collaborative, community-driven, respectful relationships. The competitive tendering that Judy Turner from United Future mentioned was a critical part of that frustration and mistrust. It pitted one organisation against another. I am very pleased to have seen the developments that were driven by that working party’s report to the Government; it has led us to many changes.

We established the Office of the Community and Voluntary Sector so that we had ongoing engagement between central government and the sector that would drive changes not just in our relationship but also in the behaviour of all Government departments. That is underpinned by a public document called the Statement of Government Intentions for an Improved Community-Government Relationship, which drives the relationship between the work of central government and that of the community and voluntary sector. We are carrying on that work now. In fact, the Association of Non-Governmental Organisations of Aotearoa has recently been commissioned to review the implementation of the recommendations in the Statement of Government Intentions for an Improved Community-Government Relationship, so that we can be confident that it is delivering in the way that was originally intended.

Judy Turner also mentioned some of the legislative changes that have come about as a result of United Future’s agreement with the Labour-Progressive Government. The change to the tax incentives for donations is a recent one, and next year we will see the introduction of payroll giving, which will not just see more direct support being given to those organisations through financial contributions, but also help to generate better respect from us as individuals for the people who do that community work so well up and down the country in a variety of ways.

Judy Turner also mentioned the Pathways to Partnership investment in essential social services. The points she made are extremely relevant and valid, in that the collaboration and the rebuilding of capacity within the social services sector will really change the nature of the operations. I can say that, from my many discussions with social service providers throughout the country, they are more than up to having that debate and to changing the way that they operate. They were driven in the 1990s to change the basic value and principle system of their organisations to try to meet a contracted need, when actually what all of them are set up to do, and what drives them to operate, is to provide what the community needs—not what a contract might deliver.

I conclude this contribution by commenting on National’s policy, because Paula Bennett continues to misrepresent it to the House. I think she does her leader a disservice when she misrepresents what he actually said. There has never been a commitment from National, or from John Key, to full funding of essential social services. What John Key actually said in his Plunket speech, which I have tabled in Parliament, is that National would encourage community organisations that put in a bid in a competitive tender round to put in that bid at a fully funded level. That not only demonstrates the completely different perspectives within the National Party on its policy—Paula Bennett saying National supports full funding, and John Key saying it would encourage bids made as part of a competitive tendering round to be on a fully funded basis—but also demonstrates that he knows nothing about the community and voluntary sector or social service providers, let alone how an organisation might win a bid in a competitive tendering round. Every single provider knows that it would not win a contract subject to a straight competitive tender if it put in a fully funded bid without knowing what the other organisations were likely to do. We know that, with competitive tendering, organisations underbid, and that would end up driving the quality of services down to the level they got to in the 1990s.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 5.56 p.m.