About $50 million was spent to set up the agency and the fund, but Willis did not elaborate on how big the fund would be, saying it would be distributed in next year’s budget.

Moe, Pacific strategy and engagement officer for the JR McKenzie Trust, said Herald she wasn’t too happy with Willis’s answer.

“I think what they want to do is pretty ambitious and we’re probably parked on the sidelines to help when we can.”

Moe said Willis’ agency should engage with outfits like hers, especially in light of Willis’ push for community service providers to innovate.

“That’s where philanthropy comes in. We can support that innovation, but it would be very good to see how the government will now support that innovation, so it would be very good to have a discussion about that.”

Responding to Moe, Willis acknowledged that the agency was in its infancy and the purpose of today’s hui was to engage with a number of suppliers.

She said she did not know how much of the agency’s funding would come from philanthropic sources, but said it was expected to be largely government-funded in its early days.

“We have urged the Social Investment Agency to design it in a way that allows private funding to come in at a later date.”

The minister presents a picture of the state’s failures that he wants to fix

Willis’ speech centered around a hypothetical 22-year-old named Jack, who was facing prison time after being arrested for third-degree assault.

She described Jack as having no qualifications after being withdrawn from school several times, a repeat visitor to the emergency department, relying on food subsidies and exposed to domestic violence with him and his siblings his having multiple interactions with Oranga Tamariki and the police.

“By age 27, there is an 80 percent chance of having died, having a child die, having a child placed in state care, serving a prison sentence, or experiencing domestic violence.”

She cited government data from 2017 which showed eight in 1,000 22-year-olds had a “similar story”. By 2022, this has increased to 12 out of 1,000.

Willis questioned why Jack was not supported during his repeated interactions with the state and the “huge amounts of taxpayers’ money” spent on him and his whānau.

“Despite all these good intentions and all that money, none of it has delivered the result we want for Jack.

“Jack, a human being, born with limitless potential to contribute positively to his family, community and country, instead creates a path of social evil, social pain and social cost.”

She argued that a social investment approach would be empowered by “locally-led innovation”, funded by government through a model that gives non-government organisations, communities and iwi “more power to do what works and more a lot of responsibility”.

“We want to be able to invest for the long term by acting early, rather than waiting for the inevitable crisis, so that we can look forward to reaping dividends in terms of better lives for many years to come.

“We invest now so we can save later. And an approach to government budgeting that takes those savings into account and better describes the return on investment that comes from increasing human capital.”

Willis said he had commissioned the Social Investment Agency to develop “prototype social investment contracts” to replace the current set of “cross-cutting and overlapping results-focused contracts”.

“My vision is one where we break through agency silos, pool our resources and bring them much closer to the 500 or so families in each regional community who really need our help.

“Resources ordered not through a particular vote or agency, but deployed instead to organizations that can have a 360-degree view of the family whose trajectory we seek to change.”

She saw the agency’s fund as a “testing ground for ideas” that could be applied more widely in the social sector if successful.

Willis, also the finance minister, believed that government budgets should take into account the expected savings from spending on social initiatives.

This position was one that the pharmacy minister, David Seymour, often championed as he struggled to secure more funding for the national medicines purchasing agency. He also believed that the government should take into account the benefits that funding a particular drug would bring, such as reducing pressure on the health system.

Adam Pearse is a political reporter in the NZ Herald Press Gallery team, based at Parliament. He has been working for NZME since 2018, covering sport and health for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei, before moving to the NZ Herald in Auckland, covering Covid-19 and crime.