Bill English on helping those most in need

An excellent article in The Australian:

Bill English has been banging on about the deficiencies of the welfare state and its role in the “pathology of deprivation” for years but his moment might just have come.

The former New Zealand prime minister does not necessarily want cuts in welfare spending – in fact he says sometimes more money will have to be spent – but he wants governments to start using data and technology to pinpoint where funds can be directed to achieve results.

After 40 years of “persistent failure” in welfare in the West, he says, we need a fresh angle and “the freshest is the mixture of actuarial models, data tools, customer segmentation – really boring down, really getting to understand the risk factors down to quite small components of your community”.

The former National Party MP is not holding his breath about the bureaucracy changing tack. But he believes charities and impact investors can show the public sector a way forward by adopting the kind of measurement tools regularly used by digital businesses such as Amazon.

“It’s not complicated, really, it’s a matter of will,” says English, who has just joined the board of Australia’s richest philanthropic foundation, the $4bn Paul Ramsay Foundation.

“The effort involved in landing the right coloured T-shirt for a 16-year old boy in a Kmart in (a New Zealand town) is way more sophisticated and focused than servicing broken families with housing needs.

“If Amazon can customise for hundreds of millions of people, then surely we can do it for a few hundred,” he says.

Such a good point.

Since the 1980s, many governments in the West have tried to tackle problems with the welfare state by slashing national budgets, but English says: “In my experience, the best way to achieve fiscal control is to actually solve the problems of the people who are driving the spend. Bureaucracies are very reluctant to admit that what they’re doing is not working … but we shouldn’t pretend when we know we’re failing.”

Sometimes much more money is needed, he says, but it has to be applied in ways that work, dealing with one problem at a time.

Hence the social investment programme he did in Government. Compare that to the billions being wasted by the current Government.

“The first thing for governments to do is admit what they’re not good at,” says English. “And what they’re not good at is complexity – that is, people who need multiple services, and don’t fit the boxes. So those people are all getting little doses of commodity services that usually wear them out rather than have any impact.”

He points to a “trained hopelessness” in the welfare sector and argues that identity politics is making it worse, “because it’s saying that who you are determines what you will be; and, of course, that’s the kind of thing a lazy universal system would say”.

For the people on the receiving end of that bureaucracy, it’s tough: “People on middle-class incomes … have no idea what it’s like to be enmeshed in 10 different systems (of payments) … these people are worn out … and we give them bad service.”

Targeted flexible support is what is needed, not dealing with 10 different agencies.

What about the bigger philosophical argument that promoting private investment and philanthropy is just a way to cut government spending and avoid responsibility.

English doesn’t pull his punches: “I think we should have that discussion on the lawn outside the house where the child is getting beaten up, and while the kid’s screaming, we will have that philosophical contest. And when someone wins it, then they’re allowed to go in and deal with the child.”

It is such a shame that Winston choose Ardern over English in 2017. Another three years of Bill as Prime Minister could have made a real difference to the lives of those most in need.