Editorial: Sensible take on health plan

It is difficult to discuss the merits of the Whanau Ora Taskforce's report, which champions a new way of delivering welfare to dysfunctional families. The devil is in the detail, as they say, and the report is being kept under wraps while the Government works through its recommendations.

Social Development Minister Paula Bennett has said Whanau Ora is all about bringing together different welfare agencies, along with justice and housing authorities, to help families in difficulty.

The Government hopes this will give better value for money. The tens of millions the Government spends each year will be channelled to community agencies and private providers to deliver health and welfare services to needy and dysfunctional families. In the absence of hard facts, rumour flourishes. There has been talk of a new Whanau Ora Minister and a Whanau Ora trust, which would hold $1 billion of funding for the scheme, but National's Georgina te HeuHeu would not discuss speculation. "Discussions among ministers continue, the outcome of which will form part of Budget 2010, at which time that member will know, along with everybody else," she said in reply to a Parliamentary question. But we didn't need to know the detail to ask another question. Would it be a preferential policy, favouring only Maori?

The policy is a Maori Party initiative, after all, part of its coalition agreement for supporting the Government. Initially it was devised only for Maori families and Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia seemed to be upset at the prospect of it being applied to non-Maori. She was quoted by Radio New Zealand's Waatea News as saying that if non-Maori wanted Whanau Ora, they could develop their own version. The Whanau Ora Task Force report contained "Maori solutions to Maori problems".

It seemed Ms Turia was being awkwardly proprietorial about the policy. This threatened to open a rift between the coalition partners. But she says she accepts Prime Minister John Key's insistence the policy should apply to everybody and be based on need, not on race. This makes sense. Politically, the Government should recall how the Clark Government found itself in trouble over its "Closing the Gaps" policy to reduce the disturbingly high rates of Maori poverty, sickness, unemployment, imprisonment and so on. But while Maori make up an embarrassingly high percentage of those statistics, in absolute terms greater numbers of non-Maori are in need of state help.

Anyway, while the Government avoids giving preferential treatment to Maori, it is reasonable to suppose most families who take up the Whanau Ora plan will be Maori. As Mr Key said, the ethos of the programme was "a Maori way of doing things", although anyone could have access to the programme. That is as it must be. If the policy proves to be a superior way of delivering social services than current methods (as its advocates contend), applying it only to Maori would be invidious. Profound resentments inevitably would be built among the many needy families left to get their help through inferior state programmes.

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