Andrew Coster: Social Investment Fund CEO on the $190 million in funding it will receive in the 2025 Budget

The Social Investment Fund CEO says their new approach will help address New Zealand's social issues. 

It's receiving $190 million in this year's budget, aiming to invest in social services early to prevent future harm and save costs. 

The first three initiatives to benefit will be Autism New Zealand, Emerge Aotearoa —which works with young offenders— and an iwi wraparound service provider.  

CEO Andrew Coster told Mike Hosking the fund has a long-term and wider focus. 

He says its portfolio neutral and will focus on creating change in families where it needs to occur, instead of dealing with the day-to-day symptoms of problems. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And around out a week of pre budget news, we've

(00:01):
got one hundred and ninety million towards the creation of
this new Social Investment Fund. Broadly, it's to stop the
ambulance at the bottom of the cliff stuff we do
in social issues in this country. Round about twenty initiatives
get money. Andrew cost is the boss of all of this.
Neys Well, that's very good morning to you.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Good morning mate.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
This could be wooly and feels and a disaster. What's
going to stop it being so?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Look, Mike, the way government spends at the moment is
not getting us ahead of the problems that we see
playing out every day. At the point you've got a
young person driving a car into a shop or doing
some other stupid thing. There've been many missed opportunities in
the years before to make a difference. And that's what
this fun's about.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Are those twenty initiatives that you've looked at, are they
at a place where you can look at them and
put your hand on your heart and go tell you
what these going to work.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
We've got three initiatives that were announced yesterday. They were
first cabs off the rank. They are exciting because they
are really they're cross cutting. They look at what's required
to support the families where there's issues are sitting and
there will be many more out there. But the funding
doesn't start till one July, so this is going to

(01:11):
roll out over the next year.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Does this money come from other areas of social agency
at the bottom of the cliff in other words, we've
accepted failure there, so have some money upfront? Or is
this yet more new money?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
This fund is established with new investment in budget twenty five.
But an important part of this is looking across social
spend and shifting it towards higher impact. And at the
moment we don't have a good idea of what the
actual result is of the money we spend. We get
lots of activity, but we can't tie it to outcomes.

(01:43):
This fund will work in quite a different way in
tracking the results, and that creates opportunity for funding to
move to the place where it can be best deployed.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
See I've conducted any number of interviews about a ring Atamareki.
Our ring of Tamareki was going to be turned around
and we were going to find and yet there's yet
another report that says it's basically useless. It doesn't work,
So what's preventing your agency being the same thing.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
One of the challenges when you're working in a narrow
portfolio is the portfolio will tend to prioritize the things
that are near term, like think current electoral cycle, and
that are tightly within that portfolio. This fund is portfolio neutral.
It's more concerned with supporting change in the families where

(02:30):
that needs to occur, rather than treating the symptoms of
problems that might present day to day.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
When will you be able to come on this program
and say here's what we did and here's what happened,
and that's positive.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
It'll take us probably the first year to start seeing
some results coming through. You know, if I say to
you we'll have results in three months, then I'm falling
into exactly the same trap of all of our other spend,
which is it's reactive. It's trying to paper over the
cracks rather than shift the dial. But we'll start to
see results in the fifty year plus.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
I wish you well. Andrew Costa, former police Commissioner of
course CEO these days of the Social Investment Agency.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
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