President's message: Bring on evidence-based investment …

There is an old Navy Seals mantra that goes: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Essentially it means that taking time to think, understand, plan, and execute in a disciplined way is faster and ultimately more efficient and effective than rushing. Rushing leads to errors, missed options, unintended consequences, to waste. The absence of good information and evidence compounds these risks.

Our system of government defaults to rushing. The three-year parliamentary term incentivises governments to invest in the short term, to rush to do as much as possible in the first two years of office and spend much of the last year convincing the voting public that enough has been achieved to warrant re-election.

At the same time, the way the bulk of the public sector is funded reinforces short-termism. Agencies seek to cover their inflationary cost pressures by bidding for funding for new initiatives. As a result, many agencies’ ‘baselines’ are a much-mended patchwork of time-limited funds propping up eroded ‘real’ baseline funding. Committing to do more to help pay for existing underfunded services is not a sustainable solution.

Evidence of effectiveness, particularly in the social sector, requires long-term investment. Lack of evidence of effectiveness can itself lead to time-limited funding on the basis that if the programme or service is found to be effective, its funding will be extended. The absence of evaluative evidence is also often the reason why effective programmes and services face fiscal cliffs and conversely why poorly performing but politically popular programmes are so hard to turn off.

We are currently seeing these vulnerabilities playing out in one of the largest course correction events I have seen in my 30-plus years associated with the public sector. These impacts reach far beyond the direct effects on public sector employees.

So where can we start to address these issues? One way is through a real commitment to evidence-informed decision-making. To using evidence to make the hard calls on what to prioritise – on what to fund and most importantly what to stop. These decisions will be hard – some choices will be between equally impactful programmes and services. Making these hard calls is the work of ministers. And this commitment must extend to investing in infrastructure and capabilities necessary to support good evidence, including data, research, and evaluation capability. Troublingly, these are just the kind of skills that many agencies are cutting as part of their cost savings exercises.

It is my hope that the recently announced Social Investment approach represents just such a commitment. That it provides the capability and the permission space to think, understand, execute, and deliver in a disciplined, innovative, and impactful way. That it helps us deliver for New Zealand in a way that is both smooth and fast.

Published in the Public Sector Journal - Winter 2024, Issue 47.2.