Crucial social investment role has been muddied - Tinetti

Thursday, 9 July 2026

New Zealand’s Social Investment Agency is causing unnecessary problems for community organisations rather than simplifying how government agencies work with them, says Labour’s social investment spokesperson.

Jan Tinetti told an Invercargill audience on Tuesday that many New Zealanders didn’t understand the agency’s role _ “and I’m not sure the Government understands it either’’.

It was set up under National amid a global movement that saw a need to use detailed government data to direct funding most usefully to agencies whose role was to help communities and reduce long-term benefit costs.

But Tinetti told a gathering at Community House that the agency’s co-ordinating role had been muddied from the start and it had become a another procurement agency.

That made it another part in the already fragmented system of contracts being issued by agencies like the Ministry of Social Development, Oranga Tamariki, and Health and Education ministries.

These government agencies did not reliably communicate well with each other, often sitting in silos, Tinetti said.

“They might be offering very similar contracts and there might be a big gap that neither of them is seeing,’’ she said.

“I believe Nicola Willis believed (the agency SIA) was going to stop all that and bring all these together - for such a small agency it was always going to be a struggle for them to do that.’’

At the same time, having been given the task of running contracts of its own SIA “kind of lost focus on who was doing the work on the ground’’.

The result was that small but well-functioning initiatives like Koha Kai in Southland - now rebranded as Southern Kai - lost funding under an agenda that contracts should go to larger-scale providers.

“I’m not saying the big players don’t do a good job,’’ Tinetti said. ”They do.’’

But the smaller operations were being misidentified as not good investments and were suffering from lost support even though they were proving, like Southern Kai, that they had insights into their own communities, had built up trust, and shown they could be more responsive to the need for flexibility.

The agencies “that know the people they are working with best’’ needed to be better supported, she said.

In very simple terms, social investment meant ‘’investing in people and the planet for good’’ - informed by an evidence-based understanding what was working and would continue to work in the future.

SIA should operate as the agency responsible for the research to make sure that the projects that were being funded were making a difference, and that the work of other agencies came together to achieve this, Tinetti said.