Winston Peters

Wellington, April 4 NZPA - The Whanau Ora policy is an example of separatism and won't work, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says.

Whanau Ora is a Maori Party initiative. It is designed to provide comprehensive support for vulnerable families, bringing together all the agencies that deliver different forms of welfare, like housing and benefits, as well as justice, the police and truancy services.

It is believed to have been developed for Maori families, but Prime Minister John Key has said it will be used by any family that needs its services.

Mr Peters told TVNZ's Q+A programme this morning that the Maori Party was telling people on marae the policy was being designed for Maori people, not the whole country, and he said that approach would not work.

"If we've got problems with social welfare, with our health system then let's fix it up but the idea of separatism as a solution has no evidence of ever working and will not work here."

Mr Peters said Mr Key had said the policy was not race-based to "save his bacon".

"The idea that you can deliver a separatist system where Maori are one tenth of the population, regardless of the excellence of that system, it's never going to be good enough."

Mr Peters said education was key.

"Maori have to do that first... you will not get there by some group of romantics in the Maori world thinking 'well we can deliver better'."

Speaking on the same programme but in a separate interview Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia said the policy was for all those in need but admitted the focus so far had been on Maori health service providers.

"I'll focus there because I know that sector best, they provide services to everybody. In fact some Maori providers are providing to 40 percent of non-Maori people in those services, so really not unusual for Maori providers to be providing to many other New Zealanders."

Asked how the policy could be for non-Maori when it had been described as supporting the evolution of a kaupapa model, meaning it was Maori-focussed, Mrs Turia said "Well why not? ...we've tried everything else".

Mrs Turia said the task force developing the policy was asked to look at confronting problems facing Maori and as members considered the new model it became clear that it would work for other groups too.

Mrs Turia also told the programme she would like to be minister in charge of the policy.

Previously the Government has not ruled out the policy being run by the Ministry of Maori Affairs, Te Puni Kokiri, rather than Social Development which looks after welfare policy.

Details will be announced in the May 20 budget, and the service is expected to be delivered by non-government organisations under contract to the Government.

Mrs Turia said discussions had not reached the point of deciding on who would be the minister in charge.

"Well you know we still haven't reached the point of who's going to be who, but certainly there will be a Whanau Ora Minister."

Seven ministers were part of the ministerial team looking at the policy. They were looking at existing contracts to start with.

"...the important first step in this process is integrating all of those contracts, so that the provider doesn't have to spend considerable time on compliance and transactional costs. So that's the first step, so the agencies have to reach an agreement around that."

The next stage would be to change the approach so the focus was on outcomes and research would need to be done to show that.

Mrs Turia agreed the level of funding involved would be around $1 billion.

"If you look at the amount of money that providers are already receiving, which they will continue to receive, there's something like 240 or maybe more Maori health providers, there's probably almost an equal amount of social service providers.

"When you start to look at integrating those contracts I think you will see considerable dollars being invested in this new approach... I think that it would end up being at that level definitely."

The policy would kick off using about 20 providers and would increase dramatically over three to four years.