Chief executive of the Southern Initiative, Tania Pouwhare. Photo / Alex Burton
OPINION
It’s raining, and Tania Pouwhare and I are trying to stay dry as we nip from her office over the road to the Manukau Bus Station. We go in the back way and get a bollocking from security. Pouwhare is an important person around here, but not that important.
Still, pretty important. She runs The Southern Initiative (TSI), a council agency charged with improving the economic and social wellbeing of the citizens of south Auckland.
They coordinate family programmes, help for start-up businesses, trades training and a whole bunch of other community engagement stuff. They call it “social innovation”.
High on the list is “social procurement”, which is why we’re at the bus station. Social procurement is the fancy phrase for getting local workers and businesses into the supply chain for construction and other projects. Partly that’s about favouring the locals, and partly it’s about upskilling them – the workers and the businesses.
Auckland Transport built the station from 2016-2018 with the principle of social procurement front and centre. The living wage was their baseline and 14 apprentices were engaged, going on to become fully fledged tradies.
The station is impressive. Along with the nearby train station in the basement of the Manukau Institute of Technology, it’s part of a highly functional transport hub, and beautiful Māori designs are featured throughout.
“This is about a hand up, not a hand out,” said one of the contractors when the job was done. And Shane Ellison, then chief executive of Auckland Transport, said they “couldn’t have done it without the Southern Initiative”.
The fact is, though, unless these things are deliberately prioritised, and unless they have a supportive framework put around them, they don’t happen. That’s what TSI does.
“We’ve pioneered social procurement in this country,” says Pouwhare. “And rather than the sky falling down on us, the sky has opened up. We’ve managed to create opportunities for Māori and Pasifika businesses they wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
“If the whole public sector did this, we would be creating change at scale and we would be significantly contributing to a more inclusive economy.”
You can see the potential over the Ditch, where the Australian public sector used to spend about $6 million a year on indigenous businesses. Now, says Aaron Donaldson of Auckland Council, it’s over $600 million a year.
Perhaps, at this point, you’re thinking it’s all just wokeism. If so, you might want to know that 40 per cent of the children in Auckland are Māori or Pasifika.
“These are the people who will be paying for your superannuation,” Pouwhare says. Everyone benefits if they have a future in higher-skilled jobs.
Tragically, this “hand up, not hand out” approach is now at risk of being closed down. Auckland Council’s draft budget proposes to cut the funding for The Southern Initiative.
Just by the bus station is a building housing Grid Manukau, an offshoot of Grid Auckland, better known as GRD AKL, which is based in the Wynyard Quarter. Both GRD AKL and GRD MNK offer shared workspaces for tech start-ups and self-employed tech workers, especially in the design and screen industries.
GRD MNK is also a TSI project. As well as access to some impressive gear, it hosts tech training, mentoring in business management and marketing, a shopfront, online retail support and hook-ups with potential investors.
The aim is to help create high-quality jobs in the screen industry – film, games and tech – and upskill people to do those jobs.
As with social procurement, says Tania Pouwhare, unless TSI makes it happen, it’s very hard for the people involved to do it on their own.
This is not only about creating jobs. “It’s not true that any job is a good job,” she says. “There are 420,000 Māori and Pasifika in low-paid work. They might have at least one child under five. They’re loyal, they’ve never missed a day and they’re stuck on $24 an hour. They’ll never get past supervisor. So TSI is putting those people into sunrise industries. The tech sector and high-value manufacturing.”
Tradies and machinists, not labourers. Entrepreneurs, designers and innovators, not cleaners.
There’s been a flurry of concern about arts funding and airport shares, but budget cuts like this are sailing under the radar.
“We’re not asking for new money,” says Pouwhare. “But we do want to ensure the existing support remains and is mobilised in the right direction. And you have to understand, the payoff for this will be in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.”
TSI works closely with council’s economic and cultural development agency, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, where Pam Ford is the director of investment and industry.
“South Auckland is 11 per cent of New Zealand,” Ford says. “And there is deep-baked inequity.”
She suggests we have a choice. We could “leave those people behind, facing redundancy and economic irrelevance as lower-skilled jobs disappear”. But if we do, be prepared for more ram-raids, more family harm and the risk of a spiralling collapse of social cohesion.
Alternatively, “We can imagine the south and the west becoming a powerhouse in this city, off the back of the culture.”
But Tātaki faces a $44.5 million reduction in its own budget. This equates to about 41 per cent and is the most savage cut, in percentage terms, faced by any part of council.
Mayor Wayne Brown has made it clear that “much-loved events” like Pasifika, Diwali and the Lantern Festival will survive. The axe will fall on economic development, specifically, the economic prospects of the city’s south and west.
The programmes TSI and Tātaki are involved in receive funding from council and Government, and also from philanthropic trusts, corporates and others in the private sector. But it doesn’t follow they will survive if council pulls out.
“If the staff to generate that support from everyone else are no longer there,” says Ford, “the whole thing falls apart.”
It’s an ecosystem. For example: The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) funds the Pacific Skills Shift Initiative, which helps employers, communities and fānau provide workplace training for Pacific peoples.
The direct money comes from MBIE, but the administration is done by TSI and Tātaki, with the invaluable help of a Pasifika charity called the Cause Collective.
What’s more, when council pulls out of a programme, Government funding is put at risk too. This is because Government supports local initiatives. If the council isn’t pulling its weight, Government doesn’t think taxpayers from other parts of the country should have to cover for it. Which is fair enough.
Another example: the TSI unit Uptempo, which coordinates with families, Government agencies, employers, the First Union, charitable trusts and education providers.
Uptempo provides a “learning platform and incubator” with a “whole of family” approach to helping them foster “their own economic futures and grow lasting intergenerational wealth and wellbeing”.
Translated: The adults learn time-management and parenting skills, especially for those critical first 1000 days in a child’s life. And the kids don’t get neglected because the adults are trapped working long hours in low-paid jobs. Programmes like this are central to everything.
“Every city in the world,” says Pam Ford, “has a local authority that invests in economic development. American studies have clearly shown that micro-economic support and social support are critical to developing economic self-sufficiency.”
She says they now risk the loss of momentum. “It takes time and a huge investment of energy. Turning off the taps makes comeback very difficult.”
In this city, economic shocks, like health shocks, hit the south first, hardest and longest. Pouwhare says that from 2013-2018, a growth period for most of us, Māori got poorer.
Ford puts it like this: “The people who miss out are invisible.”
TSI and Tātaki are trying to change that. Their work is designed to break the cycle of poverty and it will benefit not just those directly involved, but all of us. It’s hard and it’s slow but it works.
What a brilliant way to spend a bit of the rates. It’s unconscionable that the mayor and councillors are planning to put a stop to it.
Former minister Andrew Little says the Government's stance is unnecessary.