Auditor-General's overview

E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangarangatanga maha o te motu, tēnā koutou.

Family violence and sexual violence affect hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders every year. About one in three New Zealand women will experience physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime.

The social, economic, and cultural consequences of family violence and sexual violence are widespread and enduring. People affected by family violence and sexual violence often have multiple and complex needs. As well as immediate and ongoing safety needs, they can also need treatment and support for injuries and trauma, income support, and housing assistance.

In 2021, we published the report Working in new ways to address family violence and sexual violence. In that report, we described how effectively a joint venture involving 10 government agencies had been set up to support efforts to significantly reduce family violence and sexual violence.

In this report, we build on that earlier work and look at how a group of government agencies are working individually, together, and with tangata whenua, communities, and non-government organisations to understand and respond to the needs of people affected by family violence and sexual violence. We refer to the broad range of communities and non-government organisations working with government agencies as "community partners".

In December 2021, the joint venture was replaced by Te Puna Aonui – an interdepartmental executive board that was set up to make it easier for government agencies to work together to eliminate family violence and sexual violence.

The agencies that are part of Te Puna Aonui are the Accident Compensation Corporation, Ara Poutama Aotearoa Department of Corrections, the Ministry of Education, Manatū Hauora Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Social Development, the New Zealand Police, Oranga Tamariki, Te Puni Kōkiri, and Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. We refer to these agencies collectively as "Te Puna Aonui agencies".

Te Puna Aonui is responsible for implementing Te Aorerekura, which is the national strategy to eliminate family violence and sexual violence in 25 years. Te Aorerekura was launched on 7 December 2021. It makes clear that tangata whenua and community partners are essential to designing, leading, and delivering solutions to achieve its ambition.

What we found

Te Puna Aonui agencies are charged with addressing two significant challenges. These are:

• understanding and addressing the complex problems of family violence and sexual violence; and
• transforming the way agencies work together and with tangata whenua and community partners to achieve this.

Te Puna Aonui agencies are engaged in considerable work on the first of these challenges. There is broad support for Te Aorerekura, the clear statement that it provides about the nature and causes of family violence and sexual violence and the need for government agencies, tangata whenua, and community partners to work together to find lasting solutions.

Responding to family violence and sexual violence often involves understanding and meeting the multiple and diverse needs of those affected. Several Te Puna Aonui agencies are carrying out work to improve their understanding of, and response to, the needs of different communities at a national and a local level.

Te Puna Aonui agencies are working individually and with other agencies to better understand the capabilities they need to meet these diverse needs and to respond in ways that are more accessible to people who need them. Some agencies are working to understand how whānau-centred approaches can assist people, families, and whānau affected by family violence and sexual violence.

Realising the potential of Te Puna Aonui by establishing new ways for Te Puna Aonui agencies to effectively work together and with tangata whenua and community partners remains critical but challenging.

Each of the agencies involved needs to consider what being part of Te Puna Aonui means for its work and priorities. Agencies need to connect the work of their staff at a national and local level. They also need to position themselves well to learn from each other's experiences. All of this is crucial to achieving the purpose of Te Aorerekura.

However, Te Puna Aonui agencies are not consistently doing these things, which means that they are not always learning from each other. Opportunities to support the development of local initiatives for responding to family violence and sexual violence are being lost.

Te Puna Aonui agencies also need to focus on how they work with tangata whenua and community partners. My staff found that tangata whenua and community partners do not always feel listened to or included in decision-making. There are few opportunities for people affected by violence to influence decisions about the kinds of responses that are made available or how they are made available.

Creating and maintaining trust between Te Puna Aonui agencies, tangata whenua, and community partners is important to achieving the purpose of Te Aorerekura. Some community partners have a lack of trust in government.

My staff saw hard work to build trust from staff in Te Puna Aonui agencies, tangata whenua, and community partners. Some new approaches to working collaboratively are helping to build trust and improve the ways that all parties work to meet the needs of individuals, families, and whānau.

My staff also saw how trust can be eroded. Several issues will continue to undermine efforts to build trust if they are not addressed. These include persistent problems with sharing information about incidents of family violence and sexual violence. Although Te Puna Aonui agencies and community partners agree on the legal ability to share information, they do not always agree about what information should be shared, what purposes it should be shared for, and who should have access to it.

Similarly, Te Puna Aonui agencies also do not always use the information they get from monitoring and evaluating responses to family violence and sexual violence to improve the assistance offered to people affected by that violence.

There are also clear pressures on the capacity of those working in the family violence and sexual violence response system to meet affected people's needs. Those working in the system are not co-ordinating efforts to address these pressures as well as they could be. Without adequate resources, it is difficult to see how they will achieve their outcomes.

What I recommend

There is a real tension between the need to move more quickly and the time it can take to develop the relationships with tangata whenua and community partners necessary for change. However, I am concerned that, after nearly five years of agencies working together under new structures, Te Puna Aonui agencies have not made more progress in the way they operate. This work needs more urgent focus.

Although the work of individual agencies might improve some current responses to family violence and sexual violence, it is not, in my view, consistently supporting the changes needed to achieve the aims of Te Aorerekura.

The recommendations I have made are intended to address the issues we identified during our audit, support Te Puna Aonui agencies to build on the cross-agency approach's strengths, and help develop and maintain better connections between the agencies and with tangata whenua and community partners.

Te Puna Aonui agencies have advised that they are already carrying out work to address our recommendations. If these efforts and work to change how social sector services are commissioned are successful, they will help to introduce a system that places the needs of individuals, families, and whānau at the heart of decision-making. They should also support more productive relationships between Te Puna Aonui agencies, tangata whenua, and community partners.

Working effectively to address family violence and sexual violence is important to improve the lives of many New Zealanders. This is an issue I will continue to focus on in the future.

I thank staff in the national and local offices of Te Puna Aonui agencies, staff in the business unit of Te Puna Aonui, and representatives of tangata whenua groups, communities, and non-government organisations for their co-operation during our audit.

We carried out this audit when many public servants were working under extraordinary circumstances responding to outbreaks of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. I acknowledge in particular their additional effort to engage with my staff during this period.

Nāku noa, nā

John Ryan
Controller and Auditor-General | Tumuaki o te Mana Arotake

19 June 2023