Judith Collins MP National Party Welfare Spokeswoman
10 March 2006
Still no evidence of how merger will help kids
"Labour has yet to provide the evidence to show how the creation of a giant bureaucracy will benefit the at-risk
children currently being looked after by CYF," says National Party Welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins.
She is referring to the release of Cabinet papers provided by the State Services Commission on the merger between Child
Youth & Family (CYF) and the Ministry of Social Development (MSD).
"I asked for all the papers, but so far all we've seen is one document that catalogues Labour's failings as a manager of
CYF.
"But, as we suspected, there've been no costings and no work done on whether the merger will actually deliver better
results at CYF, or at MSD, for that matter.
"What the papers show is that CYF is a department in trouble. They show that it has been in trouble for quite some time,
making a mockery of Labour's pre-election insistence that everything was just fine.
"Nothing I've seen so far gives me any confidence that a bigger Labour-style bureaucracy will get it right, especially
when these papers show that the vast amount of taxpayers' money that Labour has poured into the department has had such
little effect," says Ms Collins.
ENDS