Toward productivity with purpose 2: Investing for value and impact
This is the second of two blogs to inform conversations being advanced by ARACY and collaborators about a new paradigm of what productivity means – what it looks like, and how we measure and value it. ARACY is urging the Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable to ‘take this opportunity not to reform productivity, but to redefine it’. (The first blog is Toward productivity for purpose: System approaches to building human capital, from the beginning.)
In keeping with the growing worldwide ‘Beyond GDP’ movement, this paper delves deeper into an aspect of that broad agenda – specifically, a smarter approach to public investment and commissioning, using better the existing resources expended in the full suite of human development systems – our learning, care and support systems – that engage and enable children, young people and families.
Our core contention is that dynamic, resilient, sustainable, equitable and productive societies require capable and connected people, workforces, organisations, sectors and systems. They also require resource flows and processes that are equitable, efficient, effective and productive.
To this end, we propose a suite of actionable, practical and cost-effective ‘investment reform’ propositions to re-engineer budget and investment processes:
- Add another pillar to the proposed Productivity Agenda of ‘pursuing reforms to public investment processes to deliver greater public value and community benefit’.
- Set targets that drive a better balance of public investment across the continuum of primary, secondary and tertiary health and social care and learning systems.
- Shift, over time, the balance of investment toward ‘up stream’ preventive and developmental interventions.
- Enable cultural and community due diligence to inform public investment decision-making.
- Extend the role of Primary Health Networks (PHNs) to be joint regional commissioning ‘health and care’ networks – for federal, and state and territory governments – across early child development, health, disability and social care.
- Commission PHNs to facilitate regional community-developed early child development plans jointly with state agencies, NGOs and institutes, and invest in their plans.
- Rationalise or better link the plethora of existing federal, and state and territory government investments in child and family-focused place-based initiatives.
- Resource the infrastructure that better connects and gears services and systems, such as integrated services like high-quality child and family hubs given their significant social and economic value.
- Re-route – through block and targeted grants – a fair proportion of public investments to subsidise service access to ‘under-served’ families and communities.
- Adopt longer term contracts (7-10 year) for high performing health and social care providers.
- Operationalise The Nest Child and Youth Wellbeing Outcomes Framework and associated wellbeing measures and metrics as a common commissioning and outcomes-based reporting tools.
- Engage all states and territories in, and extend the scale of the ambitions and resource pools being brokered by the Investment Dialogue for Australia’s Children.
