Publications and Articles

I reckon social innovation and entrepreneurship is about citizens doing innovative things WITHOUT handouts of public money.

Peter Shergold's Centre for Social Impact has a handout of $12m to play with from the Commonwealth.

The proposed Australian Council of Social Innovatin has a handout of $6m to play with from the SA government.

I wonder what the competitive process was for these handouts, sorry, investments. Did Peter Shergold work through existing channels, dealing with bored departmental gatekeepers like the rest of us do - or was he able to just ask for a bucket of money from the right people because of connections drawn from his previous life as a senior burearcrat?

For me, social innovation would mean that public money is not dished out to senior bureaucrats to play with around fuzzy concepts like 'social impact'. Rather it would mean major reform of public bureaucracy to unlock its resources to empower citizens and consumers in education, health, community services and welfare to purchase the services and supports they need with individual budgets - something Peter Shergold has spent his life opposing as a senior bureacrat.

Australian social policy is almost entirely built around providers of services, not consumers. Peak bodies of providers call the shots. Governments talk to the CEOs of service providers,and their peaks, and think they have talked to the community. This closed loop dominates thinking in health, welfare, education, and universities.

Social innovation should be about breaking open this closed loop, and allowing consumers and citizens in on the game. But Peter Shergold's Centre for Social Impact has already said it is about enabling the NGOs in the game to get better at what they do. Oh dear. The ACSI will do the same. Its' proposed structure ensures it will follow suit, with the same provider-centred management-driven outlook at its social core.

On 28th February at the launch of the Centre for Social Impact, Geoff Mulgan described the UK venture In Control as one of the most innovative ventures around. It is a financial intermediary and social broker that enables people with disabilities, mental and chronic illnesses, and the aged in the UK to hold an Individual Budget into which various program funds are directed, bypassing the provider agencies to allow consumers to direct where their money goes.

In Australia, ACOSS, National Disability Services, and Carers Australia (the major peak bodies in these areas) are all vehemently opposed to the kind of devolved, individualised funding processes that In Control champions. That is, these peak provider bodies are passionately against social innovation of the kind championed by Mulgan at the launch of the Centre for Social Impact, because.... well, because social innovation in this case would see a marginalising of the NGOs in disability, health and community care.

Social innovation is a hard road in Australia because the principal agencies in the social sector share a provider-centred management-driven outlook, and they are buttressed by provider-centred policy thinking in both of our major parties. Consumers and citizens are after-thoughts. The CSI and ACSI will not change this trend.

The same people get the handouts. The actually innovative and entrepreneurial people on the ground are outsiders in this game.

Vern Hughes
vern@civilsociety.org.au
http://www.civilsociety.org.au