How much does New Zealand spend looking after new mothers? Go on. Try to find out.

You'll be at it a while. RNZ this week put a number on the other side of that ledger: the $2 billion cost of our failure to care for Kiwi mums. That figure covers what happens when perinatal mental health goes untreated. It's a cost-of-inaction number. Which means somewhere there should be a cost-of-action number sitting next to it. There isn't one you can look up in five minutes.

Here's what you can look up. The Government Electronic Tenders Service currently carries 33,530 tender notices (Source: MBIE, procurement). Every one of them is a government body saying: we want to buy something, come and pitch. You can slice them by region, by agency, by category. It is, genuinely, one of the more transparent things the New Zealand state does.

And the regional slice is instructive. The single most common tag isn't a place at all: 3,904 notices are marked simply "New Zealand", meaning nationwide delivery. Auckland is next at 3,861. Then Canterbury on 3,647 and Wellington on 2,736. Drop to the bottom of the top ten and you find Northland with 1,489, roughly two and a half times fewer opportunities than Auckland, in a region that consistently posts some of the country's worst health outcomes. Hawke's Bay sits just above it on 1,595. Those ten labels together account for 25,599 of the tags on the register, and notices can carry more than one region, so the concentration at the top is real.

Now here's the problem. GETS tells you what government wants to buy. It does not tell you what government bought, what it paid, or whether the thing worked. There is no equivalent public index where you type "perinatal mental health" and get a spend figure with a service outcome attached. The transparency stops at the shop window.

That's not an accident of software. It's a choice about what gets published by default and what you have to fight for. And fighting for it means the Official Information Act, which means waiting 20 working days, then an extension, then a partial refusal citing commercial sensitivity or free and frank advice. Thousands of those requests are logged in public at FYI.org.nz, and the pattern is dreary and familiar: the more a contract touches a politically awkward service, the harder the number is to extract.

So we end up with an absurd asymmetry. A journalist can tell you, precisely, that Otago has 2,246 tender notices and Bay of Plenty 1,807. Nobody can tell you, without a months-long paper chase, what we spend keeping new mothers well.

The $2 billion figure landed this week because someone did the maths on the failure. The state already runs the plumbing to make the other half of that equation visible. It publishes 33,530 notices about what it intends to buy. It could publish what it actually bought, and for whom, and where. Until it does, the only number in this story anyone can verify is the cost of getting it wrong.