The Post: Governing by gut instinct: when science surrenders to ministerial reckons

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Sometimes common sense can be catastrophic. Take Transport Minister Simeon Brown’s insistence that all-day speed limits around schools are unnecessary, since midnight drivers aren’t going to crash into kids. Sounds sensible, right?

Wrong. Auckland Transport research shows that of the deaths and serious crashes occurring within 400 metres of the school gate, 85% happen outside drop-off and pick-up hours. Schools, after all, sit in the heart of their neighbourhood: children, parents and other community members are crossing local streets all day long.

Auckland Transport’s modelling found that a permanent 30kph limit on school-adjacent roads, combined with other changes, would eliminate 54 deaths and serious injuries city-wide every year. It would also deliver $9 in wider benefits for every $1 spent. Lowering speeds only during drop-off and pick-up times saved a mere three deaths and serious injuries annually, and returned just 20c for every $1 spent.

Brown’s option is, in short, a colossal waste of money, and will allow 10 times more deaths and serious injuries than the alternative. That’s disastrous in itself. But it’s doubly damning for a Government supposedly in love with data.

In retrospect, the coalition agreements’ loud insistence that decisions “will be based on data and evidence” can be read as prospective virtue-signalling: a gesture emptied of actual meaning. Parts of the Government seem, if anything, to be at war with science.

Brown recently eliminated the position of chief science adviser to his ministry. And no wonder: the last incumbent, professor Simon Kingham, argues that “no science adviser would tell them [ministers] that the policy they’re pursuing at the moment is sensible”.

Brown isn’t alone. The Department of Conservation has also jettisoned its chief science adviser. As of July, over 200 government science roles were on the chopping block.

Data and analytics teams, which evaluate departments’ programmes, have been cut at the Ministry for Social Development and elsewhere. The Budget even snuck through a 40% reduction in state support for the prime minister’s chief science advisor. Nothing says “we love science” like hacking back the budget of the person most responsible for presenting you with hard evidence.

Elsewhere, Wellington’s $451m Science City project, designed to turbo-charge innovation, has been scrapped. Even past National policies, like the $68m-a-year National Science Challenges, aren’t being renewed.

Concurrently, ministers have made a swathe of deeply unscientific decisions. Children’s minister Karen Chhour is putting a military-style “bootcamp” framing around programmes for troubled youths, when almost all the evidence says bootcamps don’t work.

Construction minister Chris Penk wants to wind back new home-insulation standards – even though they’ll cut heating needs by 40% and have overwhelming industry support – because a few “builders and developers in Tauranga” told him they added $50,000 to construction costs. But government-by-anecdote always falls flat: actual modelling shows the standards cost more like $2000– and can even reduce the price of building, if implemented intelligently.

Penk’s efforts pale in comparison, however, to the shambolic policies perpetrated by Associate Health Minister Casey Costello. She’s cut taxes on heated tobacco products despite there being clear evidence that such items are more toxic than vaping – indeed they may be as bad as cigarettes – and no solid evidence that they reduce smoking rates. Her much-touted “independent” advice, released on Thursday, was a random collection of largely outdated articles and opinion pieces, many unrelated to the product in question.

All this must be deeply embarrassing to the ministers still committed to data-driven policy. Education Minister Erica Stanford’s curriculum changes, for instance, are broadly based on evidence that teachers need greater clarity about what they should be doing, and better learning materials.

But even those policies have been funded by cutting schemes to raise teachers’ Māori-language skills, which have powerful qualitative support (though not yet quantitative data). Herein lies one of the Government’s flaws: its commitment to evidence is far weaker than its purely ideological belief that public spending must be cut back to 30% of GDP.

The problems deepen as one moves further away from the centre. ACT and New Zealand First ministers are particularly prone to privileging ideology and governing by gut instinct.

So far, the flagbearer for evidence-based policy has been the “social investment” approach, which will – in theory – use data to work out which programmes best help vulnerable people early in life, and shift funding accordingly. But it got just $51m in this year’s Budget, and is yet to make any measurable difference.

For the moment, social investment seems to be coming a distant second to ministerial reckons. This has real consequences: not just for our day-to-day lives, but for the very state of our democracy.

One of the biggest drivers of sagging trust in governments, according to a recent OECD survey, is their tendency to ignore evidence. If social investment, or something like it, doesn’t arrive very soon, any good intentions this government still has could disappear in a spiral of mistrust.