The Post: Profound incuriosity mixed with hypocrisy a potent mix

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To lose one child, as Oscar Wilde might have observed, is a misfortune; but to lose 200 looks like carelessness. And that’s the situation in which the associate housing minister, Tama Potaka, finds himself.

Earlier this week he marked the milestone of 1000 children having left emergency housing. Around half those kids now live with their parents in social or transitional homes; another 300 are in private rentals. So far, so good.

The whereabouts of the remaining 200, though, are a mystery. And detective Potaka is – well, he’s not on the case, actually. “I’m not worried that some are now homeless,” he told Stuff’s Glenn McConnell this week. The kids are out of emergency housing, and that’s all that matters.

It’s not the first time this government has seemed incurious about the outcomes for its poorer citizens. Last week, welfare minister Louise Upston admitted she didn’t know what happened to welfare recipients when their benefits got cut. Are they being plunged deeper into poverty and despair? She isn’t sure.

There is, in fact, a fine National Party tradition of not knowing about such things. In the early 2010s, Upston’s predecessor Paula Bennett also got “tough” on welfare recipients, dispensing sanctions – full or partial cuts to people’s benefits – at a record rate.

Although quick to claim victory when welfare rolls began falling, Bennett was remarkably incurious about what had happened to the people she pushed off benefits. It wasn’t until her Labour successor, Carmel Sepuloni, had taken office that we got the full picture.

Official research then revealed that the falling welfare rolls were “mostly” due to a strengthening job market. And even then, nearly half the people who’d left welfare were back on it 18 months later, cycling in and out of low-paid work, low-value study and benefit receipt. Around the same time, research by UK charities was showing that sanctions “increase hardship, destitution and foodbank use as well as damaging physical and mental health”.

Profound incuriosity about such issues would be a problem for any government. But it is especially hypocritical for one that has so much staked on delivering better results than its predecessor.

In opposition, National ridiculed Labour for claiming that increased outputs – more programmes delivered, more money spent – signalled increased success. Labour’s $2b boost to mental health services was a classic case. That, as the Nats rightly pointed out, wasn’t an ultimate outcome, a result, a victory.

What would true success have looked like? More people getting the treatment they needed or, indeed, being free from mental illness. And that, famously, did not eventuate.

Widely proclaiming Labour’s “failure to deliver”, National took this talking point and wound it into their rediscovery of Bill English’s social investment approach, which promises to measure whether state programmes achieve results and then shift funding from the least successful to the most.

For that to work, though, National would have to be measuring outcomes. And the evidence of the last fortnight strongly suggests it is not.

Sanctioning people, and reducing welfare rolls, are not outcomes, they’re just outputs: changes in administrative numbers. If people leave welfare only to live in ever-deeper poverty, or make themselves a burden on their family, or resort to crime, their lives have got worse, not better.

To know if welfare reform works, in other words, the government would need to know what happens to former beneficiaries: whether they end up with higher incomes, sustainable and fulfilling work, and – most importantly – higher levels of life satisfaction and purpose.

Getting people out of emergency housing is also not an outcome. People being sustainably housed is. And, in fairness to Potaka, it looks like that has been achieved for some children. But he can’t claim victory for the others unless he knows where they are.

This issue is all the more serious because, following his decision to tighten the criteria for entry into emergency housing, the number of people rough sleeping in Wellington has significantly increased, according to local charity DCM. The two may not be correlated, but there’s a high chance they are.

More kids may have parents living on the street: the opposite of success. And I’m hearing from multiple NGOs and philanthropists that more people are seeking their help because state aid has become harder to get. Again, this isn’t success, just a shifting of the burden from one balance sheet to another.

A final irony: if 500 kids and their families have moved into social housing, that can only have come about because a staggering 3453 new public homes have been opened since December last year. But that’s not an achievement to be claimed by National, which has brought state-housebuilding to a shuddering halt.

Those houses were all commissioned, constructed and paid for by Labour. A triumph of delivery, you might say. But that is yet another fact that National has little interest in knowing.