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The government's targets in charts: More than half behind track
(www.rnz.co.nz)
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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They are smashing the one about reducing the number of families in emergency housing (by changing the rules so people don't qualify anymore). Don't know why they don't fix the one about 80% of year 8 kids being at or above the expected level by changing the expected level.
Actually, just back on that, the framing of that target has always disgusted me, its just wholly negative and meaningless - someone living in their car is no longer in emergency housing but nobody would consider that a good thing.
Its really frustrating that stuff like that is not only allowed to fly, but gets parroted by the media and then becomes embedded as a way of viewing the problem.
A far more positive target - one significantly more difficult to achieve without actually having to invest money - would be to measure the number of people in secure, permanent housing and set a target to get that near 100%.
That may also be difficult. Measuring the number of families on the emergency housing list is straightforward (even if misleading).
Measuring the number of homeless people is harder. Especially because families might be cramming into a friends house or otherwise have a roof over their head that is actually not permanent housing.
Even harder to measure when you've been sacking all the public servants who might have been able to find a way to do it too I guess!
Yes, it's been interesting watching the fallout from getting rid of so many public servants and trying to decide if they knew it would happen and are pretending to be surprised or if they were actually surprised.
E.g. collapse of hospitality in the Wellington CBD. They had to know this would happen, and their "get all the public service back to the office" gesture was just lip service as their own data showed most are there most of the time anyway.
But then they had a target to drop the number of people receiving unemployment benefits but they made thousands redundant and there were foreseeable consequences of many others becoming unemployed from businesses supporting the public sector. So why set the target? Was it that they don't understand the economy or just that they hope it will recover by the end of their term?
National is weird in that I think there's some people who are just that callous and don't care about the consequences so long as their class of people does better. Then there are some who are no doubt true believers and think despite all the evidence that the neo-liberal magic economy actually exists. And then there's just the naive socially conservative traditionalists who see it as necessary that the poor need to be punished for their situation etc.
The hospitality collapse specifically, I dunno I think they're just throwing shit against the wall at this point. Like, you're not buying enough morning coffees because you're at home, so get back to the office. But also, we're going to put up your bus/train fairs by 70% so now you'll have even less spare money for coffee. And the public transport is creaking so we'll build more roads to get you into the city where parking is getting harder & more expensive to find.
Its mostly brainless policy. I try to remind myself not to attribute to malice just plain smooth-brainness stupidity. Brown in particular is so captured by the road transport ideology that he hits every problem with the road hammer because they all look like nails to him.
Give them time.