A homeless person sleeps in the basement of the Kaianga Ora building in Moray Pl. PHOTO: STEPHEN JAQUIERY Imagine a hospital manager who was rewarded for the number of operations they declined, rather than the number of operations that they performed. To decrease the number of operations you could change the criteria, you could create a bar that considerable numbers of people couldn’t reach and then claim they were ineligible. You could include extra criteria such as refusing operations if people were deemed to have contributed to their illness by being overweight, if they smoked, drank or daydreamed while driving, causing accidents. You could portray it as a common-sense policy so that the blame for the reduction of operations fell on the patients themselves rather than the hospital and claim ‘‘those are the rules and everyone has to abide by them’’. For most of us this would be considered a serious injustice because the primary issue isn’t about the affordability of the operations. The primary issue is because the manager is being rewarded for not doing their job rather than for doing their job. This approach would create perverse incentives in any social service provision. Imagine the police improving crime statistics by making it difficult for victims of crime to lay complaints or reducing a schools NCEA failure rate by encouraging probable fails to leave school before they sat their exams, (actually some of us don’t have to imagine these things as they are the reality for some families). The idea of rewarding managers to not do their jobs is at the heart of the government’s mishandling of homelessness and emergency housing. We heard this month that managers from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) were being incentivised to decrease the number of clients they were putting into emergency housing. The goal, according to reporting by RNZ, was that the MSD was to reduce the number of households in emergency care by 75% by the end of 2029. The MSD approached the target with such gusto that it met the government’s target three and a-half years early. Now we know that because of the high demand on state and social housing that it is not credible to claim that many of these people found their way into long-term rentals or bought their own houses. Of course, if the government had found permanent accommodation for them we would have all congratulated them. Instead, they appear to have done it by tightening criteria, by making the hoops to jump through tougher and by subjective judging as to whether people had contributed to their own homelessness. (If you have strict enough criteria you can claim that everyone has contributed to their own homelessness). The MSD claims that the ‘‘performance measures’’ did not mean that staff were being incentivised to turn people down, but I don’t see how they can prove that, especially hearing from social service workers in the community trying to find accommodation for their clients. They report that a squeeze has definitely taken place, making it more difficult for desperate people to qualify for emergency housing, leaving some on the streets. Every manager gets into their position because they have a degree of ambition and want to succeed. They want to prove that they are capable and most will take the challenge of obeying the instructions from their superior. However, there is a problem when there is no incentive to help people, only the incentive to dismiss them? The head of the MSD tried to defend its staff performance targets linked to cutting emergency housing numbers, because that was what the government wanted. In other words the age-old defence of ‘‘we were just following orders’’. It is one thing to appear hard-hearted, and sometimes you have to be in this business. You have to put aside your emotions and create just rules and only allow people what they are entitled to have. But it is another thing to be cruel. Cruel because you are removing hope from vulnerable people because of a fake quota determined by a minister who appears happy to make themselves look good at the expense of the vulnerable. The argument for cutting government services is that New Zealand has to control its spending and so tough choices have to be made. But as the Salvation Army’s Greg Foster said recently on emergency housing, ‘‘we should not be balancing the books on the backs of New Zealand’s most vulnerable families’’. At the same time as it is making access to emergency housing more difficult, the government is also bringing in draconian move-on measures for homeless people to punish this group even more. It seems that the government’s position is that sacrifices need to be made, but it increasingly looks like, that in a number of areas, some parts of New Zealand society are making inordinate sacrifices, while those at the top make few at all. • Anaru Eketone is a professor in social and community work at the University of Otago.
