Barking up the wrong tree: The DOC survey with 'irrelevant' and 'intrusive' questions

Conservation Minister Kiri Allan, flanked by Northland MP Willow-Jean Prime, announces $20m in funding for Northland environmental projects. Photo / Peter de Graaf

Do you feel "part of the web of life", asked a Department of Conservation survey that was meant to track the effectiveness of some $500 million of spending through a make-work scheme. The survey, which has since been dropped, asked workers a range of disjointed, personal questions that ranged from gauging their connectedness to the earth to estimating how safe they felt making online transactions.

The department said the survey was used for more than a year. Before it was scrapped, it collected over 400 responses from people beginning and ending employment through the Jobs for Nature programme.

A spokesperson for Conservation Minister Kiri Allan said the minister pulled the plug on the survey in September last year.

In many cases, participants were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with a range of statements. Questions which focused on the natural world asked participants to consider their feelings about statements including:

• "I feel as though I belong to the Earth as equally as it belongs to me."
• "Like a tree can be part of a forest, I feel embedded within the broader natural world."
• "I often feel part of the web of life."
• "I feel that all inhabitants of Earth, human, and nonhuman, share a common 'life force."

Participants were also asked to react to statements related to safety and crime. "How safe or unsafe do you feel": "At home by yourself at night?"; "Walking alone in your neighbourhood after dark?"; "Waiting for or using public transport such as buses or trains at night?"; and "Using the internet for online transactions?".

Reg Kemper, chief adviser for Jobs for Nature within DOC, said the survey was dropped after an unfavourable review and because a more comprehensive evaluation process is being developed for Jobs for Nature spending.

A spokesperson for Allan was more blunt: "No, she [Allan] wasn't happy and considered some of the questions to be inappropriate, intrusive and irrelevant. She directed DOC to undertake a review of the survey with these concerns in mind. She was not satisfied with the outcome of the review, and requested the survey no longer be used."

The spokesperson said the minister did not sign off on the survey. It was agreed within the department's Jobs for Nature unit, she said.

A source close to DOC told the Herald that a review of the survey and its subsequent discontinuation was prompted by a privacy-related complaint.

Jobs for Nature is the Government's signature job creation programme, conceived in 2020 in response to Covid-19 at a cost of some $1.2 billion. It also has considerable environmental aims including weed and pest control. Of that total, $1.1b was funded from the Government's Covid Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF), a pot of money that has increased to $69b, and which was established to help the country battle the pandemic. However, it is now so depleted that Finance Minister Grant Robertson recently confirmed that the CRRF will probably need fresh funds if it is to fund a fourth round of Covid inoculations.

The DOC portion of the Jobs for Nature funds account for the single largest chunk of programme spending, most of which is to be spent by mid-2024. The remainder is spread across four other departments and agencies including the Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry for Primary Industries.

Labour ministers including Minister for the Environment David Parker, and Finance Minister Grant Robertson, claimed the spending would create some 11,000 new jobs.

However the scheme has been dogged by failures and criticism. Job creation has been very slow and has reached just one tenth of the promised 11,000 total. Public reporting of performance measures is very limited, and crucially, unemployment in New Zealand is now very low while inflation is running hot, making it exactly the wrong moment to continue pouring money into state-funded job creation.

Just 1100 full-time equivalent jobs (FTEs) were created in the first 15 months of the programme, from its inception in July 2020 to September 30, 2021, the date to which figures have been tallied by the Ministry for the Environment, the co-ordinating agency for the spending.

A DOC spokesperson said it created some 446 FTE Jobs for Nature roles by the end of last year, however the department declined to say how many of those jobs are new, despite asking for this same information in the now-discredited survey.

Much of the Jobs for Nature spending has been funnelled into projects run by third-party service providers, in many cases private businesses and not-for-profits which were previously doing the same or very similar environmental work and funded privately or from other sources.

Kemper declined to provide a count of the number of Jobs for Nature-funded projects that were already underway before the programme.

Nicole McKee, the Act Party's spokesperson for conservation, called the survey "ideological nonsense".

"What really does DOC mean to achieve by asking these very personal questions, including people's feelings about their families and, I mean really, 'the web of life'?

"I thought this programme was about cleaning up the environment and getting people off the dole and along the way helping them to acquire a useful skill set."

National Party conservation spokesperson Jacqui Dean said the survey was proof that the Government failed to do the necessary policy work to make Jobs for Nature an effective programme. "What are we actually getting by spending all this money? We don't know."

The survey also asked workers to describe their sense of belonging to entities including their religious or spiritual group, ethnic group, family, iwi, and neighbourhood.

Respondents were also asked to estimate how lonely they felt, how easy or hard it would be to talk to someone if they felt depressed or down, and if they'd been discriminated against in the previous 12 months.

Beyond the range of very personal questions, the survey also asked such potentially identifying questions as the worker's ethnic group, age, sex, earnings, the configuration of their household, and whether they were born in New Zealand.

Kemper said the survey was developed as a wellbeing measure by a social scientist at DOC with input from Statistics NZ.

The survey introduction told respondents it should be completed during paid work time, and noted that "some of the survey questions may seem unusual, but almost all are routinely used in a variety of New Zealand Government surveys."