Kāinga Ora was adrift, we need to keep it simple - Ryan Bridge

THREE KEY FACTS

• Housing Minister Chris Bishop unveiled Kāinga Ora’s turnaround plan to focus on building and managing social housing.
• The plan includes selling 900 older homes annually, with new builds ensuring no net reduction in state houses.
• The changes aim to reduce deficits by $190 million this year and $354m by 2027/28.

Everybody knows if you’re on a plane and the emergency oxygen mask drops from the ceiling you must help yourself before helping others. It’s difficult to assist somebody in need when you yourself can’t breathe. In order to help, you must be in a condition to do so.

It’s why they send injured rugby players to the sideline and wounded soldiers off the battlefield.

It’s becoming frustratingly clear just how wounded our public service has become over the past half-decade. In pursuit of enacting a policy “vibe” of kindness, some of the most essential services a state ought to provide have not only failed to deliver but have in some cases become unviable entities.

Kindness and compassion are effective campaign slogans but without competence, clarity and accountability are meaningless. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

A turnaround plan unveiled for Kāinga Ora includes focusing on its core business, wait for it: building and maintaining state houses. What a revelation. This after a report last year found the agency to be underperforming not financially viable. In order to help others you must first help yourself.

The fact it needed to be told in simple terms what its basic job is tells you two things. First, these guys were adrift under the last lot. Money was free-flowing, debt was soaring, tenancies were for life; it didn’t matter whether you’d killed your neighbour’s cat or threatened people on your street. Why does the agency own 200 properties worth $2 million-plus each when it has 20,000 people lining up get a home of basic, livable quality? Why were build costs 12% higher than the private sector? Conditions in state houses are below standards seen in the private rental market and have been for some time.

Second, it shows us scope creep is a real problem for government departments. Take police, for example, an unhealthy chunk of their time is spent on non-life-threatening mental health callouts rather than crime.

We have to learn as a country that not everybody can or should do everything.

Everything else just muddies the waters. Unfortunately for us scope creep seems to be a contagious infection caught by many a civil servant given the state of our books and record on delivery. A real cluster, if you will, around Thorndon and Lambton Quay.

The other issue is the size of the cluster. The number of civil servants has grown rapidly over the past seven years and while some changes have been made by the current Government, the numbers remain well above levels seen pre-pandemic.

Public sector wage growth to the year to June was 5.4%. Annual wage growth in the private sector was 3.6%.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s workforce jumped from 255 in 2018 to 641 last year. Perhaps that’s what was behind our runaway inflation (joke).

Radio New Zealand this week reported 11 RBNZ staff members’ main job related to the environment, sustainability, climate change, culture, equality, diversity, inclusion, art and heritage.

Some were apparently not fulltime roles but presumably the number also excludes many others doing this most important work but for whom it’s not their primary responsibility. Scope creep strikes again.

Perhaps these hires were a response to the many mandates the bank was forced to deliver on. While this has been simplified and its remit tightened, it illustrates that sometimes too many orders can confuse the troops.

We can’t all do everything at once. We can’t please everyone.

The best we can do is find the thing we’re meant to be doing and do it well.

Contrary to popular belief, half of those on Kāinga Ora’s waitlist are currently in private accommodation but don’t have the means to stay there. There is a shortage of affordable private rental homes available and that is a problem for the Government to help fix by loosening and speeding up regulation. Kāinga Ora’s job is to make sure it has homes available with the right number of bedrooms for those who can’t afford private rentals. And it must be financially sustainable to ensure it can help those who need it.

We’re lucky to live in such a beautiful and diverse country with government agencies that strive to help those who require support in their hour of need.

We can’t let scope creep and confused mandates complicate what should be a relatively simple job.