Labour MP shares moving cancer anecdote as Government moves ahead with more rigid public service targets

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced the targets after Monday's Cabinet meeting. Photo / Mark Mitchell

By 2030, the Government wants fewer people enduring long waits for elective surgery or spending hours waiting to be seen in an emergency room. Ministers also want vastly less crime and tens of thousands fewer people on a benefit.

These are just four of the nine public service targets announced by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on Monday. The targets cover the health, education, social development, police, housing and climate change portfolios, in each case setting a target for 2030. They appear to target areas where the former Government was weak, like wait times for surgeries and law and order.

Luxon said the targets would “focus our public sector on driving better results for New Zealanders in health, education, law and order, work, housing, and the environment”.

“These targets are not going to be easy to achieve. But we’re not here to do what is easy – we’re here to do what is needed to reduce crime, shorten healthcare wait times and improve educational achievement, no matter how difficult,” he said.

Labour’s finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds warned the targets would have unintended consequences, and could undermine the broader societal goals. Criticising Luxon’s benefit reduction target, Edmonds noted that during her childhood, her father went on a benefit following her mother’s diagnosis with terminal cancer.

The jobseeker target includes work ready and health and disability jobseekers. This is for people who cannot work, or are working fewer hours because of a health condition, injury or disability. Edmonds warned that this kind of target could have unintended consequences.

“My father had to go on the benefit to look after my mum when she was dying of cancer. What he needed was support from the Government, not the pressure to go back to work. These are people who have to care for people that are dying, that are sick - they need that support and that time to be able to do that,” she said.

Edmonds said her father’s decision helped keep her mum out of hospital.

The nine Government targets to be delivered by 2030 are:

1. Shorter stays in emergency departments: 95 per cent of patients to be admitted, discharged, or transferred from an emergency department within six hours.
2. Shorter wait times for (elective) treatment: 95 per cent of people wait less than four months for elective treatment.
3. Reduced child and youth offending: 15 per cent reduction in the total number of children and young people with serious and persistent offending behaviour.
4. Reduced violent crime: 20,000 fewer people who are victims of an assault, robbery, or sexual assault.
5. Fewer people on the Jobseeker Support Benefit: 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support Benefit.
6. Increased student attendance: 80 per cent of students are present for more than 90 per cent of the term.
7. More students at expected curriculum levels: 80 per cent of Year 8 students at or above the expected curriculum level for their age in reading, writing and maths by December 2030.
8. Fewer people in emergency housing: 75 per cent reduction of households in emergency housing.
9. Reduced net greenhouse gas emissions: on track to meet New Zealand’s 2050 net zero climate change targets, with total net emissions of no more than 290 megatonnes from 2022 to 2025 and 305 megatonnes from 2026 to 2030.

Edmonds said she did not necessarily disagree with the targets and agreed that wait times should fall and student achievement should rise. But she questioned the Government’s ability to achieve them whilst cutting public service spending. She said the targets were missing measures for how they would be achieved.

“Where are the targets for more social housing? Where are the targets for more doctors and nurses? For me, it has basically set up the public service to fail,” Edmonds said.

Edmonds warned of unintended consequences, saying there was no point reducing emergency department wait times if it meant patients being discharged into hospital corridors.

The Greens also criticised the targets, with co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick noting the emissions reduction target was exactly the same as target set by the previous Government.

“The so-called ‘deliberately ambitious’ climate goal is literally the current emissions budgets signed off by James Shaw based on the advice of the Climate Change Commission, supported by National in 2022,” Swarbrick said.

She doubted National would be able to hit the target, because it had binned climate policies like the clean car discount.

The change marks the broader return of targeting across the public service, something that was popular under the Key-English Governments, but fell out of favour during the Ardern-Hipkins Governments, which argued the narrow focus on achieving a handful of targets sucked public service resources from valuable endeavours.

The first Better Public Service Targets were implemented in 2012 and updated while the former Government was in office. Not all targets that the Government set itself were achieved. By June 2017, the Government had intended to reduce re-offending by 25 per cent, however by September 2016 reoffending had only dropped by 4.4 per cent, according to Newsroom. The Government then dropped the percentage reduction target and replaced it with a goal to reduce the number of serious offences by 10,000.

In 2017, then State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes told the Public Sector Journal that the 2012 targets pulled “agencies together behind a common focus”.

“It was a very bold thing to do and it’s helping us into much more of a system focus”. Hughes said in the story that achieving the targets forced agencies to work “across the system as a whole”, asking questions about which agencies had “decision rights” to deliver a particular goal and where the resources sat in the system.

The multi-agency approach is meant to honour the complexity of some of the goals. Reducing violent crime is, on the face of it, a matter for the justice system - and Luxon has made Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith lead minister for the policy; however, reducing violent crime will likely require other social agencies to work with people most at risk of becoming violent offenders. Luxon said other agencies would pile in to work on the targets. He said the social investment approach would also be used, to help guide decisions made by multiple agencies. There is currently little detail on how this would work.

Luxon said the challenges would require the public service to “think differently”. While specific targeting is a change from the Labour Government, taking a cross-agency approach is not.

The former Labour Government’s Finance Minister Grant Robertson tried to get this approach to change the way agencies were funded. Labour moved towards “cluster” funding in which multiple agencies were funded at once and over a longer period. This was meant to encourage more collaboration across agencies.

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.