Methamphetamine testing
The report from Dr Anne Bardsley and Dr Felicia Low for the Office of the Chief Science Adviser makes clear that testing of houses for methamphetamine has been a complete failure for the sort of evidence-based risk-benefit analysis the NZ governments are claiming to care about.
It’s not just that Housing NZ used an Australian guideline for how clean a former meth lab should be after you’ve cleaned it as a screening threshold. Or that there’s an explicit 300-fold safety factor underlying that threshold even for the most susceptible people (toddlers crawling around and putting things in their mouths). Or that they not only evicted people but sometimes took away their personal belongings as too unclean to touch.
In a situation where Housing NZ now claims they knew their standard was not very well founded, they didn’t try to do any better. Faced with a huge testing and remediation bill, whose necessity was — at the most generous evaluation — unclear, they didn’t spend the relatively small amounts that would be needed to find out whether they were wasting public money. They didn’t even ask for help from, say, the Chief Science Adviser, or the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
More importantly, though, they ignored the harm done by evicting vulnerable people. The fundamental assumption of any cost-benefit or risk-benefit analysis is that you’ve got the costs and risks and benefits right, or at least that you’ve made an honest effort to get them right and been explicit about your uncertainty. There are difficult second-order questions of whose costs and benefits you include, and how you account for hard-to-quantify factors like cultural preferences and reputational costs. But if you don’t even put in some of the major costs of a policy, you’re admitting up front that you don’t care about the right answer.
There currently seems pretty broad consensus among people who don’t work there that Housing NZ needs to be remediated. But the ability of the meth screening policies to last that long will — and should — raise doubts about evidence-based decision-making across the NZ public sector. Which is a pity.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
While I agree with all this I think you have to remember the political context – namely, a Finance Minister wishing to sell of NZ Housing stock and a “law and order’ regime on criminals and drugs. Think about the ACC where the previous government tossed out the board and insisted on tougher judgements about eligibility. Again, the public servants are the meat in the sandwich. And, if we are so bad at evidence-based policy, why did the Chief Science Advisor not weigh in on any of this stuff? Well, I assume he took a pragmatic stance and usually adopted issues that he thought he might get a sympathetic hearing on. I cannot say I remember a single issue on which the government looked chastened after an intervention by the Chief Science Advisor (yes, I do remember him publicly disagreeing, but cannot remember what the issue was! Maybe boot camps). So, don’t blame the public service; blame a conservative political climate that is cavalier with science, and that is so with impunity!
6 years ago
It wasn’t an “unprofitable” policy when you understand the demands they worked under.
Housing NZ was required to return a certain amount to the government. The requirements they worked under meant the only way to raise the money the were required to sent to government was selling their assets.
But they were only allowed to sell assets that were unused for a six month period, and funnily enough cleaning up a meth lab was found to take about six months.
So applying that to more houses, especially ones that were not meth labs, gave them a sufficient rate of sale to raise the money they needed.
The government of the day was basically in favor of the sale of state houses and loss of assets, so didn’t notice anything askew.
6 years ago
I seem to remember that at the same time Housing NZ was taking a zero tolerance approach to meth contamination because of the health risks they were not similarly vigilant in their approach to moldy damp conditions in their houses and the associated health risks. I think that this contrast is worthwhile to remember when Housing NZ trot out the excuse that they were concerned about health risks and were applying the precautionary principle that the meth contamination might be a problem.
6 years ago