Nailing those targets

A target

It's nice to have a target. If you don't aim, you won't hit. 

Or that's the argument coming from the Blue Team about their just-announced targets.

But when their aims are all calibrated towards a date of 2030 — just far enough away not to be politically challenging — can we really take them seriously?

And even if you do aim, doesn't it matter what you aim at?  The Soviets knew all about setting (and meeting) production targets, didn't they. Set a target for a large number of nails, for example, and you'd get many, many very small useless nails. Set the target by weight, by contrast, and you get many fewer much heavier nails. Or one very, very big one.

Manager of a Soviet nail factory being awarded

the Order of Lenin for exceeding his tonnage

There's something that Christopher Luxon could learn there about his own targets: that their very specific focus look to be just as easy to get around.

• "95 per cent of patients to be admitted, discharged, or transferred from an emergency department within six hours," says the target. How easy would it be to "triage" patients before they officially arrive at ED to reduce the number appearing there.
• "95 per cent of people wait less than four months for elective treatment," says Luxon's target. Again, easy to reduce the number permitted elective treatment.
• "15 per cent reduction in the total number of children and young people with serious and persistent offending behaviour," says the naive target. Yet how easy it will be to simply redefine what "serious" and "persistent" look like.
• "20,000 fewer people who are victims of an assault, robbery, or sexual assault," says the wish list — and you'd damn well hope it were achieved. But aren't we already seeing the word "victim" politically redefined?
• "50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support Benefit," says the hopeful headline. Hard to "create jobs." Easy to simply create a new benefit for which those 50,000 might be "entitled."

I'll leave the remaining four for you to do as an exercise. You already get the point. Despite Luxon's comical business-speak about "chunking down" and "laddering up," even in their relative modesty these are pious hopes, not real targets. (Since he's so focused on business-speak perhaps he could read about Goodhart's Law while he's chunking up, often stated as: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".) And in their specificity they (like Building Minister Chris Penk's naive hope for quicker Building Consents simply because he's set a new target) could even make their targeted problems worse.

So perhaps it's a good thing that we have to wait until 2030 before any rubber really hits the road.