Monday, May 08, 2017



A colossal waste of time and money

Radio New Zealand has been keeping an eye of National's program to drug-test beneficiaries. The results are unsurprising:

In the last six months of 2016, more than 18,000 beneficiaries were sent for drug tests and 80 failed.

The Ministry of Social Development said the number of failed tests included cases where beneficiaries didn't turn up to be tested.

It said only 54 sanctions were applied to peoples' benefits for failing the test.

Over the previous three years, nearly 95,000 beneficiaries were drug tested - and only 450 failed or didn't turn up.

That's a failure rate of one in every 200.


At what stage do we admit that this has been a colossal waste of time and money and just end it? Or is National happy to waste public money subsidising its cronies in the drug-tsting industry?