What is the story from the social services part of this? Why are they denying so many applications? Surely the entire organization cannot just be full of people who have not but hate and loathing in their heart. Has working at such an organization for so long made them callous and depressed as well?
Perhaps what should be investigated is what sort of help social workers need to enable them to cope with their job long term?
Unfortunately, the elected officials in charge of changing the rules can get more votes by talking about other wedge issues. Worse, some of them can even get votes by peddling the myth that the poor are the ones responsible for bleeding the working class dry. This is often accompanied by a "fix" that costs more than it saves, makes life even harder for those at the bottom, and sometimes even funnels money back into the party / official's pocket (e.g. the urine test performed by a company owned by the official's wife).
It's voters that need to change, not social workers.
You need to spend your budget or you get less money. And frankly, some departments should recieve less if they come in under.
The problem is that the people who do an incompetent job and/or give out grants via patronage. They never really operating a competive service The over head is just disgusting.
You cannot fire the incompetent or the amoral. There is lots of fat to cut in these organizations. I know people that start out working hard on cases but then are nerfed to keep others from looking bad.
Hell I even offered to teach a google alert class for job seekers and the department free of charge. Did they do it... nah duplication of effort keeps their budget high and their employment stable.
I always thought a much more plausible explanation was simply the accountability gap in public policy. The voters don't care if a policy works or not, they care if it sounds like it works according to their preconceived notions about how society functions (e.g. charging people to ride the bus will save money). Analyzing policy is a difficult and thankless task. It's hard to do right and voters don't pay attention anyway.
My suggestion: give each candidate 1/2 (or 1/3 or 1/4) of a ballot page to use as they please (with caveats on sourcing data). Let the infographic battles begin! It's not a perfect solution, but I think that it could do a great deal to steer the debate back in the correct direction: the post-mortem debunkings would likely be more socially productive than any immediate effect the graphics had on voter behavior.
People just aren't equipped to put themselves out there emotionally over and over and over again day after day, particularly when a huge proportion of the time, when they do put themselves out, the outcome is awful. They retreat to a numb routine of following the rules, because, basically, they get trained to do so. When they try to bend the rules, they suffer a lot of emotional anguish for, typically, no reward.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/04/28/3991401.ht...
These workers are normal people, who believe the same myths that Americans do about poverty, or that most Australians do about refugees. The unusual thing is that their beliefs matter. The fact that they stick to the usual myths, when confronted with so much contradictory evidence, suggests that people aren't as free in our beliefs and actions as American and Australian mythology would hold.