Pensioner Rosemary Rudolph and her husband were forced to leave their state house in Avondale, Auckland after traces of meth were found after testing.

It's been called the biggest scam ever played on New Zealand. For years, tens of millions of dollars were spent on testing and cleaning houses for methamphetamine residue that wasn't dangerous at all. Throughout, Housing New Zealand led the charge, kicking tenants out of homes and pursuing them for thousands in the Tenancy Tribunal. HENRY COOKE looks back at the series of failures at every level that got us into this mess.

Rosemary Rudolph was in her late 80s when the Government told her she was going to die.

It wasn't cancer, old age, or anything her doctor said at all. It came from a Housing New Zealand (HNZ) staffer, who said the place Rudolph called home for more than 60 years was poisoning her – she had to move out quick.

"They said I would die if I stayed there. I'll tell you what, I've been dying ever since – I'm a shadow of what I once was," Rudolph said.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Pensioner Rosemary Rudolph, who was forced to leave her state home: "They said I would die if I stayed there. I'll tell you what, I've been dying ever since."

One of Rudolph's 16 grandchildren had smoked some methamphetamine on the property and HNZ had caught wind of this, she said, admitting she was "pretty naive".

READ MORE:

* The meth house is a myth: There's 'no risk' from drug smoking residue, Govt report finds

* Meth testing industry slams science

* Meth report 'kick in the guts' to those who paid to decontaminate

* Meth clean-up industry knew houses were safe, now the game's up

HNZ demanded the 87-year-old leave the property in Avondale, Auckland, so that it could be tested. They were also worried after her house had been fired upon by a suspected gang attacker. The tests came back positive - and that was it. She was out, moved to a far smaller unit right by a busy road.

"They said you have to move out, and because it's not your fault, we'll give you a little place somewhere."

"I wasn't allowed to bring my blankets or anything. I just walked out in the clothes that I had. The few that I had had to be washed three times ... My possessions were taken away from me. People came off the street and ransacked the place."

Rudolph said HNZ charged her $3000 for the testing. An HNZ spokesperson said the agency is "currently reviewing any costs associated with this matter".

"Our staff met with Mrs Rudolph and her son to discuss the meth testing results which showed the highest reading of 22.5 – well above the new level of 15.5 – despite confirmation the tenant's son had arranged for the property to be commercially cleaned before testing," the spokesperson said.

This might sound like an agency doing the best it can to help a vulnerable tenant it didn't want getting sick. And an HNZ spokesman said they were also very worried about her safety thanks to that "serious incident involving her son and some associates who identified themselves as gang members" where shots were fired on the property.

ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, chief science adviser to the prime minister, delivered a report in 2018 into the acceptable levels of methamphetamine in contaminated Housing NZ homes.

But the Government has now made clear that unless there was someone actually cooking P on her property, which HNZ didn't suspect, Rudolph was in no real danger from the meth - even with the higher reading. Neither were the hundreds of other tenants kicked out or moved from their houses for the same thing, with readings that were often far lower.

According to a report from the Chief Science Advisor Peter Gluckman to the Prime Minister released earlier this week, not a single person has ever been found to have gotten sick from the residue left over when someone smokes P.

The levels HNZ were testing to were 10 times lower than they should have been, and based on guidelines not meant to be used for anything but former labs. The agency spent $100 million on what the report describes as mostly unnecessary tests, and took 900 properties out of its portfolio in the middle of the biggest housing shortage in a generation, chasing tenants through the Tenancy Tribunal to pay for "contaminating" properties.

And it wasn't just state home tenants getting stung - private landlords, private tenants, and even home owners were all caught up in a years-long moral panic with no real scientific evidence to back it, often spending tens of thousands of dollars on tests and cleaning they didn't need.

ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF Housing Minister Phil Twyford and chief science adviser Peter Gluckman's announcement that clearing homes that tested for meth was bad science came, says Oscar Kightley, out of the blue.

Housing Minister Phil Twyford, who commissioned the report two weeks after becoming minister, called it a "textbook public policy failure". Sir Peter Gluckman, whose office wrote the report, said there was an "inexplicable leap of logic" which caused all this.

So how did that happen? How did all the institutions we trust to keep these things from happening – the Government, the justice system, and the media – get this so wrong?

The story of how it happened shows up shortcomings in some of those key institutions. It shows how some unproved claims can spread like wildfire through the media and politicians, causing real damage along the way. And it shows how erring on the side of caution, being a little bit more conservative than might be strictly scientifically necessary, can cause massive unintended damage.

Ross Bell, director of the New Zealand Drug Foundation, has been following and worrying about this issue for years. He said it all began in the late 2000s with news stories about cops and firefighters worried about getting sick from busting meth labs.

Meth labs can contain really harmful chemicals used in the production of the drug - generally not meth itself, but nasty solvents - so these concerns made total sense. But then things started to grow.

"Councils became worried about registering these high profile labs on the Land Information Memorandums people get when they sell properties. That's when the Ministry of Health was asked to develop the guidelines that they did," Bell said.

These guidelines, released in 2010, are the closest thing to a smoking gun in this case. Just imagine the gun was actually intended by its creators to be a water pistol.

The thing is, the guidelines were only meant for the clean-up of meth labs. As labs can contain those other dangerous chemicals, which are often hard to spot, it made sense to make the standard you should clean to should be very very restrictive – 0.5μg or "micrograms" per 100cm2. This figure was not a measurement of when you should begin cleaning, but a point to get to afterwards. The trigger to start cleaning would be clear knowledge that a meth lab had been present on the premises.

The idea is that after you clean up a lab you should only have 0.5μg or less of meth residue left in these testing areas – which would prove that any other harmful chemicals were gone. 0.5μg is very restrictive. A grain of sand is about 11μg.

This standard is in line with international standards of what to clean to. But in New Zealand this 0.5μg figure was taken and took to mean the absolute maximum that meth should be present in any property, a trigger to begin cleaning in the first place. This is the inexplicable "leap in logic" Gluckman is talking about. A measurement meant to check if someone had cleaned up enough was taken and used as a trigger to begin that clean-up in the first place, even if there was absolutely no evidence that a meth lab (or even any usage) had ever taken place on a property.

An industry of meth testing and clean-up companies began to develop, with tests costing between $500 and $5000. A clean-up can cost between $5000 and $50,000. Stories began appearing in the media about people getting sick from living in houses where people had consumed meth, usually accompanied by quotes from the cleaners and testers, who appeared to the untrained eye to be experts.

Envirocheck's head David Kilburn told Newshub it was "the next leaky homes crisis". MethSolutions head Miles Stratford told them 40 per cent of homes could have meth traces. Todd Sheppard of Envirocheck decided to double that, telling Stuff that he believed 80 per cent of Kiwi homes had some level of P contamination, and the resulting story misinterpreted the 2010 guidelines, as many others had. There were several stories questioning the hysteria.

"Journalists were running stories that were fed by an industry that was deeply conflicted," Bell said.

Stratford of testing company MethSolutions said he didn't think the industry fuelled panic.

"We've been raising awareness of an issue that has got profound implications for New Zealand in many facets. One of them is for health and safety," Stratford said.

"I wouldn't describe it as a moral panic. I think there is an emotional response to realising that this meth issue is far more widespread than we realised."

"It's not because an industry is saying 'you know there's bad things in houses'. That's because people have to confront the reality of meth in New Zealand society."

The institution which seems to have caused the most damage here was HNZ, our country's largest landlord.

Unfortunately, Rudolph's case is not a one-off, and it can get much worse. One real estate investor Stuff spoke to spent $34,000 on cleaning up a property he probably didn't need to. If you plug the words "methamphetamine" and "contamination" into the Tenancy Tribunal database you can find 341 rulings where the landlord won damages or compensation over the last three years, often for thousands of dollars. In 120 of those cases, HNZ is the landlord.

Not all of these cases involve testings low enough to pass the new standard of 15 micrograms per 100cm2 set in place hurriedly after Gluckman's report was released. But plenty do. Take this Waikato man, charged $11,503 for cleaning and testing of his former Hamilton home with readings we now know are completely safe, despite clear evidence that it was a friend who had smoked meth at the house, not him. Or this south Auckland mother, charged $12,826 for clean-up work and told her property was uninhabitable, with readings that are completely safe.

When Rudolph heard the news of the report she was devastated - and angry.

"I felt gutted and I thought 'how dare they'?"

She says her husband and her had lived in the property since 1953.

"That was our home. I've got big family, I've got 16 grandchildren and nine or 10 great-grandchildren. That was the place we all came to enjoy ourselves. I thought we had it for life."

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF The house Rudolph was ordered to leave.

HNZ were not doing this quietly. In a March 2016 press release headlined "Tribunal's methamphetamine rulings send strong message", HNZ drew reporters' attention to a case where a former tenant was ordered to pay $34,000 for the clean-up after "contaminating" her state house, and another where a Whangerei tenant was ordered to pay $17,000. The release noted a new focus in recent years "on identifying homes where P may be used, or may have been used in the past."

Chief operating officer Paul Commons specifically invokes the "Ministry of Health levels" as their guide in this release - that pesky 0.5μg which, once again, was intended as a level for cleaning to after a lab was found, not as a trigger for danger. You can find it mentioned in plenty of the Tenancy Tribunal cases in similar terms - as a measure of danger, not a target to be used post-cleaning.

Jane Wyles Housing NZ Chief Operations Officer Paul Commons, second from the right, said “The rulings also help ensure that the financial burden for remediation work does not fall to the taxpayer and we are being more vigilant than ever around retrieving costs from ‘offending’ tenants.”

Bell said he told HNZ it was misusing the measure, but he was ignored. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health said that staff had repeatedly advised HNZ that it "has always been the Ministry's view that the ministry's guidelines only cover clandestine laboratories." HNZ spokespeople have rejected this several times and on Wednesday a spokesman said "HNZ's methamphetamine testing and decontamination approach has always been based on the advice of experts in the field." The spokesman noted that the Ministry of Health guidelines were at the time the "only formal guidance available to residential property owners in New Zealand." (The agency's head is refusing to be interviewed - by Stuff or anyone else.)

So why were HNZ head honchos so keen to stay so tough? Conversations with people who worked at the agency or are familiar with their thinking suggest the agency's staff did feel like there was a vacuum of trustworthy information, leaving them to rely on the one piece of guidance they had - the Ministry of Health guidelines. When the Ministry of Health updated those guidelines in late 2016 they dutifully followed them, and when Standards NZ eventually set a slightly higher standard in 2017 they followed those too. With numerous reports of people getting sick from meth exposure and the possibility that one of your tenants might be one of them, wouldn't you want to be pretty certain - especially if you had a "zero drugs" policy anyway?

These evictions did not go unnoticed at the time, and some experts noted the standard was being misused. Eventually, it was updated in 2016, and then again by Standards NZ in 2017. But Standards NZ, in a "consensus decision" supported by meth clean-up industry figures on the panel, only brought it up to 1.5μg - 10 times more restrictive than what Gluckman suggests now. That decision will now be independently reviewed by Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi, although manager Carmen Mak told Stuff on Tuesday the process was "consistent with requirements in the Standards and Accreditation Act 2015, and with the practice of international standards-setting organisations."

CAMDERON BURNELL/FAIRFAX NZ Former Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett said she and Bill English tried to push back against Housing New Zealand.

Some have also suggested a political climate contributed to a feeling of hysteria around meth, something former Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett rejected on Tuesday - instead saying she had actually pushed back against HNZ at several points.

"At the time we questioned HNZ and experts continuously and repeatedly. We always were so skeptical. But we were up against Health and Safety and lawyers saying what the law was," Bennett said.

"We couldn't overrule a crown entity that had got legal advice."

She said both she and former Prime Minister Bill English felt the standard was too low but they were not technical experts.

"I just instinctively didn't think it was right."

At this point, no evidence of this pushback from Bennett or English has been made available to media. One source who worked at HNZ during this period said there wasn't political pull either way – towards going tough on meth or looser on it.

Bennett and English were certainly happy to talk to media about the dangers of meth consumption residue at the time.

English said the agency was "rightly taking a firm stance on the health risks posed by meth, and will continue to do so for as long as it is detected in its properties" in 2016.

A year earlier, Bennett said "we are not going to risk houses suspected of being drug dens today becoming potentially toxic playgrounds for innocent children in the future," noting "quite serious health effects."

(She has since said that she based statements like these on advice from officials. Stuff has requested a copy of said advice.)

Politics, however much you may think it contributed to the problem, is not supposed to enter into the austere halls of the justice system. But the Tenancy Tribunal issued many decisions based on the wrong interpretation of the Ministry of Health guidelines.

Melissa Poole, Principal Tenancy Adjudicator at the Tribunal, said the Tribunal "has always relied on the most relevant and current guidelines available for its assessment of methamphetamine contamination claims."

Poole said adjudicators – quasi-judges – receive ongoing training on the latest science, and that Sir Peter Gluckman's report will form a part of that training in future. She also noted that tenants who have more than $1000 awarded against them can appeal the decision in court.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF "I wouldn't know what a drug looked like. We don't drink we don't smoke. We are just living our lives."

But people like Rudolph never took their case to the Tribunal, and are unlikely to ever have the funds to consider taking it to court. Several former HNZ tenants Stuff spoke to today said their lives had been devastated by similar decisions.

"I lost everything," Rudolph said on Wednesday evening.

Her husband, who has dementia, was very confused by the move.

"It knocked him. It changed his life completely. We came here, and he kept saying 'let's go home'. Every day he'd go in the bedroom there and take all of his clothes out of the drawer, and pack them up, and say 'let's go home'.

"I go to bed at night, I can't sleep. I just get up and down all night long."

An HNZ spokesperson said they had tried its best.

"We regret Mrs Rudolph was placed in this situation but want to reassure her we took her health and wellbeing into careful consideration when deciding it was best to transfer her to another Housing New Zealand property."

Rudolph isn't buying it.

"I just feel like everything that I'd cherished was taken away from me. I wouldn't know what a drug looked like. We don't drink we don't smoke. We are just living our lives."

TIMELINE:

2010: Ministry of Health develops guidelines for the clean up of former meth labs.

2015: The amount of state homes testing positive for "meth contamination" starts to rise.

2016: The Ministry of Health update their guidelines, still leaving the limit very low.

2017: Standards NZ sets a new guideline of 1.5μg per 100cm2. This decision is now being independently reviewed.

2018: Sir Peter Gluckman releases a report suggesting new guidelines of 15μg per 100cm2.