I am deeply skeptical of the new Oranga Tamariki.
Oranga Tamariki was set up after a damning 2015 review of CYFS that extraordinarily found children were more at risk of being abused in State care than if they were left in their family.
Thousands of children were negatively impacted and in the 2013-14 year, 117 children were abused while in state care.
The National Government at the time claimed compulsory contraception information campaigns alongside drug testing beneficiaries and draconian welfare penalties would decrease the total number of children falling into State care in the first place.
I’m not sure how making life more difficult for beneficiaries with children helped one single child held by the State.
That National was re-elected twice using such spiteful cruelty as social policy says a lot about us as a people.
So too do the current stats from Oranga Tamariki. They have taken a record 6000 children into State care and latest figures show those children being taken are increasingly Māori children.
So an agency that replaced a dysfunctional one which was abusing children is taking more children into care than ever before and they are taking Māori children at higher rates?
Sounds charming.
Where is the outcry over this ramping up of seizing children and what extra resource has been put in place to protect those children once they have been taken?
The state sanctioned incarceration of Māori children and Māori adults should shame us as a country.
Unfortunately the mainstream media of NZ are too focused on the ‘Kiwi Jihadi’ and Married St First Sight to ask questions about the 6000 children taken into State care.
First published on Waatea News
Yup, don’t want to hear another excuse all day. Just want to hear a yup, found a flaw in the system and I’m gana spit shine the fucker with my god dam elbow.
Baby stealers.
What you say Bomber means we are going to have ‘stolen children’ in NZ, following that appalling practice in Australia. The government needs to sort it out so overworked social workers aren’t making the wrong decisions. However flawed, past policy put families first (as carers). The system didn’t penalise the working class which by focusing on Maori it is doing. When I went to the UK in the 70s it seemed that problems with children were problems of the working class. After all,the middle classes are so much more caring and knowledgeable about how to treat children, lol!
My father worked in Child Welfare and our family was close to much of what was happening about the welfare of children in the ‘old days’.
This is one of those situations that I find difficult to lay blame. For the social workers involved and the people having to make the decisions about children in troubled homes it must be heart breaking work. It is also a completely thankless task – as this article high lights – because they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
I suspect the answer to the problem lies in a mix of solutions that would include greater investment in services that can support troubled families and more investment in higher quality care for children that are removed.
Maori need to take a hard look at themselves. Only when they face up their own behaviour will they begin to fix their own problems.
Four out of five Maori children are born out of wedlock and international research shows that children born to single mothers are far more likely to be destined to suffer through life. Abuse in the home, FAS, depression, illiteracy, addicted, suicide, criminality and imprisonment.
Why do you consider “wedlock” to be some sort of ‘panacea’ for social problems? It seems that the social ills you list are far deeper rooted than whether or not someone has a piece of paper headed “Marriage Certificate”.
Yes I do consider wedlock a panacea for many of societies ills.
I say this only because both NZ and international research shows that children need a father as a role model and as a protector. The state makes a poor father and a series of live-in boyfriends is a recipe for child abuse. Here are some references to assist you in your education:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/co-parenting-after-divorce/201205/father-absence-father-deficit-father-hunger
http://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequences-of-fatherlessness/
https://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/18/533062607/poverty-dropouts-pregnancy-suicide-what-the-numbers-say-about-fatherless-kids
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/red-alert-politics/boys-crave-masculinity-fatherless-homes-are-detrimental-to-youth
https://www.smh.com.au/national/fatherless-boys-become-dads-earlier-study-20110907-1jxb9.html
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/fatherlessness-creates-void-cannot-be-filled
https://www.nzcpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/TheFatherlessGeneration.pdf
https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/research/sole-parenting/sole-parenting-in-nz-an-update-on-key-trends-and-what-helps-reduce-disadvantage.pdf
You confuse and conflate wedlock with good parenting and childcare. Making vows before some hand-waving, spell chanting priest or public official does not ensure good parenting. Raising children raised in father/mother environments does not even require a wedlock ritual.
Also, are you aware that, historically, the ‘nuclear family’ model is a relatively recent practice and it has never been universal?
Yes kids need their fathers
….but the parents don’t have to live together
…many solo parents do a brilliant job
…and for many reasons one or other of the parents, or both, is/are incapable of parenting well ( maybe their parents were abusive)…but it is good if they can show their love for their kids in whatever way they can and society supports them in this
…society must support all kids and their parents
100% Bussy
As usual you hit the nail on the head. Maori have played the blame gain for too long. There were many wrongs done in the past but there needs to be a point where you move on and accept there opportunities in this great country instead of chasing the next high. There are many successful Maori who will never lose their children the leaders need to draw attention to them as role models.
Indeed, Andrew. I too wonder why leading Maori politicians like Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett, are not proclaiming that these are their children, and these children need better than they are getting now.
Bridges, I gather, is fighting the next election via women’s magazines shamelessly flaunting pictures of his own children, because he says that families are what National is all about – cosy little rich kids with parents better heeled than many.
I can remember when Bennetts were a respected Maori family, seen as good people, but I suggest that only a lunatic would see Paula B as a mother earth figure embracing all our children as the precious and vulnerable little gifts that they are.
Before you start slagging Maori, ask yourself why two top Maori Nats with so much more clout than most others, are not leading the way in helping their own people.
Maybe the photo ops aren’t pretty enough for women’s mags, or for putrid interviews about life as an incredible shrinking woman and how wonderful her own life is. Shame on the selfish pathetic pair of them.
I would hardly call Bridges and Bennett “leading Maori politicians.”
They flaunt a bit of whakapapa when it suits them.
And with regard to Oranga Tamariki – it’s a flawed bureaucratic system, soaking up money on social workers and caregivers of dubious competence, as well as lawyers, while the families and children who need the care struggle through the mire.
Andrew is either racist or ignorant …. but most probably both.
Racist white Aussies say the same thing about their original inhabitants …
As do racist white usa citizens …. ignoring all their broken treaties and twisting the past….. Victim blaming like Andrew.
Canadian Inuit who are their Indigenous people living in 53 communities spread across the Canadian Arctic also suffer the same racist attitudes and ignorance of history …. as always the victims are blamed for their plight at the bottom of Canadian society.
It does not help when National actively dog whistles to their racist base …. iwi / kiwi to CGT.
They would rather look after the profits of the booze industry and Serco private prisons than help a poor brown kid lead a better life.
National look after and protect the rich criminals ,……
Andrew, perhaps you don’t know that in traditional Maori society many couples did not have formal rituals equivalent to today’s weddings, but got together informally like a lot of the general population are doing today. Past practices continue in most societies.
You need to take a hard look at how dispossession of their land has affected Maori from 19C to the present day. It is hard for most of us when we are deprived of what is ours and then condemned for ‘not coping’. If I sound preachy, no more than you. I would rather think about values; caring human relationships which are special to NZ.
+100…and Labour Party Government Rogernomics and the neolib Ruth Richardson Nact politicians that followed
….making institutionalised unemployment a generational thing for Maori and Pakeha workers which impacted negatively on social economic and emotional wellbeing of their families
….this is where the blame lies, not in racism or an outmoded patriachal church ( god help us the Catholic Church)puritanical morality
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