I am deeply critical of Oranga Tamariki.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly know there are bad bugger parents and adults out there who do terrible things to kids.
No doubt about that, and we most certainly do need to have a welfare agency that puts the welfare of the child first. If children are being harmed at a level that demands state intervention, then we would be amiss as fellow citizens to not intrude.
B-U-T
And it must be an enormous B-U-T…
Such incredibly intrusive powers by the State demands an evidential threshold and skilled nuanced approach that obliges on those exercising it to look at every dimension of an uplift.
You would be horrified to find out that this cost cutting neoliberal welfare experiment using big data to automise responses was barely funded with almost zero oversight to these extraordinary powers.
Well, prepare to be horrified…
Baby uplifts: Mother discovered her newborn would be taken while she was in labour
Oranga Tamariki carried out an internal review last year, which found major failings in the uplift of a 6-day-old baby from his 19 year-old mother at Hawke’s Bay Hospital.
It found that Oranga Tamariki did not do enough to build relationships with the baby boy’s family or explore placing him in the wider family.
The removal order was based on the views of a single Oranga Tamariki employee, and “no clear rationale” was noted for the decision.
…Oranga Tamariki was a neoliberal response to welfare spending.
It argued that certain subsets of Society were prone to cost the State more in prisons and health costs. By using big data, a new streamlined welfare agency could simply intervene predictively to uplift children before any abuse had even occurred.
This Orwellian nightmare scenario is what has been driving this terribly flawed social policy thinking.
In the report, it shows that just one person signed off on this child uplift and the case mangers didn’t even seem to know what the hell was going on???
If you are about to take an infant off a mother post birth, you would demand that every possible resource had been spent on working out exactly why that had to happen and what was being done to repair whatever was causing such alarm!!!
NZers fought and bled on foreign soil to oppose States with that kind of authoritarian power over their own citizens! What the Christ are we doing allowing the State to intervene at the most intimate and vulnerable moment of a persons life based on pitifully weak evidence!
It’s not just the farce of process, the inability for Parents to gain legal aid to fight against having their children taken in the first place means vulnerable people have no access to the law to protect them over something as innate as being a parent!
This just gets more and more and more outrageous and I can not for the life of me understand why a Minister as talented as Tracey Martin is willing to die in a ditch for a neoliberal welfare experiment started by National!
What adds injury to injury on top of injury is that the rate of abuse for these kids inside State care is actually higher than if they were left in the general public!
So we have created a neoliberal welfare experiment that justifies taking infants from mothers for future crimes based on big data indicators because it will save the State money in the long run while eroding universal welfare provision and amputating any oversight to a process that is obscenely threadbare?
Oh and the kids taken have more chance of being abused in State care than if left with their whanau?
This isn’t social policy, it’s a grim dystopian satire.
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You describe a horrific policy Bomber, but I would also like to know what Tracey Martin, a politician I respect, has to say on the matter. Pity you can’t interview some of those you write off based on media coverage. You are critical of MSM, but you appear to accept their coverage in some cases.
Janio – Reasonable point. Oranga Tamariki’s CE has said that this report focuses on the mothers, whereas their focus is primarily on the babies, and this is also a reasonable point. Tracey M is one of NZ First’s best people.
Janio, why would Martyn waste any time interviewing Tracey Martin? She repeatedly stated that she had not watched the horrifying video of the young Hawkes Bay mother and her whanau and midwives being lied to by three Oranga Tamariki social workers,and being threatened by the police who all appeared to be working in cooperation with the Hawkes Bay District Hospital administrators in this shocking case.
Both Tracey Martin and Jacinda Ardern should not only have watched the video, but I believe they should have fired the Oranga Tamariki CEO Grainne Moss and the offending incompetent social workers involved.
ORANGA TAMARIKI NEEDS TO BE SHUT DOWN NOW.
While the treatment of these young women was inadequate (a polite description) the media also reported that those mothers had accepted that they needed help. While it is easy to criticize wrong treatment we need to be able to put forward a better way of handling issues especially solo parents so that the child’s right to an ‘Ideal Family’ is preserved. What that family is would need to be fairly broad considering the social conditions today. The behaviour of men & contraception use need to be used as ways to prevent unwanted babies which is obviously the worst start in life a child could have. Once we have a child with willing parents (parent) there needs to be suitable financial support & education to give the children every opportunity to thrive.
Bonnie – Wise words. The fact is NZ’ers kill a kiddie every 4 or 5 weeks – these little ones don’t kill themselves. They do that further along the track. Fact is a baby born across the ditch has a 50% higher chance of surviving childhood, than a baby born here in New Zealand. None of this is Oranga Tamariki’s fault – we need to step further back, as you’ve indicated.
I did think that a couple of the Hawkes Bay apparent- social-workers looked like old slappers – but that’s not the point either – and I know that the police hate doing those pick-ups – but Oranga Tamariki (God forgive me for defending a govt dept) are not the cause of babies being born into situations likely to harm, batter, torture, or kill them.
The fact that pious anti-abortionists are indifferent about the fate of little ones born unwanted, is something that they damn well need start explaining in the face of our dreadful kid-killing stats. But if whanau and some of the really good NGO’s are unable to prevent the abuse and murder of the innocents, govt needs to step in.
Historically, this has all been thrashed out before, and never adequately addressed – blaming OT is convenient scapegoating, which could well suit politicians, and solves nothing for the children.
Babies Lives Matter as much as Black Lives Matter, but we may have to video them being snuffed out to get anything done about the circumstances which cause some babies to be born into hell on earth.
Online BBC docs about street-living women in the south of England, identifies them all as having started life in care.
It may not be much better here, and the best thing is for it not to happen – blaming OT is little different from Chinese who used to punish their doctors for not curing them – and I’m certainly cynical enough to believe that it suits govt just fine for us to do that, rather than look at the huge dystopian picture.
Snow White: “None of this is Oranga Tamariki’s fault….”
Exactly. OT must pick up the pieces when little ones’ lives are damaged or ended.
“…a couple of the Hawkes Bay apparent- social-workers…”
I watched that video. As I recall, the social workers were Maori. Not surprising, given that as I understand things – and given also that the children they must protect are disproportionately Maori – OT’s staff is largely Maori. That has, I believe, been the case since the late 1980s/early 1990s, when the structural shift away from the old DSW was implemented.
“…but Oranga Tamariki (God forgive me for defending a govt dept) are not the cause of babies being born into situations likely to harm, batter, torture, or kill them.”
I think it’s fair to defend OT. Its staff must do the ghastly work of child protection: work that most of the rest of us could not manage. I certainly wouldn’t have the stomach for it.
“…our dreadful kid-killing stats. But if whanau and some of the really good NGO’s are unable to prevent the abuse and murder of the innocents, govt needs to step in.”
Precisely. I know that many people – including Martyn – condemn OT’s contemporary approach: uplift at birth based on known risk factors. And it sounds callous and cruel in the extreme. I’m also a parent: the thought of it rips my heart out.
But would anybody wish to return to the days when child protection services uplifted babies and children only when harm was known to have occurred? Or the police were obliged to retrieve the – often horribly battered – corpses of the innocents? Speaking for myself, most emphatically not. Over and over in the past, I’ve watched the consequences of child abuse and murder play out in the courts.
OT’s prime objective is to look out for our children. It isn’t its job to play nursemaid to hopeless parents, although I note that some now expect this of it.
“Historically, this has all been thrashed out before, and never adequately addressed – blaming OT is convenient scapegoating….”
Never adequately addressed in the sense that some talking heads and activists apparently aren’t willing to accept that the blame for child abuse and deaths lies at the feet of the perpetrators. The difficult thing for many is that Maori are overrepresented in the statistics. Unfortunately, that’s undisputable. People need to be honest about it and face up to it.
I’m well aware that many citizens believe that people do these things because they’re Maori. I disagree: I think that’s far too one-dimensional an explanation. The risk factors used by OT don’t, to my knowledge, include “being Maori”. Nor should they.
But Maori themselves need to be honest about who is abusing and killing our children. If – as will often be the case – the problem is poor parenting practices, those same practices are likely to be evident in the wider whanau. Therefore fostering to extended family might not protect the child. Issues like crime, gang affiliation and drug and alcohol abuse may also be evident in the wider family.
I admire the heroic work being done by OT, even though it doesn’t always get it right. Think how bad things would be here, were it the case that OT had never been established.
being Maori always lurks around behind the scenes as a risk factor. at core there is a lack of trust that Maori are capable of looking after their own. and yes there are individual Maori whanau where tamariki need to be made safe. but as a collective Maori are quite capable of dealing with the issues if given the right to do so and if given support to develop alternative Maori ways of dealing with our whanau who cant look after their tamariki. there has been no such rights even entertained as a possibility nor has there been support. its called institutional racism.
have some trust that Maori can come up with a better system for their own. and show others how to do it. https://www.facebook.com/Breakfaston1/videos/363791317606063/UzpfSTE1OTQ1MjY5ODI6Mjc1MjA2NDM5NTAyMjU3OA/?sk=h_chr
our maori leaders are going to start stepping up regardless
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/418854/no-way-oranga-tamariki-allowed-to-take-babies-from-hospital-waitemata-dhb
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