Here we go…
Lawyer claims decision on ‘Moana’ case was biased, appeals to High Court
The mother of a Māori girl in the care of Pākehā foster parents has appealed a judge’s ruling that would see the girl stay with them.
Last month Family Court Judge Peter Callinicos ruled the 6-year-old girl “Moana”, traumatised and neglected before being taken into care, could stay with the foster parents at their house in rural Hawke’s Bay.
Oranga Tamariki and the girl’s iwi wanted her removed from the home she had lived in for the part three years because they did not think the couple could meet her cultural needs.
Judge Callinicos criticised Oranga Tamariki for putting ideology ahead of a child’s best interests.
In his 145-page decision, he dismissed Oranga Tamariki’s application to remove Moana from the foster parents, and he has appointed the foster father as guardian. He also appointed as guardian the woman who cares for Moana’s younger brother in Wellington.
The decision includes stark criticism of, its chief executive and numerous of its staff, though the judge said his intention was to traverse the facts that led to the situation and not to criticise.
…what most commentators don’t understand about this cruelty is that Oranga Tamariki must destroy Family Court Judge Peter Callinicos because this case is actually a test case of Oranga Tamariki’s critical race theory woke madness.
There are a dozen of these cases where OT has gone back to white step families who have had Maori children placed with them for years only to now tell them they are being uplifted again, that’s why this case was so important.
Let’s rewind for a moment here.
Once Labour took over, OT scrambled to hide the neoliberal funding mechanisms that drive OT.
Bill English’s ‘investment’ model argued that it was cheaper to uplift children from dysfunctional families rather than pay all the downstream costs of prison and the Justice system.
To streamline the process of bypassing parental legal rights and due process, OT had parental laws changed, weaponised their 0800 number and barred parents from accessing legal aid to fight these uplifts.
Researching Whānau for uplifts was also too resource consuming and didn’t fit the new model.
National perfected the art of waving dead brown babies in our faces while screaming ‘something must be done’, and no one checked what they did.
This neoliberal experiment in welfare fell quickly out of favour with Labour once Newsroom exposed what they were doing and insanely OT adopted critical race theory that declared no Maori child could be raised by White families, this sparked dozens of cases where Maori children who had been placed with white step families and told they were ‘forever homes’, were suddenly after years of living with those white step families yanked out of those homes despite the protests of psychologists.
Judge Peter Callinicos highlighted the deep corruption, lies and manipulations of OT as they sought to steal back Maori children despite that being worse for the child’s psychological development and well being!
That’s why it’s now a woke wash attack on the Judge and him supposedly ‘bullying’ lying and corrupt social workers.
Don’t get me wrong, we all agree at the point of uplift that Maori agencies should step in, but that’s not what’s happening here, these Maori children have been with white step families for years!
If the nation wasn’t so focused on Covid, the lunacy of this woke critical race theory would be politically damaging Labour every day.
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After your last post on this, I went on a deep dive to look for child abuse statistics in NZ.
Complete figures were only available I think for the 2019 year but it showed that something like 70% of uplifted children are placed with whanau, another amount (on the graph looked to be maybe 10%) are then placed with other Iwi. A quick look at OTs figures for the last available quarter shows placements in non ethnic matches probably currently around 10% of total.
So if that is true, OT was turned on its head for the sake of probably less than 20% of children, with the annual number of children uplifted something in the region of 700 that year. That’s 140 kids of all ethnicities. (Figures not given solely for Maori) so lets say 50% – that’s 70 kids a year going to non Maori homes.
So all this drama, cost and personal heartache for children and foster families is because 70 kids a year are being raised in non Maori families.
The takeover of OT by Maori is entirely political and ideologically driven (CRT?/ He Pua Pua perhaps?) Even the termination of the despised uplifts at birth policy doesnt fit with the figures that show that 70% of murdered children are under the age of 2.
So clearly the government doesnt have the welfare of children foremost in its thoughts. Kindness, Transparency, yeah right.
“the lunacy of this woke critical race theory”. Please call it what it is, “the lunacy of this racism”.
When you think about the fact they are removing a child from their step-parent because the step-parent is white it’s on a par with banning Maori kids from the public swimming pools in 1950s Pukekohe because they are brown. The pendulum of hate.
We must remember Peter Ellis and what he went through. Abuse of children brings powerful feelings to the fore. And hysteria can grow. Parents should be helped not hounded. Then there would be less of a tail leading on to an unsatisfactory future. Thank goodness for firm and strong men holding the fort on this. Women can buckle under pressure, or become overly judgmental or emotionally OTT. Dealing with emotions is hard, we have lost Barrister Greg King as a result of all the conflicting stuff.
People with a thinking mind and soul and heart don’t carry on like this, from any point of view or ethnicity.
We all know that children can be devastated when parents die or go away and leave them, and if taken from long-term and accepted caregivers, -their supports, their care-givers, their provider, the children will suffer and may never feel part of what is supposed to be their own family. Children aren’t toys to be played with, put up on a shelf, back in a box, between outings, when it suits the PTB in their background.
True social investment requires heart, reliable , kind and regular routines, not treatment that leaves mental scars if not physical ones. NZ employed a woman from UK to run this local, race- and ethnicity-sensitive organisation. I think Bill Engliah got mixed up with religious ideas which became prioritised. Religion can be very cold and formula-ridden, full of prejudices.
*This is horror story how the UK treated children and parents after WW2,. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/09/uk-child-deportations-of-50s-most-catastrophic-child-abuse-in-memory
*This from Scotland after a hearing to deal finally with a matter. The Judge was unequivocal: The judge criticised the social workers involved, saying that their handling of the case had been “fundamentally flawed” and he found in summary that “these proceedings are so fatally flawed as to be incompetent” and that the children concerned had been separated and subjected to repeated cross-examinations almost as if the aim was to force confessions rather than to assist in therapy. Where two children made similar statements about abuse this appeared to be the result of “repeated coaching”.[ (Think Peter Ellis.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
*There was a very unfortunate case around 2000 in the UK. This is part of a study of it: (Use keywords in google – ‘miscarriage of justice in uk children taken from parents suspected of sex abuse’) to see extract from google book -‘ Child Welfare: Child abuse and child protection’ edited by Nick Frost page 157
Two consultant paediatricians got a bee in their bonnets to put it mildly. In 1987 children were separated from their parents, ‘taken into care’, for months to a year’; authority argued whether the number was 113 or 197 children removed in six weeks. Everyone looked sideways at the parents, the children thought there was something bad about their parents; the parents felt hesitant to take any of their children to hospital for otherwise normal problems.
(Note, reading around the relevant extract, this area around Middlesbrough had suddenly fallen into poverty with job losses of 46,000, from being a thriving industrial area, and had unemployment of 28% at one time. People were under stress.)
Also I add this which relates one person’s experience with accusations from social workers with one-track minds. http://netk.net.au/Williams/Southall10.asp
Well researched and written!
God knows why Wira Gardiner would enter the fray in this joke of a department?
Probably because he is maori.
“If the nation wasn’t so focused on Covid, the lunacy of this woke critical race theory would be politically damaging Labour every day.”
I truly hope it DOES damage LINO politically. Radical identity politics is in the political DNA of LINO and the so-called Greens. Maybe an utter annihilation in the polls would reshape LINO back into a Labour party, especially if the wokest MPs are the ones to lose their seats.
Anyone who has to go to the high court to get a child back really really really needs a reality check.
The central claim was that the child would not receive “adequate” inculcation into Maori culture if brought up by a non Maori family, despite the foster parents having gone to considerable trouble in that direction as shown in court.
Would that be an issue if the fosterers were Maori? Based on my observations most Maori don’t have much to do with Maori culture anyway, can’t speak the language and live a Kiwi culture like almost everyone else. A kid in their care would likely grow up with a similar outlook. How is that a bad thing?
This is pure racism, by definition.
That just let’s orange children off the hook. I always hear this or that social worker is trying real hard for the children then go real quiet when kids get molested or murdered by OT staff.
Typical.
Good article Martyn. Thanks.
I see the judiciary is tearing itself apart over this with all sorts of accusations of bullying of judge Callinicos by other judges; all initiated by Wellington bureaucrats. This is a breach of the independence of the judiciary and should alarm us all.
The biggest victims are the children who now are either forced to live with constant abuse, or pillared around by dysfunction OT staff with their latest tick box from management, trying to find the ‘tick box’ family for their critical race theory.
OT knew the family were pakeha in the first place, why place her with them, they can’t change their ethnicity? Also highly likely this child is also of pakeha origins too, so where it the support for that part of their heritage? In woke school, do you just throw that part of your heritage away?
OT should be forced to fund additional cultural support for the child aka Te Reo lessons from native speakers! Case closed.
The child is apparently already seeing whanau in the holidays!
More pathetic court wastage and attacks on the judge who put the Childs needs before woke enablement which doesn’t fly in wokeville NZ.
Are all people equal or not? I think, they are, some are good, some not so much (the most) and some are bad and it is regardless of the colour of their skin. All have the basic human rights to life, fredom and safety (UN Declaration of Human Rights). These are the basic rights. The worldview and culture are evidently secondary, people can choose the one they prefer (some convert to Islam, others to Christianity, Hinduism or adopt the culture of the country they have moved to, some decide to return to the traditions of their ancestors like many Maoris here etc.). A Maori child is not different from a Non-Maori child, he or she has the same needs and should have the same rights. The most importan need of a child is that of love. Moana was deprived of love for first three long years of her life while OT tried to find a foster family for her. The opinion that Maori environment and society is in some way special and more important for a child than safety and love is false as well as the opinion (that we hear more and more) that Maoris have some special and better way to grow their children than Non-Maoris which is just a kind of wishful thinking and propaganda. If it were true Moana and other Maori children would have been cared for by their wider whanau, hapu or iwi (as we hear that Maoris have always done and do) there would not have been the need to find her and others foster families. Where was her whanau, hapu and iwi, when she was tossed to and fro? They either did not know, which shows no special care or they knew but still did not care.
The fact that her birth mother appealled the judgement is just arrogant. Any attempts to uplift her from her foster family based on her ethnicity is blatant racist and unregardful of the basic rights and needs of the child and absolutely cruel toward her as well as toward the foster parents.
Alexandra
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