Hand on heart, news of this decision had me so angry and enraged that I backed off, thought about life, the issues that are important to me as a human being and waited patiently for this offensive and insane decision to be wiped.
It wasn’t…
Questions left hanging as Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni hangs up
Stuff reporter Aaron Smale attempted to interview Minister Carmel Sepuloni about the Oranga Tamariki Oversight Bill. The conversation ended with her hanging up on him. This is his retelling of what went down.
…so fuck it, let’s ride!
Demand for Children’s Commissioner to be retained amid Government reforms
Jacinda Ardern’s Government is facing mounting pressure about a proposed law to disestablish the role of the Children’s Commissioner as Amnesty International, the Human Rights Commission and Save the Children raise serious concerns about it.
Children’s Commissioner Judge Frances Eivers said the Oversight of Oranga Tamariki System and Children and Young People’s Commission Bill would “dilute” the commission’s power to advocate for children and young people.
This obscenity of a decision to strip oversight away from Orange Tamariki is the latest assault on allowing any oversight of Orange Tamariki from occurring because Critical Race Theory has raised its ugly head here and it needs to be amputated.
Before I start the slaughter, let’s recap what the hell Orange Tamariki is.
It is a Frankenstein monster, a neoliberal welfare experiment conjured up by Bill English and big data.
The argument is that children from backgrounds with specific features were the worst in terms of cost to the state, so if the state stepped in and removed the children quickly enough, that cost will fall.
To do this they passed law reducing the legal rights of parents over children, streamlined their 0800 numbers and weaponised uplifts.
They also ensured that people with children taken from them are ineligible for legal aid so they couldn’t fight back legally.
This was all going dandy up until Newsroom started showing the video evidence of cops stealing babbies at birth.
The heat went on this neoliberal madness and in an attempt to curry favour with the new pro Maori Labour Party, Orange Tamariki started taking Maori kids sent to live with white parents in an insane Critical Race Theory conclusion that white people can’t look after brown kids.
This latest demented view of the world has been ripped to shreds in court and produced the inevitable claims of racism when it’s OT being the racist.
NOW they want to cut out the oversight of the Children’s Commissioner and dilute any real ability to monitor OT abuses because the agency created to watch over OT (The Independent Children’s Monitor) is being folded into the Education Review Office for Christ’s sake…
Judith Aitken, who was chief executive of ERO in the 1990s, has been following the royal commission and is part of the Royal Commission Forum, an independent group of interested parties who give advice and feedback to the inquiry.
She has been horrified to learn of abuse, including sexual abuse, that occurred in schools that ERO reported on when she was in charge. The abuse was never picked up in those reports. One such school is Dilworth, which has been the subject of criminal investigations and convictions for offences that span decades.
Aitken says it underlines that ERO was only ever designed to inspect the performance of schools at the educational level. ERO was never designed to investigate complaints that arise from vulnerable children in state care. She says the restructure will embed a flawed system that is not up to the job.
…if ERO couldn’t spot endemic sexual child abuse at Dilworth for decades, how the Christ will they spot it in Orange Tamariki?
Labour inherited a neoliberal experiment in welfare whose goal is to step in early and save the State down stream costs, now they are attempting to camouflage the abuse of Orange Tamariki via an obtuse veil of bureaucracy with no oversight from the Children’s Commissioner.
Sepuloni has somehow managed to make state abuse of those they are charged to care for worse!
Why isn’t anyone demanding her sacking?
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Why are you surprised? No one in this country gives a fuck about kids, , this is for the good of the politicians. Carrmel Sepuloni is Paula Benefit. In fact they are the two faces of the same coin. What ever kool aid you are drinking, you should stop it and ask the simply questions : Qui bono?
R B stole my words WHY BE SURPRISED.This government wants total control of Water DHB’s Councils . zThey show no concern or care for those at the bottom of the heap especially the children. This country gave them total control as the opposition was in disarray and they are determined to grab this once in a lifetime oppetunity. to take control and pander to the upper middle class not effected by covid.
You get what you pay for Martyn.
In this instance the state has for decades been extracting money from the middle class via taxes only to hand it to the lowest and least able in society on the basis of how many kids they have. The net result is a sort of upside-down eugenics experiment aimed at raising the next generation in dysfunctional and abusive settings. This feeds into all the negative statistics we see in our society: Illiteracy, crime, addiction, depression and suicide. Fix this and you fix almost everything!!!
Oranga Tamariki is in an invidious position: damned if they take children but also damned if they hesitate and yet another kid gets bashed to death in a meth fuelled rage. Who’d want their job!!
gotta say andy can’t argue with that..
.but it is a prime example of and all Maori should take note… having te reo on the corporate letterhead means precisely fuck all.
Andrew I don’t agree with everything you’ve said there, but the DPB is definitely the brontosaurus in the room when people talk about fixing “child povvidy”. The DPB was originally intended to help women out of awkward situations – not to be a lifestyle. And it’s very clear that fatherless kids are at a big disadvantageous in life. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/18/533062607/poverty-dropouts-pregnancy-suicide-what-the-numbers-say-about-fatherless-kids
Andrew There probably does need to be a tapering off of benefits after X number of children, but I can’t see it happening. I know personally of one single Somalian woman in social housing, who thought it wonderful that government gives her more money every time she has a baby.
Women carry the can, and the “blame” for fatherless children, can be clueless about how hard it can be for both them and their children growing up without good male role models, and ideally, men could step up here, as they have started to do about family violence.
This probably can be done, but when I look at Roger Douglas, architect here of neo-liberalism, and another state house boy who pulled the ladder up after him, the prospect is gloomy, but there are a lot of good decent men out there, and we all know them, but whether Parliament is the best arena for them to work in, looks questionable, unfortunately.
Andrew You don’t get the point. The matter starts with childhood of the parents and solidarity with theor whanau and hapu. If they all cling together and follow the same bad upbringing and behaviour then it just continues over generations. Maori have set up various systems some better than others; government should get a good system and get behind it in a big way, then have jobs for these young people. Give them a chance to show what they can do. They won’t all change straight away but at present there is little hope for anyone to have a happy life. The middle class that are doing all right keep their eyes up and don’t see the strugglers, and if they do what can they do? It’s a government task to act for its citizens to achieve better living standards, not being given demeaning charity from the better off.
Part of the problem is that professional people and qualifications are the ongoing casualties of the past 30 years, so just when people knew better, they got rid of the experienced and qualified people and filled the institutions with Rogernomics types with little knowledge about anything but business.
Sadly fucked up people are not like business and you can’t make it work on a balance sheet.
What is needed is really good and qualified people making decisions in government departments, aka people who are clinical psychologists, doctors, police detectives and qualified social workers who have real experience (aka not the paid for bums on seats qualifications that are worthless now) or those put into the workforce because they are cheap and just exist to tick boxes.
Increasingly people writing reports, are incompetent and destroy lives.
“There were some early signs, however, that the social worker might be out of her depth. The review filed in November 2018 said Moana had a close relationship with her grandfather. It transpired her grandfather had died five months earlier.”
It is outrageous that those types of people have been allowed into the wokeforce of NZ and then are making mistakes, the institution covering it up, and getting away with it, to uplift poor kids!
All the money is going into lawyers to protect the incompetent not the victims of the incompetent!
Note many of these types of reports from ‘investigators’ are from the same ilk, they are just full of fictions from the perspective of an unqualified person who is making big decisions that effect policy but are instead making everything worse by subjective reports that are not based on facts, are down right wrong and wrong conclusions made on the back of it.
Probation reports, health and disability reports etc, are full of mistakes – and change the lives for those who the reports are about.
System does not work and the anti vaxx aka anti expert culture has been spawned in government who allows mistakes to happen repeatedly and then covers it up – thus trust in government departments is being eroded.
saveNZ. Right again. It’s very disillusioning, maybe more so when Ardern rode into power on the back of child povidy. Few care about children in this country, but the dumbing down of public servants, teachers, nurses-who-see-black-blood, has to have been deliberate, is now entrenched as an accepted status quo , and we’ve gone all biblical sacrificing kids to dubious gods. At best, somebody in opposition will call Sepuloni out, if there’s anybody at all, who can do so without opportunistic grandstanding.
Some of the public servant types involved in this sort of decision making are unbelievably thick, as I’m sure you know, and ignorant, and unforgivably polarising; I think English a mad little man- not that that helps.
“the wokeforce of NZ”
Well put, saveNZ.
certain govt departments are the dumping ground for ‘box ticked’ incompetents to keep the diversity figures good….depts that are regarded as unimportant, we’ve all got an MSD story.. and on the other side of the coin try to find a maori or pasifika person at Treasury that doesn’t have a mop in their hand…
part of the proliferation of paper shuffling posts in these depts is to provide jobs for the terminally incompetent.
I just feel sorry for the untrained and uninformed frontline staff in these depts who have the function of being whipping boys for the public and shields for the managers…helping the public is not part of their intended role.
Failed leadership is the seemingly obvious answer to all our woes. I know our dear leader can’t do everything but it appears she is trying to, but not very well.
Martyn you seem to be fair-minded in your articles and give credit where it is due. It is frustrating (an understatement really) that this government has all these across-portfolio issues that they are not only ignoring but actually exacerbating and then concealing the consequences. A transformational government it is but in the worst possible way.
I don’t mind your support for the PM for the covid response even though I have always disagreed with mandates. So good on you for showing up all the bad stuff like this OT disaster.
I wish it was in the MSM!!
Let’s face it. Labour hardly knows which way is up any more. FGS keep the new Children’s Commissioner as Oranga Tamariki stinks and Maori mothers who have had their children just about ripped off their breasts don’t think it is a real, helpful Maori entity. It’s a puritan, pursed-lipped middle class one with no love for humans at its heart just cold unrelenting judgments of negativity.
Labour in the UK kicked out Corbyn because of cross-eyed people at the centre of the Party, where its heart used to be. Now we have got their https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/462025/political-leaders-should-get-off-their-high-horses-jim-bolgerThird Way followers wreaking havoc on havoc in NZ to our sensitivities and attempts to be good-natured, practical and good-living people.
Listen to Bolger, the great family man? But he’s National so has a head start on being po-faced.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/462025/political-leaders-should-get-off-their-high-horses-jim-bolger
And one of our Supreme Court judges has turned down a mother’s plea to have shared custody of her 12 year old son suspended while the father remains unvaccinated. The child must have diversity of opinion and presumably be able to make up his own mind in the same wilful lack of understanding and the ignorance that pervades so many NZs old and young who don’t know what the hell is happening around them and stand on a bit of ground looking blank like the cattle that were on that landslide some years back. They were rescued with difficulty, but who is going to save the poor, sad NZs struggling to make their way in right-wing NZ, the left wing broken, and flying round in circles calling out in distress.
“Sepuloni has somehow managed to make state abuse of those they are charged to care for worse!
Why isn’t anyone demanding her sacking?”
Because giving idiots more rope works rather well in NZ. This is the idiot who made sure the new disabilities ministry had a head who had no idea what it means to be disabled. No lived experience, which for disabled is the key to understanding the issues around being disabled in NZ.
She is also the minister who talks down to people more and more, the longer she has been in power. Fun to watch her in action being a condescending know it all. You should watch some the performances towards the disabled community – mind you she was a troffing off the disabled before she became an MP – so one should not be surprised.
Ignatius. It’s interesting that you describe Sepuloni as talking down to people. The few times I’ve seen her in action replying to journalists I’ve thought that she appeared very evasive, even if not as adept at evasion as John Key. But I’ll take your word for it, the disabled scenario is unjustifiable, and again it probably reflects the incompetence of the young persons who tell her what to do.
is she from an indigenous aristocracy background? she certainly acts like it
So you’re saying the abolition of the children’s commissioner job comes from Maori resentment rather than its strident condemnation of poverty which I thought? I was pissed the gummint got so pissed at their condemnation by an independent force they abolished it. It would be an indictment .
Can’t see poverty would come second for Maori.
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