The jaw dropping move to cut Oranga Tamariki oversight by removing the Children’s Commissioner is so dangerously unhinged as a solution you honestly wonder how on earth it’s gotten this close to happening.
To date, Minister Carmel Sepuloni has moved heaven and earth to be as uncommunicative as possible on the proposed changes while Minister Kelvin Davis is missing in action.
The media have been forced to contact the Prime Minister directly over these changes and her refusal to give clear answers is alarming many critics of Oranga Tamariki.
Their proposed plan is to remove the Children’s Commissioner for a faceless bureaucratic panel that will be rolled into the Education Review Office.
This is the same Education Review Office that seemed incapable of spotting sexual abuse by teachers for decades at Dilworth.
Oranga Tamariki is granted some of the most extreme powers the State has. The power to remove your child at birth demands a check and balance of the most extreme caution, which has been utterly lacking at Oranga Tamariki.
To now hear that the Government will quietly remove the oversight of its greatest champion for Children’s rights and hide this in ERO is the exact opposite solution to the problems we’ve had at Oranga Tamariki.
This is not about protecting the children the State takes, this is about protecting the State from accusations of abuse while those children are in its care!
This is an outrageous ‘solution’ that puts the welfare of the child second to protecting the State from legal action.
This is ‘kindness’, but to the State, not the children the state abuses!
Seeing as Māori children are consistently overrepresented in these statistics, hiding accountability manages to also entrench systematic racism.
We need more oversight of Oranga Tamariki, not less!
First published on Waatea News.
Oranga Tamariki is granted some of the most extreme powers the State has. The power to remove your child at birth demands a check and balance of the most extreme caution, which has been utterly lacking at Oranga Tamariki.
The second sentence is now out of date. Check the data before spouting off. The number of uplifts has dropped through the floor and it is now much more difficult to arrange an uplift – lot’s more evidence and interaction is required before this LAST RESORT. Or would you rather just leave the kids to fend for themselves?
F*****g horrifies me what I read about what was going on at Dilworth School, Remuera, Auckland, I used to play football and cricket against those poor kids when we were at school. There have been a lot of enablers here in NZ in positions of power who have enabled these repugnant extra curricular activities to go on for a long time. Time they were brought to account.
There’s a good article in the latest NZ Listener about this, written by a former Children’s Commissioner. Agrees with your comments Martyn.
Well done MSD, I applaud your exemplary actions in winning the test case, brought by abused children. And how you managed to defend against having any culpability. Tax dollars well spent on the best legal representation, that’s out of the reach of ordinary citizens, and of course, the private detectives used by MSD, to dig dirt on the victims. Well done MSD, you have set the standard in society for the rest of us to emulate. Unfortunately the bar is set quite low.
This is just a continuation to a long history of the public sector covering up its misdeeds, in the initial stage, till the passing of time finishes off the whitewashing. De rigueur since colonisation. We know some of the more egregious aspects, from colonisation, or more recently, with the children harmed in state care, but we’ll only ever see the tip of the iceberg. And if the director of the Public Service Commission has his way, soon even the tip will disappear below the veil of history.
The Public Service Commission and it’s grand Code of Conduct, should primarily be a guardian for the public good. But instead of seeking to uncover misdeeds, wherever they can… covering up, appears to be the order of the day, with the perpetrators then emboldened by the lack of scrutiny. How many complaints from the public about breaches of the code, has the Public Service Commission ever been upheld?
Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Three? Two? One? Or None?
Is uplifting or torturing or sexually abusing children, against the Code of Conduct? And if it is, should the boss of the Public Service Commission, instead of trying to cover up even further, instead be making an apology for the turning of a blind eye, to what happened? Will those responsible for turning a blind eye ever be disciplined, fined, jailed, demoted, fired, or even receive a stern talking to?…Don’t hold you breath, for Mr Hughes has their back.
Rolling the Children’s Commissioner function into the ERO…is the final solution…like the necessity to seal a mine full of truths in need of reputation management, for the greater good.
When you consider each victim of abuse and their required compensation, alongside the salaries of the bosses of the Public Service Commission and MSD, it almost seems obscene. Could their big bucks really just be hush money? Obviously to any decent person, the amount of oversight provided by the Children’s Commissioner needs to be greatly expanded. And only when NZ reaches the point, that the abuse of those in state care, is but a dim memory of a more barbaric age…only then, should any reduction in oversight be contemplated. To put it bluntly, what happened to those children, has been an atrocity, yet Mr Hughes wants to improve the covering up of such atrocities.
Is that really what Mr Hughes wants to be remembered for. Are you so proud of your actions, that you would be happy for a TV crew to do an indepth Louis Theroux style doco on the whole situation? Or would it be the case that if you got wind of such a doco, you’d be on the blower to NZonAIR to get any funding pulled, and badgering higher up, to get it all shut down.
Speaking of oversight, what ever happened with the setting up of a Commissioner for the Elderly, to increase protection for this other vulnerable sector of society? Or has the Public Service Commission in all its wisdom, already managed to quietly consign that proposal, to the bureaucratic waste basket of history. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Trish. Thank you so much for your eloquent expression of the truth – I’m going to have to reread this, and am trying not to get personal about Peter Bachelor Hughes, but nearly all the dynamics involving children in this country are almost criminally negligent, which, apart from being cruel, are breathtakingly socially myopic.
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