Oranga Tamariki is a Frankenstein monster, a neoliberal welfare experiment conjured up by Bill English and big data.
Luxon has already promised to revive this horror process if elected in 2023.
So what is the ‘social investment’ model?
Let’s look at Oranga Tamariki.
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, 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.
Oranga Tamariki has always been about saving the State money and the welfare of the child is secondary to that!
Since the Royal Inquiry into Historic Abuse, Public Services Commission Boss Peter Hughes, has done all he can to remove OT oversight and roll it into the ERO so that it saves the State money if children are abused in our care.
Public Services Commission Boss Peter Hughes was the chief executive at MSD in the 2000s and oversaw obscene tactics that included hiring private detectives to dig dirt on victims who were complaining about being abused in state care in a Test case that if MSD had lost would have cost the State untold in damages.
Peter and his elite Wellington Bureaucratic class want to remove the threat of costs and damages from poorly funded social services and the ‘social investment model’ is a means to spend money on the most costliest of those social problems without actually universally funding services.
For the State, amputating social responsibilities and the legal threat of damages frees them up from having to spend any money in the first place.
Rather than creating more taxes like a Capital Gains Tax or Financial Transaction Tax to properly funded the welfare of children in State care, it’s easier to amputate the responsibility altogether.
Social Investment is a bullshit term for ending universal provision of welfare under the guise of providing more resource for the most at risk target demographic.
We need properly funded child welfare where their welfare is the issue, not cost saving to the State! We need actual oversight, to my astonishment Jacinda is refusing to provide that.
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it’s no more than computerising middle class prejudice to give it a ‘scientific’ cover and pretend it’s not just prejudice…bit like the whole eugenics thing.
I don’t agree that the social investment model is to avoid paying compensation for children abused in care, but certainly agree that it is all about cost cutting in the distant future. But the model misses a major factor in it’s assessment – most of the ‘clients’ of OT are from lower socio-economic parts of the population and the idea that they can somehow extricate themselves from their structural disadvantage is significantly flawed – any solutions moving forward must consider the confound of poverty in the families that come into contact with OT. If NZ was able to bring ‘invest’ in those on the lowest incomes, much of the ongoing friction between OT and this part of the NZ population would evaporate.
exactly how do you reduce child poverty without reducing their families poverty?
What a grotesque story. How certain Maori have been confused! And how can ordinary NZs have so little pride in the country and their fellow citizens to allow this sort of thing to continue and just push it away with some negative cliche about bad parenting or irresponsibility.
This tells a story that could apply. – 2014 Film Philomena from the 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son, and a 50-year Search by Martin Sixsmith.
https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2014/01/20/philomena-must-see-film-magdalene-laundries-forced-adoptions/
Tuam juveniles – were some trafficked to America, how many deaths and secret burial grounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoulaehrD_I
This is in the style of thinking behind the Irish Magdalene Laundries – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magdalene_Sisters
So the solution to everything is to just throw more money at the problem is it? That’s worked so well already hasn’t it…
Martyn (and others), what would need to change in the approach of early identification plus wrap around support / investment so that it exceeds your expectations?
Much like health, education and many other societal issues just throwing more money at it doesn’t actually change anything. The exception being of course Labour’s master stroke wealth creation plan for the property owning class, that wealth transfer plan exceeded everyone’s expectations.
New Zealand is a small and relatively poor country. We don’t have the economy or money to afford uncapped spending. This data led approach may well be wrong but at least it’s new thinking and a challenge to the status quo. We need more of this as there has to be a better way. Just accepting what we have now is to accept ongoing child abuse, inter generational welfare dependency and that the lives of the under class must be lived in perpetual misery.
The classic example is academies in the UK and US which for the lucky few who get in change lives. Sadly, Unions hate them as they threaten their business model and monopoly.
What’s better, targeted investment lifting the worse affected out of the cycle of abuse and welfare at the expense of universality (plus some cost savings) or just pumping more money out with no expectation of reciprocity?
And Yeti sings the same bullshit apologist shit doesn’t Yeti?
Of course more fucking money is the solution!
Tax the rich and spend it on social infrastructure.
A financial transaction tax would do that.
I am so sick of hearing left wing apologists support scum bag wellington bureaucrats and their ‘we don’t have any money’ crap.
Tax the corporate elites, tax the rich and tax the banks.
Then we can look after our children.
as far as kids go well trained better paid social workers with lower caseloads and cull of the time serving dross is step one…the organisations ‘letterhead’ is unimportant if you don’t fix the fundamentals.
The whole OT problem starts with people not looking after their own children & claiming it’s someone else’s responsibility to provide for them. NZ is now approaching the 3rd generation of institutionalised welfare dependency creating it’s entirely predictable problems so for anything to change a significant circuit breaker is required.
how about incentivising small families rather than subsidising large ones, all the research says if you have 1or2 kids you can devote time and resources to them and they have a greater chance of success…drop a couple of brats on an annual basis is practically a guarantee of poverty…
but I’m entitled to as many of gods little angels as I want…yes you are but don’t expect others to subsidise them
The height of hypocrisy…
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/paula-bennett-i-was-grateful-to-nz-taxpayers-but-its-time-to-stop-depending-on-the-state/4T2AYGBZCUPWXG3JI34RDUSWPM/
Yeti – You are falling between the cracks here. From the one view there is a societal problem that needs fixing because it shows up in sad people who can’t live a satisfactorily happy life and are a trouble to themselves and society and, on the other hand. individuals that have developed a set of behaviours that enable them to manage their daily lives in unsatisfactory way to themselves and society but who are stuck in these behaviours. It could be said that they are conservatives within the lower class of society. and that they are a reverse image of the wealthy who often also don’t lead satisfactory lives.
What the lower income and class people require is assistance, also along with their friends and whanau, so they can manage their lives more satisfactorily, have achievable goals to work towards that aren’t stomped on by government and its agencies and contractors halfway through, so that every advantage gained is diminished by the cancellation of some other advantage. They could get off the treadmill of behaviours that lead to bad consequences for them if the effort to change was met with good consequences.
They feel particularly the bruising from living in a lying world, run by con artists who are in power and are connected to the financilal world. This world requires skills of duplicity to negotiate within it. Those who are unsuccessful in fitting the template required have to make up their own lies to provide them with their own story to fit their daily setting. Lies we all believe in? One is that our politicians intend to make NZ better for the people, as they promise. That is just one lie that we absorb and work around, there are so many others.
A little tale from Denmark’s Hans Christian Anderson about The Emperor’s New Clothes recounts what could happen when reality suddenly appears from the fog of lies and we laugh because it is such a rare and unlikely happening. And if you have read all of this, it is just long enough for the reader to have dismissed it as rubbish, the vision of the naked truth is unattractive for those used to our daily fanciful fare.
Putin – your novel fiend. Why not try Putin when you are looking for a new person to hate. Forget all those lesser types doing objectionable, awful things – they’ve lost their novelty, they are shopworn. Use Putin now as your object of ridicule, the scapegoat of the day, for the heaping of all dissatisfactions. This is how all humans run their lives successfully. Projection! Always some scapegoat bears (get it) all the rotten projections of self (deep psychological analysis here).
While we are examining behaviours and thinking about those we don’t like and why, we could well read the famous story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. It could help to explain how and why we condemn Putin so deeply from the midst of a world neck deep in disgraceful behaviours that no longer traumatise us, if they ever did!
“The Lottery” is a story which shows the complexity and capability of human behavior. Something immoral, like stoning a person to death once a year, is a normal occurrence. The main character, Tessie Hutchinson, is the victim of the lottery.
The Lottery and Human Behavior – 1674 Words | 123 Help Me
https://www.123helpme.com › essay › The-Lottery-and-H…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery
This should have gone into another slot!! I know https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2022/03/13/putin-the-masochist-is-more-dangerous-than-putin-the-sadist/
Thought provoking though. The Lottery referred to above is interesting and relevant, apparently always in human society. The scapegoating is particularly bad when it comes to women and children, if… they… didn’t hadn’t got pregnant then …. People blamed for being people and being affect4ed by their bodies and genes, we know that receives sooo much consideration when you’re transiting but when you are following natural creative paths it’s different.
“Wellington Bureaucrats worship their new Big Data Fascism, Orac”
Love the Blake’s 7 reference. Cant believe any Wellington bureaucrat looks as cool as them though.
Blakes 7 was pretty cool . . remember watching it when I was a kid.
Can’t we just carpet bomb certain areas and then start again?
Is that what they did or do in the UK Andrew?