Mungo no understand.
We can destroy International Man of Mystery Kamahl Santamaria because glorified quarter of a million dollar autocue readers on the state broadcaster feel triggered, yet nothing happens when Oranga Tamariki lies to the State about sexual harm programs????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Oranga Tamariki hid sexual violence project report – ministers, officials
Oranga Tamariki’s botched sexual violence project was hidden from top officials and the Public Services Commissioner Peter Hughes, who was supposed to have oversight of it.
The Government says what went on was an “incredibly serious” failure by Oranga Tamariki (OT), but Government ministers said they did not know anything about the “mess” that jeopardised the $60 million project.
Last week RNZ revealed the internal report by independent assessors for Oranga Tamariki which last year found the project team was so dysfunctional and inadequate that OT had to shut it down and start over 20 months on.
Hughes who chaired the board of a cross-agency anti-violence joint venture, said OT told him late last year its work was on track.
“I was not aware of the independent review report, which resulted in a programme being closed down,” Hughes told RNZ last Friday.
“It is disappointing I have only found this out now.”
Delays still plague the $15m-a-year programme aimed at boosting support to all children who have been sexually abused.
This is at a time when a new briefing shows OT is dealing with 400 rangatahi in care who have been sexually abused and knows of 1500 instances of sex abuse against children each year.
The April 2021 review that shut down the team said it failed to plan for expanding existing sexual crisis services even though that was central to its 2019-20 Budget bid that snared $60m.
…let me see if I can get this completely straight.
An Oranga Tamariki program to support sexually abused children that was central to gaining access to $60million was so corrupt, so useless, so ineffective that Bureaucrats lied and hid it to other Bureaucrats until the entire fiasco was simply shut down???
No one has been held accountable, no one has faced anything like the media attention for Kamahl Santamaria and BECAUSE of the Kamahl Santamaria story, this story about OT failing so unbelievably has been utterly eclipsed?
How is this happening?
How is Kamahl Santamaria’s misdemeanour MORE IMPORTANT than Wellington Bureaucrats lying and hiding their failures for a $60million program to help children who have been sexually abused????
Why are woke micro aggression policing stories a bigger scandal than Wellington Bureaucrats lying and hiding corrupted taxpayer funded programs to protect and heal children damaged by actual sexual assaults and not imagined ones?
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I thought Kelvin Davis and the Tribal Elite that now run OT were going to stop all of this. Pfffft – next they’ll tell me a separate Maori Health Authority will ‘close the gap’……..
Agree 100%
Because Wokeness or CRITICAL social justice exists to protect and advance the ideology for the purpose of acquiring or maintaining power, not to serve ACTUAL social justice.
Santamaria and Depp vs Heard can be framed as examples of patriarchal entitlement and oppression. The clusterfuck that is OT would be hard to spin for the best PR department and editorials. That hurts the narrative so best ignored.
Terrible. Putting the culture vultures in charge at OT hasn’t helped to improve the lot of disadvantaged children and it may have made things worse for some of them. Media can’t be relied on for anything much.
We desperately need a switched-on Minister for Children, prioritising the present hence their future, instead of wallowing in the past. An intelligent and perceptive maternal woman could be really good, regardless of colour, race, or creed. There must be somebody in government prepared- or permitted to – to champion the children and protect them from public service liars.
The old adage of not biting the hand that feeds you likely applies.
Mr Santamaria doesn’t cough up 50 mill a year as freebie giveaways.
The Government (who own OT) does.
Every media organisation who has supped at the 50 million dollar trough has no interest in pursuing stories detrimental to the Government least this largess be jeopardised.
The media as a whole don’t care about children, exposing corruption/ineptitude. They care about one thing only, tapping into sustainable revenue streams regardless of how these compromise their supposed ethical standards.
Why is it that over the past 2-3 years the msm by and large have sung from the political song sheet so helpfully and kindly provided by the Government? Whether it be Three Waters, Covid, Co-Governance, or other major issues, spin is prioritized, facts are minimized, and incompetence whitewashed.
I hold the Government in some form of obnoxious admiration at their ability to harness the media to their cause with minimal outlay and the occasional covid advertising bonus. A pity that the abused, the children, the sick, the poor, the homeless, and crime victims aren’t rendered such attention as the urgency of maintaining power……
Yep this is concerning. But even more so – why has NZ got such a high rate of sexual and family violence?
Ideally OT should not even need to exist. Yes, children are abused in care – but also, many children are abused in family care and many of these cases are never reported.
My husband supplies services to Wgtn govt departments.
Wokeness, ineptitude and corruption are rife particularly in some departments. As he puts it, the corruption in NZ isnt like in other places, there are the odd bad apple being given drugs for contracts etc but mostly what defines the Wellington public service is ‘People like us’. No, that person with 20 years experience is not woke enough, young enough, brown enough, educated enough etc to be part of our organisation.
This approach is essentially corrupt because it ensures selection and promotion of an elite few (See Treasury wanting to take on people without economics degrees) and means we have whole quangos or areas of bigger departments where the work is either not being done (because of lack of skills – like the OT program) or being done at such a dumbed down level that the output is essentially worthless. Of course this is a boon for consultancies who then take on the surfeit of educated grey hairs at relatively cheap rates and give them strict instructions to be on their wokest behaviour.
This is an out rage.
We need to know exactly what happened, why such incompetent people were appointed to run a service for abused children.
The furore over the TVNZ guy shows how out of touch our media is. Btw, whatever Mr Santamarias crimes were, it should have been kept out of the public view. If he did commit a crime, it is a police/justice matter and he could have applied for name suppression.
Anker – It’s not clear if Santamaria committed any sort of crime at all. He resigned from his new job, whereupon his new employer put out a statement saying that he’d quit for family reasons, and it seems that that may have been a convenient fabrication on the part of his employer. At this stage it looks as if he might have been a bit of a hopeless jerk as far as women are concerned, but so are many males, and labelling them all criminals, is a step too far. He’s not been charged with anything, ergo he can’t really apply for name suppression. He may in fact have a whopping great employment case to take against his now ex-employers who seem to have bungled things spectacularly right from the get- go.
All this pales in significance compared to the tragic plight of the vulnerable abused children theoretically in the care of OT who appear to have failed in their statutory duty towards them, and then lied about doing so. The silence of the msm about this is incomprehensible, and if no process exists for making OT accountable for its own actions, then to my way of thinking, it’s pretty damn useless, and yet another example of how little this country cares about those to whom we have the greatest duty of care.
In the workplace, women subject to unacceptable behaviour from others have various avenues we can follow to get it addressed. Sadly, young powerless children do not. They’re pretty much boxed in. Further along the track they too may have legal cases which they could take against OT, but it is disgraceful that this situation has even come about, and terribly unfair on the children concerned.
How dumb. That $60m or whatever it was could have paid for a lot of clothes, shoes, food, counselling, reparations etc etc for those ‘survivors’ ( I put that word in commas because how can you say you have survived after having your life trashed?)
Why?
Why are woke micro aggression policing stories a bigger scandal than Wellington Bureaucrats lying and hiding corrupted taxpayer funded programs to protect and heal children damaged by actual sexual assaults and not imagined ones?
Is it part of the (Nanaia’s) ‘Super Narrative’ Chris Trotter described in his recent Daily Blog article?
Paid (corrupt) media ignoring stories that ‘bite the hand that feeds them’ and also, potentially go against supporting Te Teriti… Which would also cause that media to lose cash gifts from the government.
He wrote:
Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted intense journalistic interest.
Corrupt government controlled media,
Except for The Daily Blog and some others…
This is why the demarcation between the Executive and Departments is so wrong. Ministers asked questions and OT leadership assured them all was on track. If Ministers and the SSC had contact with people on the ground directly involved with the report they would have known that their were issues and would have been able to act on them.
Public service needs a massive wake up call, a shake up from the top down. They are only focused on delivering on their agenda, and any policies that don’t fit their agenda they do whatever they can to stall and delay.
Ardern and Roberston need to use the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine that is going to end up being a full on war once China invades Taiwan, and the pending health crisis as a result of COVID and flu hitting our hospitals all at once, as justification for a once in a generation overhaul of the public service that actually delivers on what the voters voted for.
As a leftie, I know this model would benefit the Right when they are in office, but I also believe in democracy and believe in voters getting what they voted for.
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