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’……..
There is no media coverage because the victims of the failure – a group of child sexual abuse victims – will never be named or photographed.
No ID’d victims = no emotional engagement by the reader or viewer, such as anger or sadness. Emotions are what journalists look for in covering stories. That keeps viewers and readers engaged for longer.
Especially TV – no visuals = no coverage.
Depp V Heard was heavily covered because there was so much visual material – both were film stars, live coverage from the Court, daily updates and breaking news….
Contrast this with Kamahl Santamaria’s coverage – lots of photos = lots of news coverage.
We have a ‘villian’ but no victims as yet.
The ‘victims’ will tell their stories anonymously in coming weeks. Lots left to run in this story.
well ada, doesn’t stop extensive coverage in other mass child abuse cases like schools/churches so maybe OT is exempt from censure
In those cases, the media has villains to photo and video of locations etc. Police to interview. worried parents to speak up…
it’s all about the amount of material that can be published.
It’s about government and it’s agencies being able to avoid taking responsibility for big things- it’s nothing to do with pictures, or the number of pictures. In this case it looks as if OT lied the way that spineless, dishonest, morally weak, and manipulative people do.
Your referencing a group of “ child sexual abuse victims” exemplifies part of the problem here, as it objectifies children into an amorphous anonymous mass, whereas every single child is a separate person, and an individual hugely dependent for protection upon others, in this case the government which has let them down very badly indeed.
One bloke allegedly making a nuisance of himself with women in the workplace is tut tut territory which many can relate to; it’s juicy, and it enables sanctimony in a way that sexual abuse of children never lends itself to and has zero comic value. The public wouldn’t stomach details or descriptions of the monstrous sort of actions which constitute child sexual abuse – lecherous males are more entertaining.
The post by Martyn was about the lack of media coverage…..
Ada. Exactly, and I’ve suggested why.
“See why you need The Daily Blog?”
Yes Martyn you are right. I never read this anywhere else.
Thank you for writing. This situation is appalling
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.
This is what happens when you let the mental kids out into the real world. The muddle class Woke Fascist brigade is not only in Wellington!
The revisionist feminazi wokester fascists too from the leafy burbs definitely don’t like men unless they’re slightly effeminate and subordinate.
As for OT. Why are they still in existence? Probably because it is part of a much bigger plan?
What could that plan be I wonder? A project (ongoing) for services to be contracted out maybe? The last national government had a plan in place which is still in play. Something like Social Services Contracted Private, Public Partnership.
Therein lies the answer to why OT is still in play.
A vulture capitalist like Blackstone is ready to pounce on the rental market in NZ. So it wouldn’t be a bad guess to suggest that they could be interested in a PPP with the government for OT Contracted Services ay?
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.
social work used to be a professional reasonably paid career but years of cuts, underfunding and excessive case loads have turned it into a refuge for 3rd rate karens who either have a tenuous grasp of ideology or are just plain lazy…
pay peanuts you get monkeys.
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……
Jimmie that sums it up nicely.
Thanks.
Children damaged by actual sexual abuse and no one held accountable is beyond belief.
Absolutely disgraceful.
Bob – OT staff lying about their failure to provide this support to abused children, won’t be the first time that they’ve lied; they’re probably used to doing it, and cry the predictable if caught. If it was just one untruthful Oranga Tamariki person it may be the sort of human error or frailty which can occur anywhere, but if, as it looks, there is more than one bad egg involved in misleading the SSC and/ or others, then it has to be seen as some sort of systemic failure and corruption. Media turning a blind eye to it shows them as trite and shallow.
Agree Appiewood.
” Children damaged by actual sexual abuse and no one held accountable is beyond belief ”
I have longed believed that the crimes act should be changed to ensure that any crime against children , sexual , physical or accessing material that encourages those to exploit and torture children under the age of 16 should face a 25 year sentence.
Any term of imprisonment or home detention in some cases under current law is not harsh enough to acknowledge the damage to innocent children and infants.
How we protect and care for our children is incumbent on every generation , the judiciary and government of any colour.
Hip ray Mosa well said.
Mosa. I’d be comfortable with the death penalty for proven and admitted pedophiles.
The damage that they do to innocent young lives is immeasurable and their crimes are usually very calculating in a very pre-determined sort of way. The death penalty may not be a deterrent to murder, but this type of evil is too sub-human to extend normal human privilege to them, or to waste taxpayer money on them, so let’s go the neolib way and rid ourselves of them altogether.
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.
Give the money directly to the likes of Mark Solomon for his anti-domestic violence work with Ngai Tahu – at least this way it won’t be squandered by our ever-expanding crop of incompetent bureaucrats. Thanks for highlighting this Bomber – it is an absolute disgrace.
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