Chief Ombudsman calls for Govt overhaul of Oranga Tamariki
Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier has published a report calling for organisation-wide changes to Oranga Tamariki Ministry for Children on a scale “rarely required” of a Government agency.
Warning: this report deals with issues about the care system for children that may be traumatising for some people.
The Children in care: complaints to the Ombudsman 2019–2023 report detailed the types and numbers of complaints to the Ombudsman about Oranga Tamariki from the past four years.
It included emerging themes from the complaints, relevant case studies, and how the Ombudsman resolved issues for complainants and ways to improve the system as a whole.
“I regret to say I cannot yet provide reassurance that Oranga Tamariki’s practices and processes are consistently operating as they ought to.” the report said.
The report cited detailed measures which Boshier believed Oranga Tamariki should take “to address the issues he has identified and embed good practice”.
Boshier said complaints and enquiries continued to increase “year on year,” including complaints from tamariki and rangatahi, either directly or through trusted adults.
“Since the request was first made by Parliament for my enhanced focus in 2019, I have dealt with more than 2000 complaints and other enquiries about Oranga Tamariki,” he said.
Boshier said important changes have already taken place at Oranga Tamariki over recent years following his investigations, however he said it was “abundantly clear that much more work is required”.
“I share the hope of the complainants I spoke to that sharing their stories provides transparency, accountability and an opportunity for Oranga Tamariki and the new Government to really make profound changes to the way the Ministry operates”.
The 119-page report detailed thorough recommendations for Oranga Tamariki including an organisation-wide quality improvement plan, ensuring staff understand and apply legislation and policy, better attention to detail and accurate information in decision making, more training and supervision, regular tracking and reporting, and keeping better records overall.
Don’t.
You.
Fucking.
DARE.
Be.
Surprised.
At.
Staff.
Abusing.
Children.
In.
State.
Care!
Don’t you fucking dare!
Second Oranga Tamariki sexual misconduct allegation discovered during surprise visit
Allegations of “inappropriate sexual behaviour” have surfaced against two staff members of Oranga Tamariki and former police commissioner Mike Bush will take over management of its youth residences.
The two staff members acted independently, Oranga Tamariki chief executive Chappie Te Kani said, and were alleged to have offended against five children.
The incidents occurred at two separate facilities. The first was reported to Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis on June 8, he said. The second was discovered when the Children’s Commission sent an inspector to another facility last week.
Children’s Commissioner Judge Frances Eivers said her staff arrived to carry out an unannounced inspection of a facility, which she described as “prison like” and under resourced.
Shaun Brown, an associate deputy chief executive of Oranga Tamariki, said the ministry was struggling with the number of children currently in its justice residences. He said over crowding in the facilities had led to children connecting with each other, and orchestrating crime to commit after their release.
No!
You can’t pretend to be this ignorant any longer!
As TDB has spent half a decade pointing out, Oranga Tamariki is a Frankenstein monster, a neoliberal welfare experiment conjured up by Bill English and big data.
Luxon has already promised to revive ‘social investment’.
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, the Public Services Commission has done all it 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 that 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.
The 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 fund 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.
Oranga Tamariki is that experiment in play.
One of the reasons OT was created was because National claimed CYFs, the old system, had a higher statistical risk of children being abused in state care than left in the community…
Children in state care are being abused and CYF is failing them – report
Children removed from their family home are being sexually and physically abused in foster homes – and the Social Development Minister says there’s no evidence they’re any better off in state care.
…you can’t pretend to be shocked that two OT staff were caught abusing vulnerable children in State Care BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT UNDERFUNDED STATE CHILD AGENCIES DO!
What is most outrageous here is that this pocket child prison seemed to have been flying under the radar…
Children’s Commissioner Judge Frances Eivers said her staff arrived to carry out an unannounced inspection of a facility, which she described as “prison like” and under resourced.
…how the fuck is it allowed to exist with barely any oversight and you only catch them out when you do a ‘surprise’ visit?
Oranga Tamariki is a brownwashed under resourced neoliberal experiment in welfare aimed at saving the State money down stream while minimising legal liability, it sure as fuck doesn’t have the interests of the child at heart!
Let’s also be very clear, all repealing s7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 will do is create another generation of stolen Māori babies!
Watching the Political Right, who would want way more Social Investment, decry the abuse it creates to demand more of that Social Investment is the very definition of sophistry.
But don’t pretend abuse of vulnerable children in State Care surprises you, don’t dare.
Don’t.
We refuse to tax the rich to fund this social infrastructure and look for neoliberal experiments to cut costs and protest the State from liability.
This is all on us!
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We can bitch and moan all we like but nobody has dealt with the cause of why we need Oranga Tamariki in the first fucken place.Find and accept the answer then we might solve the problem .We can blame parents till we are black and blue in the face but that is not the cause .In my mind the cause is fucken poverty and not so good parenting is a bi product of that .Fuck me ,when I was 5 I was sent to a foster home for 6 months and the bitch that ran that was an arsehole .Get up ,go to school and when you get home go to bed .That was all due to the fact my dad was ill and mum had a lot on her plate and there was no wellfare back then .Even tho we now have wellfare 65 years later the situation still exists where whole families exist on nothing and a lot of them are fully employed ,how is that right ? wake up people and fix the cause which is poverty created by the creators of the PAYE system which has robbed the bottom to fuel the wealth of the top .
Gordon Walker It was tough on you as a 5 year old, being treated in such a callous way. No child deserves that.
It looks as if we need to look at a country which does not have our truly appalling rates of baby and child murder, battering, bashing, and abuse, and see what they, as a society do differently from us, and do the same. It’s not that big an ask.
New Zealand prioritising saving the state money, rather than focusing on the well-being of our beautiful children, is inhumane.
Bill English has a lot to answer for. His trashing a whole generation of young men was for economic reasons too, to create a low-wage economy using cheap immigrants, but I don’t recall his justification for a low- wage economy which keeps the have-nots struggling, while the haves lead lives free from the stressors which can cripple every day living, and practically powerless.
Yes gordonw – Poverty of purse, poverty of understanding the warmth in enjoying living with people, of love for special people, life skills and overall, poverty of mind, Those in charge with the capability for a full life suffer from two of the poverties named; they have access to money but the other poverties reign.
They don’t see that their power and their budget allowances, get spent well with people who can really make change to produce happy, good adults bringing up in their parenting – happy, good, sturdy children. A good society would work towards that but ours is still riddled with class attitudes that ‘some people’ are no good and they can never be like the top echelon which is the exemplar. Bosh.
Celia Lashlie and her like were doing so well but just living in this society and feeling its ills is very wearing I think, and wears some out who may not have had good beginnings or have been hit by some disease that has laid them up and also laid the foundation for their break-through thoughts.
We are all a bit sick though but most of us aren’t aware of it. I see it clearly as an aged person, that we are at war with callousness and wilful ignorance; think Terry Pratchett’s Young Adult book Only You can Save Mankind when an electronic game becomes real to the ships and crew in the game and the real person must enter their virtual world and help the last spaceship get home before it’s too late. As everything we do and think is based on perceptions that our psychology can change, sometimes quite quickly, then let’s follow Terry and act right, before we too get dementia and lose our powerful minds.
Fuck off, is not on me. Blame those useless Labour cunts that blew BILLIONS on fucking woke bullshit and castle building, that bunch of fucking wankers should be in prison!!
That’s a well thought out and considered post Justanidiot.
It’s important that readers see just how fucking evil and spiteful the Right truly are when they don’t think they can be traced.
Open your eyes & ears, all parties spend on woke bullshit and castle building & all the evidence shows that the conservative side of politics does more of it.
You’re right justaname but too many expletives spoil the message. Those others finding fault with you cannot have come up against the spiked walls of our so-called welfare system that has become equivalent to a rigid class society, in all ways, having poisonous, pious people with contempt as its driver. We have been there in near centuries and a small number of dedicated people had to work like sh..t to improve it – Douglas and Treasury undermined the good work in NZ in their zeal to get more money and profit into the country and cater for the adept businessmen adopting money-making schemes like asset stripping of solid businesses etd.
Pretty sure @Grey, he hasn’t thought things through in the manner you have. He’s so tuff, he just wants revenge for not getting everything he wanted. Sure Labour were fucking useless – especially given the mandate they had, and that they absolutely squandered. Turkeys voting for Christmas is not the viable option though.
What billions were spent on woke bullshit? You sound like Luxon and Willis. Just say whatever you like even it’s complete bullshit.
Labour got loads wrong, including not introducing a CGT but there is so much rubbish being talked it’s clear Luxon and Willis don’t have any answers. Focus on cost of living my arse.
Do the broken country next.
While your article is fair it ignores the reality that any system can be abused by those looking for an easier way of life, you only need to compare the numbers receiving the DPB in the 70s to today to see that effect. When people act for their own selfish pleasure with no consideration for any subsequent children (yes that is males & females who are involved) then the result will always be a mess.
It is fair that if society allows those actions then it should pay to fix the results however we get a situation where those who are elected & their supporters for the most part are unwilling to accept that they are part of the problem so they make laws that keep their tax rates low & allow mostly children to suffer instead.
Shall, we,
CYPS/CYFS/Oranga Tamariki is bad, no doubt, but privatising its functions, as iwi want to see done, are going to make things much much worse.
Can we get some accountability for those woman having children outside of marriage and or a relationship?
Sam Probably not. In past times, it was rarely a conscious choice and there were some horrific outcomes, with illegal abortions, forced adoptions, women whose lives were forever haunted, and some kids with lives intrinsically out of kilter.
The social stigma of single parenting has gone, but the fact remains that children need two parents. The DPB was a safety net for women left alone, but the issue of men who irresponsibly father children for whom they have no concern, is a biggie. Rape as a weapon of war is also well documented, and once again the fate of children fathered in this way can be more tragic than many adults would want to know about.
As a mother I can’t imagine not being permanently concerned about my offspring, but not all parents are wired the same way.
Even if I was generous and assumed all 7000 male inmates raped the mothers of all 7000 children in state care aside. Regardless. You’ve still got 7000 woman going out at night. Disobeying there fathers. Being promiscuous. Having unprotected sex. And expecting the state to bail out degenerate woman for there choices.
underfunded, low grade box ticking staff, high case loads..WTF do you actually expect?