Kia Ora – Meet your new faceless bureaucracy to protect the interests of the State dressed up as accountability
Pōwhiri welcomes new advocates to Mana Mokopuna, the new Children and Young People’s Commission
Six children’s commissioners were welcomed to Mana Mokopuna – Children and Young People’s Commission in a pōwhiri led by Te Ara Whānui Kura Kaupapa Māori o ngā Kōhanga Reo o Te Awakairangi at Waiwhetū Marae in Lower Hutt on Thursday.
The event formally acknowledged the new commission established on July 1 to ensure the voices of children and young people are heard, and their rights upheld, with greater and more diverse representation at the table, while recognising the work of former children’s commissioners.
As we see a spike in the broken Children of New Zealand thrown into the underfunded hell hole of youth detention and state ‘care’, the latest masquerade of accountability is rolled out with a lovely powhiri.
I personally am sickened by the brown washing of these agencies, it’;s a white wash to gloss over what they really are, the State’s attempt at ensuring they are never held to account.
The true lesson the State took from the Royal Commission into historic state abuse of children is to en sure no one can investigate them and pout them in the hook for the underfunded hell hole these kids are dumped into.
There is an unspoken neoliberal political agreement in NZ, that those administering the poorly funded State ‘care’ are never held accountable by the law when abuse occurs and in turn the Political class who refuse to tax the rich to afford proper care in the first place won’t prosecute the Bureaucrats when abuse occurs.
One hand protecting the other from ever being held accountable for the damage the underfunded State care causes.
As some of you may be aware, I spent part of last year locked in a private battle with the Bureaucratic Gods of Wellington for repeatedly posting blogs that pointed out the dark tactics the State were prepared to go to undermine State abuse victims.
My point was that we have ample evidence of these behemoth Ministry’s with enormous power hiding and minimising their culpability for abuse and in the year we held a Royal Inquiry into historic State abuse, that removing the Children’s Commissioner oversight on Oranga Tamariki was obscene self interest.
The State doesn’t want a truly independent voice investigating abuse in State care and rather than extend the Children’s Commissioner oversight, they bundled it away into the bloody Education Review Office, because you know, nothing says laser like investigations and resourcing like the Education Review Office right?
They didn’t manage to notice students were being sexually abused at Dilworth for 3 decades, but hey who is counting?
This new faceless watchdog is responsible for box ticking stats, not whether or not the children are being abused!
The Children’s Commissioner was ended by the State and morphed into this new Children and Young People’s Commission because they kept holding very powerful people to account. This new version is watered down and merely an amplifier for the supposed voices of the children inside the system, which while admirable (and ideally should actually be in the Youth Ministry) is not the guard dog of children’s rights that it is being sold as.
Replacing the arse kicking Children’s Commissioner with all the powers of independent investigation it had with the voices of children who have suffered abuse isn’t a guard dog, it’s an emotional support Labrador.
Which is exactly what the State wants, the pretence of accountability with none of the legal threat.
Oranga Tamariki is a neoliberal experiment in welfare, the game is to only provide resource to the worst cases instead of universal provision of welfare. National who created this Frankenstein experiment, are pushing the ‘Social Investment’ model which is really just a means to privatise and slash welfare costs.
Now that this system is horrifically without any real oversight, the true damage can begin.
This has been pushed by the State to ensure they are not responsible for the carnage this new system will cause the next generation of children in State care.
But yay, a lovely powhiri.
The most obscene part of all of this, is that none of this is ever explained to the voting public.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
At least Labour doesn’t hire Private Investigators with tax payer money to smear complainants. so yeah, National would be SOOO much better…
We need to address causes rather than symptoms.
Having to uplift children from meth addicted, alcoholic drop-kick parents must be the ultimate shit job. We have to do it because we actually encourage the least capable parents in society to have more kids and much of the dysfunction in NZ (and other countries with the same policies) is due to decades of this fuzzy well-meaning thinking.
Who said: “Hey let’s tax the competent, working, middle class and hand the money to often illiterate and addicted solo mums who have gang members for boyfriends.” Yeah, that’ll work!
What’s worse is people like Marama Davidson and Bill English having six kids each and the Greens now wanting free dental care for them to be paid for from the taxes of more responsible persons who do not breed to excess.
Couple of generations ago several young women in my extended family had their children removed by adoption. In the latest generation we have one who never worked and is on her sixth child, a number of father’s, latest is gang. I don’t know the income but 6 kids it would need to be substantial. She’s kind of a good mum but ….
It may be necessary to work in a government department to understand quite how ignorant and dumb many public servants are. This is why they have been used to replace the independent Commissioner for Vulnerable Children who was always a high calibre professionally qualified person who acted on behalf of kids, and was not governed by having to hang on to their job.
We all know what happened when independent women tried to speak at Albert Park, and it’s happening again, here, now. This is inept politicians protecting themselves, and the children are it’s sacrificial lambs. Shame.
“National who created this Frankenstein experiment, are pushing the ‘Social Investment’ model which is really just a means to privatise and slash welfare costs.”
I am not going to pretend that Labour has the answers but they are only as clueless as National so you need to look somewhere else for the answers or totally reform the main parties.
The problem is, this is everywhere. The “democracy” you think is there does not exist, except in good people’s imaginations. And there are no good people in power in NZ that preside over managing the complicit goofballs we get to “elect” every three years.
There are no good people there, because look at the results. They serve the system, which is shaped to suit the global elite. The rest is population management.
You thought Oranga Tamariki/CYFS/MSD was bad?
Wait till it gets handed over to iwi and the private sector. I 100% gaurantee you all that the alternative will be 10 times worse.
And what is also bad about what they have done with their brownwashing is ensure the blowback is on Maori. We now have a Maori Commission and a Maori Agency responsible for Children in Care well and good but when it doesnt work (and it never does for a vast raft of reasons) the blowback will be on Maori.
And on top of that is the huge politicisation of children in care. Recently OT removed a child with a white parent and an Aboriginal, Maori and White parent away from what I presume was white caregivers’, friends of the grandmother who lived near by. It ended up at the high court which found that OT had a responsibility to take the child away from where it was living to place it with distant family up north despite the child being more Pakeha or aboriginal and the father not wanting it. (They didnt say but the inference is that the mother is dead).
Again, another overreach by an ideologically and over politicised system that does not have the wellbeing of the child first and foremost in their sights or in dead ‘probity with public money’. And I really do believe that this version of the children in care system is likely to fail and is being set up to fail.
thanks for information