MEDIAWATCH: Everything wrong with NZ Herald (and us as a people) all in one news story
Oranga Tamariki’s KFC order to lure kids off roofs at Korowai Manaaki, Te Puna Wai o Tuhinapo
A hundred chicken wings, 52 burgers, 28 pizzas, 32 pottles of chips and 60 original pieces were just some of the takeaways purchased by New Zealand’s child protection agency while trying to lure young people off the roofs of youth facilities in July this year.
Oranga Tamariki spent more than $1000 on Domino’s, KFC and McDonald’s in the space of a week across two incidents at Korowai Manaaki and Te Puna Wai o Tuhinapo, with the young people, as well as Oranga Tamariki staff, police and other emergency personnel receiving the takeaways.
Receipts of the group’s orders, provided to the Herald under the Official Information Act, show the agency visited takeaway shops six times during the incidents and reveal chicken was a real crowd favourite.
This is the kind of fuckwit nation we have become, a petty racist bigoted redneck people who like basic bitches scream about the cost to use KFC to coax the little bros off a roof when they really should have been given the bash eh Settler NuZilind?
This is the trash media fed to dumb down the brain and arouse redneck settler bigotry.
This is who we is now.
This is the knuckle-dragging fuckwittery we have mutated into.
Note it’s the price of the fast food that the Herald is telling you to be outraged about, note how there is no fucking mention of why the kids were on that roof in the first place.
No mention that the staff were organising and filming fight clubs and bribing children with chocolate to participate, no mention these staff are given a mere 2 weeks training, no mention that 12 staff were stood down for abusing these kids.
Oh no, none of that fucking context, just a basic bitch call to get your knickers in a twist over the price of the fast food used to coax children we were abusing in care down off a roof!
This is the shitty people we have become fed on far right mainstream media bigotry.
I’m not sure what the Right’s solution was in this situation with these children?
SAS using helicopters?
Police dogs and Tear Gas?
Snipers?
That’s the level of intellect the NZ population use on crime and young people these days.
Now we find out sexual assault allegations and a fight club that staff oversaw.
11 OT staff have been stood down.
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 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 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.
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!
Remember this is the Government that removed the Children’s Commissioner who should have had oversight to look at systemic failures!
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.
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.
This is why the Children’s Commissioner needs to be put back in an oversight role over OT.
Still complaining about using KFC to cox children off roofs being beaten at fight clubs in state care you fucking morons?
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It’s not called the National party New Zealand Herald for no reason.
The contributors …
Audrey Young
Mike Hosking
Paula Bennett
Steven Joyce
Richard Prebble
Fran O’Sullivan
Kitk Hope
Simon Bridges
etc
etc
The paper gives right wing directives and propaganda.
You missed a few Squeaky:
Shane Te Pau
Hayden Munro
Mike Munro
Andrew Kirton
Simon Wilson
Mike Williams
Arena Williams
Siouxsie Wiles
Steve Maharey
Joel Maxwell
Ali Mau
Morgan Godfery
Max Rashbrooke
Helen Clark
Harry Tam
Donna Miles
Diana Wichtel
I don’t see too many of this list writing in the Herald Alvin. Would you care to have another think about where you have read for example Alison Maus articles.
I think Shane the Pou may be the only regular with Mike Munro. Some of the others may be intermittently used but some you list never.
At least National is squeaky clean has a accurate list.
Your list is typical of right wing disingenuity, put out shit with a kernel of fact and 50% will believe it to be 100% true.
There’s a search engine called Google – you should try it.
Happy to provide more names: Craig Renney comes to mind
Actually Im right/Alvin, rather than google, look for the “regular” columnists
Mike Hosking
Audrey Young( sister to Jonathon Young)
Richard Prebble
Simon Wilson is the only “regular” contributor chipmunk.
Otherwise…you missed many
John Key
Kerri Woodham
Kate Hawksbury
Barry Soper
Heather 2 + 3 Allen
Paul Goldsmith
Jordan Williams
Damien Grant
Thomas Coughlan
Wayne Brown
John Rouglan
Bill English
and the hideous Phil O’reilly
etc
etc
etc
There never has been much or any room for journalism or news in the Herald.
It’s columns of opinion bullshit, cover to cover.
Bill English, the sanctimonious anti-abortionist from the boondocks, wanting unwanted children to be born to unwanting parents providing fodder for his vapid Mengele social meddling, would do our children an enormous favour by returning to his roots and doing real work, if he knows how.
We need to realise that, disgracefully, genuine public broadcasting has ended in NZ. There is only one viable course of action left, to use CER to push for access to the ABC and SBS via the courts.
Re. newspapers, we’ve never had any decent papers just a handfull of decent writers/journalists. The only way ahead there is online.
We are a salutary tale for the rest of the world, if you let PB wither it almost certainly is gone for good. (Sarkozy recreated PB in France by acting unilaterally and precipitously, the only exception).
The Herald was always a racist settler rag.
Who needs to look to Australia for a non-racist rag when they have colluded in stripping NZ of its land and labour for generations?
Aotearoa belongs to Australia.
Their banks already own us by stripping our lost wages.
Plenty of Brown and White Kiwis are already there to get their back wages.
Plenty of immigrants use NZ as a stopover to Aussie.
The rest of us just don’t see we are only separated by a ditch from our lost wages.
Plenty of Whites in Aussie still say Blacks don’t count. Fuck them.
What counts is our unpaid back wages and land stripped for profits.
The class war will erupt when Blacks, Browns and White workers unite to take their lost wages back from the banks and the landlords, confiscate their stolen wealth and tell capitalism to fuck off.
We can do that in our own newspapers that tell the truth of the working people.
Our stolen wages, not our lost wages.
They can’t afford the gas and electricity bills involved in doing their own cooking and produce storage.
Easier and closer access to fast food joints than Supermarkets. etc etc
Buy them a cabbage and a bag of potatoes and the produce will likely just rot. These food receipts are likely for emergency use, better to ensure some hungry child gets food in its stomach now, rather than never.
The system is designed to have people living on cusp of poverty and hunger.
My father used to subscribe to Granny Herald as far back as 1950s. He swallowed all their propaganda and lie campaigns from Waterfront disputes to general union bashing.
But I spent most of my adult life away from Auckland and sometimes even NZ. I promptly cancelled the parents subscription upon their death in 2011, and ceased even buying the occasional paper at the supermarket when I observed their unashamed right wing bias and lie peddling in regard to the Cunliffe shafting.
It has always contained more lies than truth Read it at your peril.
“and you only catch them out when you do a ‘surprise’ visit?”
That’s what surprise visits are for – to catch people out. When the corruption is deep and widespread, that’s pretty much all you can do, given that it would be covered up if you gave them warning. It’s funny, we know what stops kids becoming criminals. We have examples of countries where it happens a hell of a lot less than in NZ. The same with adult criminals for that matter. And yet we want to follow the American example which simply doesn’t work, but is much cheaper. Actually it’s not funny. It’s a disaster.
guerilla surgeon. It’s a disaster when the new PM inflicts photos of himself in pyjamas on the punters at Christmas. Marie Antoinette used to like play dressing as a shepherdess, but at least she was a queen, and Luxon’s looking like one too. We knew that this bunch were clowns. We didn’t need telling. We didn’t need being dragged down to their level.
Excellent summation Gentle Annie.
I uses to work at Te Puna Wai. And, you’re way off base. The conservatives are not the problem. It’s the liberals that have created an unsafe environment devoid of meaning consequences for young offenders and encourages a lack of professional boundaries by staff. There’s a long list of reforms needed to create a safe and secure environment where young offenders can rehabilitate, however both the political and public service leadership lack the courage to challenge the political correctness bullies in power.
(cringe)
Standard Right wing solution: greater punishments, more adverse consequences. Enforce compliance harder.
Because that’s been shown to work so well.
$1,000 on KFC is chicken feed. The only downside is kids thinking that unhealthy food is government sanctioned, but if it works, then do it.
Next year this govt should legislate to prosecute the parents of children born with foetal alcohol syndrome. It’s a start. Given National’s links with the alcohol industry, and that the Nats under Dame Jenny Shipley lowered the drinking age, and that journos are a generally boozy bunch, it’s unlikely to happen. In the unlikely event that it did, the usual turkeys will scream, “ Racism” or “Colonialism”. Tough.
Children disadvantaged and damaged before they are even born, are little living tragedies. The criminals responsible for this should not be getting away with it.
An independent Commissioner for Children would be good too, Peter Hughes permitting.
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