Minister Davis’s OT answers aren’t acceptable, why Labour have failed and how the next election is their last chance
Minister Kelvin Davis’s answers to the horror fightclubs inside Oranga Tamariki’s poorly funded and under resourced youth detention facilities are unacceptable.
Cracker NuZilind screamed these little violent thugs were offered KFC to coax them down when we should have used snipers instead.
Cracker NuZilind be screamin’ that we should have left them up there, hilariously ignoring the legal obligations of care for these kids which we put in place in the hope that being legally responsible for their well being might make Oranga Tamariki give a fuck.
Turns out these kids were fleeing from the fight club beatings that OT staff bewilderingly seemed to have helped organise and oversee!!!!
Do. Not. Get. Me. Wrong.
I acknowledge that for many men and women, proper boxing training and MMA provides for many an incredible sense of self believe, self esteem and has been enormous in providing them with the discipline they have mustered to go onto great things.
But that’s not what the fuck was happening in Oranga Tamariki.
These were Lord of the Flies level madness that no on seemed to have any idea about!
You get this real sense that Kelvin is learning these issues during interviews!
Why are staff only given 2 weeks training?
Why has report after report highlighting these problems of abuse inside state care by state workers been ignored?
If the argument was that we had to move from CYFS to OT because so many kids in state care were being abused by each other and staff, then how the Christ can Kelvin’s defences be believable especially in light of all the previous reports???
“Time and time again, the Children’s Commissioner – now the new commission – has reported the same issues at residences with Oranga Tamariki and yet little has changed. Our reports include:
· the use of secure care (solitary confinement) to manage the behaviour of young people;
· the number of assaults between mokopuna, including the use of weapons;
· the lack of therapeutic and occupational programmes, or a wrap-around plan designed for a young person;
· unaddressed mental health issues;
· contraband entering the residence, including vapes and cell phones;
· kaimahi (staff) telling us they felt untrained, overstretched, and left on their own to cope with no leadership from outside the residence;
· kaimahi not knowing how to spot and de-escalate situations; and
· the lack of transparency across residence operations. This includes the lack of detail in some Serious Event Notification (SEN) reports and the lack of access given to independent advocates when they visit the residence.
THIS FIGHT CLUB is the very reason why the Children’s Commissioner should have oversight rather than a faceless useless panel inside the Education Review Office which is what Labour changed it to!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s almost as if there was no warning that children in state care are being abused, oh wait – there was – last year, the headline reads…
Almost 500 children, teenagers in Oranga Tamariki care harmed during 2020-21
…that was published in March of 2022.
It is now July of 2023.
How is this acceptable?
The Minister has called for another bloody inquiry when the bleeding obvious is confronting us – these detention centres are obscene and grim and violent and underfunded and under resourced because no one gives a fuck about these kids!
These are the broken children who are awaiting trial or the broken children already abused by the State!
There has not been the investment into the facilities, and there are no plans to do it either!
They will create the smokescreen of an inquiry when the bleeding obvious is the answer – MORE FUCKING MONEY!
Labour will cry out they don’t have the money to do that, which is a lie. They could properly regulate Capitalism and Tax The Rich and we would have the money for this social infrastructure.
Allowing poverty and abuse to co-govern our detention facilities into operating Staff supported fight clubs is an obscenity.
Pretending to not know this is happening when report after report has highlighted all the conditions exist to create these exact abominations is an obscenity.
Removing the Children’s Commissioner as independent oversight of Oranga Tamariki is an obscenity.
Not taxing the rich to properly fund these facilities is an obscenity.
Time and time and time again people who voted Labour ask, ‘why are Labour failing’.
I think that most voters don’t understand how NZ politics work and they don’t understand how Labour is failing when Labour have an MMP majority.
They are legitimate questions and are valid ones, how can a Party with an unprecedented MMP majority still seem to do sweet fuck all on the big issues confronting us as a society, economy and culture.
It starts at the 2017 election.
In an act of desperation and true leadership, Andrew Little handed Jacinda the leadership months out from the 2017 election which was strategically designed to eliminate the Māori Party and United Future and on election night the specials and overseas vote weren’t counted leaving a deflated Jacinda to tell the country we hand’t won when in fact the specials and overseas vote were always going to go our way and I believed Winston was going to go with us.
The strategy of knocking out National support parties won us the 2017 election but because no one in the Labour leadership expected to win, there was no 100 day legislative agenda to ram through the moment you get into Parliament and if you don’t do that, the Wellington Bureaucracy will kill off any of your reform agenda for their own interests.
This is what most NZers don’t understand about NZ politics, winning power is VERY different from managing power. If you don’t arrive on day one with with a clear legislative agenda and enough mana to intimidate the Wellington Bureaucracy, you get nothing done.
Representative Democracy in NZ is a masquerade so that you will participate and give it legitimacy, the truth is that the Wellington Bureaucracy runs the country and their middle class neoliberal pandering decides policy implementation, not the feckless and easily manipulated Ministers.
Labour didn’t expect to win 2017 and they didn’t expect to win an MMP majority in 2020, so they’ve had no real 100 day legislative agenda to ram through and as such have been stymied ever step by the Wellington Bureaucracy.
Instead of proper investment from revenue created by taxing the rich, Government has spent more money on social engineering media campaigns and a re-arranging of the Bureaucratic structures behind the Ministries to direct funding rather than actually funding the Ministries properly in the first place!
Chippy’s attempt to drag Labour out of ideological virtue signalling cul de sacs to focus on bread and butter issues is admirable, but meaningless if no one can afford the bread and butter!
Going into this election, Labour desperately need a crisis response policy that makes immediate material change in the lives of the many who are being crushed by the cost of living crisis.
- Free Public Transport for all
- Free Dental
- Expand free after school care and extend Early Child Education to 30 hours a week.
- New State Home Expansion
- New Ministry of Green Works
- Financial Transaction Tax
- 30% stakeholder role in Supermarket Duopoly
There are a thousand reasons not to allow a National/ACT Government from taking over, Chippy has to give voters just 1 reason to vote Labour.
Universal Left policy that helps everyone is the solidarity antidote to alienating identity politics.
A competent National/ACT Government is far more terrifying and dangerous than an incompetent Labour/Green Government.
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Give up on them Martyn. They have had five years and the country is in a perilous state.
Seymour made the point that the OT youth facilities should be managed corrections.
He is promising more facilities with Rehab and he stresses the rehab
More facilities so he can lick more kids up. Has he detailed what he means by ‘rehab’, ‘boot camps’ maybe his go-to option.
His definition of rehab is more guns.
I think it sums up society when you can make great money beating the living shit out of each other on pay per view.
Ah yes indeed. The great neoliberal dream grinds on.
Labours kind society.
Sometimes wonder if dreadful Davis, Sepuloni and Davidson were put in the positions they were, as part of a deliberate divide-and-rule scenario. Never forget how they watched safely from the balcony as Mallard inflicted assault upon the Parliamentary protestors, and how the then PM transparently lied, saying that the IPCA process would reveal the dynamics of that occurrence. Not so, and we knew it.
that’s a bit conspiratorial @ Snowwhite. The simpler answer is that they’r just fucking useless and self indulgent, over and above “trying to make a difference” (without having to expend too much emotional capital, and as LITTLE political capital as they think people won’t notice.)
Probably the best thing would be to promote them the hell out of there.
I don’t mind Davis, but he is a victim of circumstance, of his government’s making.
I didn’t realise that these facilities had closed under National but after Labour came in, the severe Covid lockdowns in Auckland, the appointment of a very faithful to the Labour cause woke police commissioner, and the jail emptying no consequences law and order policy, youth crime went off the scale. And because of that, they had to reopen these facilities.
These young criminals are the creme de la creme of youth crime and it reached a point where the wrap-around blanket of the youth court simply could not stem the crime they were committing, so they had to lock them away.
The answer does not lie in a segregated justice system nor letting them roam free to commit more crime. But something more secure than an OT-run jail is needed!
Corrections as a whole are screaming out for competent staff but until they are rewarded, (with appropriate salary and conditions and, yes, it all comes down to that if you want good, qualified, well-led staff), they will not get the staff they need to fix up a raft of issues that they have to deal with.
Cannot see they will get what is needed under Nat/ACT, given their latest policies, pronouncements and tut-tutting…. nor in the few weeks left until the election.
So these issues will only be compounded in future.
Not a cheery thought….
You’ve got a point VV. Not sure who’d want a career in Corrections. Must be some capable people with the right profile, nurturing but with a thick skin, but from hear say the chance of getting assaulted is pretty high. In adult facilities that is. Mind you, that could be said also of staff who work in A&E.
We live in a society where everyone has rights but no one has responsibility, what could possibly go wrong? Things are a mess but shifting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff is not going to stop people from falling off the top. Tax & spend on better care might work for a while but I would like to see policies that reduce the need for that care. Education & meaningful jobs would be my suggestion as a way to get more people positively involved in society with a harder line on tax evasion bad, tax avoidance good mantra that allows the top end to avoid paying their fair share in life.
It is managers who are responsible for correcting report findings; many managers at OT should have resigned by now in absolute shame, and if not, they should be suspended pending disciplinary hearings. As for the Minister the electorate will decide very soon.
Then the question is where do you find the right people to mentor and care for these damaged kids?
Another Labour “success”?
But keep supporting them, maybe they’ll do better in the future.
The fact is – no government could have dealt with the hand Labour was dealt and come out of it as some kind of champion! MPs on both sides of the aisle are inept, careless, arrogant and undisciplined. Davis disappoints me – it is possible he is a distant cousin too – as have the self serving ‘defectors’. Its time to ‘pull up ya socks’ people and start providing the service Aotearoa New Zealand voters are paying for!! #Labour4TheWin2023
“Mokopuna,” isn’t that “grandchildren” fighting each other? Or wrong word?
Isn’t it great using a language only 4% understand to confuse the public and lower accountability.
Changing the letterheads, removing commissioner oversight and going full racist on whitey sure did wonders for CYFS didn’t it.
The fact is – no government could have dealt with the hand Labour was dealt and come out of it as some kind of champion! MPs on both sides of the aisle are inept, careless, arrogant and undisciplined. Davis disappoints me – it is possible he is a distant cousin too – as have the self serving ‘defectors’. Its time to ‘pull up ya socks’ people and start providing the service Aotearoa New Zealand voters are paying for!! #Labour4TheWin2023
So you want the voters to give Labour another 3 years to do what they have not done in the last 6 years .3 of those years they had a clear run with a majority to do what they wanted without any hand brakes .
They have failed on most counts and the country needs a new broom and new direction
True Trevor, but IMO the required broom is not available amongst the choices on offer. Neither Labour nor National have shown any willingness to unravel the damage of the unregulated free market and privatised finnancial system.
Don’t worry about Oranga Tamariki. After the election the new government will sort it out. Who will Luxon/Seymour choose as Minister? How will they restructure that ministry?
That weekend interview (can’t remember whether it was New Shub’s Nation or TVNZ’s Q+A) really was a bloody train wreck.
I sincerely hope the pundits are factoring in the fact that the populace is bloody sick of voting for ‘the least worst option’ and they’re sick of any lack of accountability with both our elected, supposedly ‘representative’ pollies, AND a PS that’s a Humphrey’s wet dream.
There is a mechanism to kick those self-indulgent, self-interested PS in the senior and muddle ranks to account but it appears it’s hardly used.
(i.e. put it on Hughes, and if the old queen doesn’t get them into line, replace Him)
Surprisingly, the Faaf in his latest STUFFED piece pointed out some truisms that made me reconsider whether it was just His laziness, or that alongside PS obfuscation and pushback. (I’ll put money however that he did not ever do a moan to Hughes)
As a lifetime Labour Party suppota, I’ll be voting for the best electorate MP (in terms of competence, dedication to the role, and engagement with his/her local public), and for a party vote for the policies that most closely align with my beliefs.
As things stand, that’ll be Omar in Wgtn Central, and the Gweens, although the latter could change.
It’s no longer the best idea to keep voting for the least worst option. It just enables them to keep doing, or not doing what they’re doing.
But re Davis, and a few others, including Luxon and Seymour, a 6 month lag would probably do the trick, and in Seymour’s case, probably 15 minutes max with a Calendar Gal
Davis is too preoccupied with having the best haircut in caucus I think, while brown karen Sepuloni is too busy showing off her latest tattoo to worry much about the kids.
Davis has gone up in the hair-do rankings since Woods’ slick mop exited stage left.
There’s very, very little underneath it.
One thing is for certain, Luxon has very very little underneath, the very essence of Humpty Dumpty.
Actually by all accounts Luxons staff at Air New Zealand thought he was an arsehole and if you drew a line down the middle of his head he would be.
Davis could never be accused of that.
God I hate men with designer hair cuts. Don’t ever do it, Ethan, OK ?
The problem for soon to be ex Labour voters is this Bomber, you vote Labour and you get never ending shit but that’s ok because they’re our party.
They get back in and you get lied to, the woke go on a bloodbath against everyone except Kate Hannah and Joanna Kidman, your free speech is goneburger and we enter the brave new world of Klaus Schwab’s “Multi Stakeholder Capitalism’. Already embedding itself into a country near you! AKA it’s already here – see the latest EC Trade Deal.
Wake Up, Neo Liberal Capitalism is being superseded by Multi Stakeholder Capitalism and it is the literal antithesis of democracy and the pinnacle of Global Capitalism.
Vote Labour if you want this, vote ACT or NZF if you dont, Vote National if you want it but dont want to admit to it.
There is a more fundamental problem and that is many of these rangatahi are those who were in the womb while their mamas were smoking P. The intellectual impacts of P in utero are poorly researched and understood. AFAIK, there is little scientific study data available that has ascertained this. We know that P heightens aggression and impacts on understanding consequences of your actions. It is likely that this has had a severely detrimental effect in utero which we are starting to see en mass now.
X Ray don’t you remember some of Kelvin s shocking speech s at Labour Party conference s.
Do we look at youth who do break the cycles and live productive lives afterwards enough? When we see what tools they used the basics should be making these tools more available. Starting with security of housing would be a good start. 24,081 applicants on the Housing Register as at 31 March 2023 is not going to help social progress very much.
If there is any hope for Labour it is likely to be found after Sj one serious soul searching during a long period in opposition.
Much like any government that loses the plot really.
Bring it on!!