Oranga Tamariki & the art of waving dead brown babies in our face

When Stuff did their mea culpa to the way they had covered Maori as a clickbait, one way they covered dead Maori babies was noted. Despite waaaaaaaay more Pakeha babies dying at the hands of white parents, Stuff (and many other mainstream media) would amplify the dead brown babies and give graphic details of the deprivation they suffered where as white parents who killed were given empathy and sympathy.

It is to this turid time, 2007 to 2015 that we need to look at to understand why Oranga Tamariki is the basket case it is, and it’s to do with the art of waving dead brown babies in our faces and how easily we all capitulated.

Two things happened between 2007 and 2015 which built the blue print for Oranga Tamariki.

The first was a public outrage campaign run by the Sensible Sentencing Lynch Mob and their right wing mouthpieces who repeatedly used the deaths of brown babies and all the accompanying damage of their lives as an immediate reason for something to be done.

(I still laugh thinking about Jeremy Wells turning up at a Christine Rankin silent vigil in 2007 while Wells was on the opposite side of the road screaming into a cell phone that he couldn’t hear the silent vigil.)

Despite more white parents killing their kids, the babies waved in our faces had to be brown to get the right level of white anger to give the State extraordinary powers.

While the campaign of denigration played out, Bill English’s new experiment in welfare saw an opportunity.

His big data investment model argued that if CYFS uplifted children early it would save the State money downstream and using big data would make this more efficient.

Let’s be very clear, the mutation that Oranga Tamariki mutated into has at its heart the welfare of the State, NOT the vulnerable child. This is and has always been a cost saving measure and if you don’t understand that you don’t understand the problem.

In 2015 Anne Tolley held up damaging statistics showing hundreds of kids abused by the State and concluded there was more chance of a child being hurt in State care than left in the community!

Rather than use these shocking stats to demand more funding, Tolley renamed CYFs for the 18th time into an organization called Oranga Tamariki and using all those dead brown babies as the justification, removed parental legal powers, dumped the research units that found Maori homes, streamlined the 0800 numbers into immediate investigation units using little more than rumour and removed accused parents of gaining legal aid to defend charges.

This was all done to maximise the big data investment model, removing children from damaged families at birth was where the financial pay off was so National weaponised uplifts.

Oranga Tamariki was always a neoliberal welfare experiment using manufactured white outrage at dead brown babies to manifest an Agency drunk on its own power.

It wasn’t until Newsroom exposed what Oranga Tamariki was doing that it started to unravel. Suddenly having Political masters who cared about this threw OT into a panic and created a knee jerk critical race theory response where OT stopped uplifting Maori babies and started taking Maori kids off white step parents they had already placed.

Until Bill English’s funding model is dismantled, until we start funding this directly and appropriately, we will continue to fail these children in a land of plenty.

You all allowed the media’s shaking of dead brown babies in our faces to justify something must be done and never bothered to check the thing National did.

The horror of Oranga Tamariki is all on you and your ease to be manipulated.

 

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