That John Campbell Q+A interview: Oranga Tamariki v. Christian social services

Jack Tame has enough discernible quirks to be unlikeable at this stage in his career. We know his gotchas before his interviewees do – they couldn’t be more well telegraphed if Samuel Morse himself has sent the message. So when Q+A on TVNZ had John Campbell appearing instead the weekend before last (28/07/2024) I thought it might be a welcome change of pace.

It took Campbell several attempts to coax Nikki Hurst, Executive Officer of the Council of Christian Social Services, to display some sort of consideration to the actual clients – the vulnerable people – that the Oranga Tamariki contract cuts were going to affect. The interview was conducted a day after the Royal Commission on Abuse in Care was publicly released. It is a meaty and bloody issue – and one I presumed Campbell would excel at dissecting.

Campbell begins, dramatically framing the crisis, “we started by asking her: how close some organisations are to breaking point?” She says they’re all waiting – somewhat anticlimactically. The contract renewals are a mess, no new contracts and expiry looms. The situation sounds incomprehensibly, improbably insane.

He asks about the “front line.” “A lot of distress” she said – caused to the organisations. She doesn’t get what he’s asking for – he let the question beg, he doesn’t want to know about the organisations but about the children and their families, but that isn’t enough to drag her away from the money. Campbell let’s her run, but it’s all about the funding. He apologises for interrupting (which he wasn’t, it’s just part of his nice guy schtick) and asks again: “you used a really striking and quite confronting phrase right then which was ‘how do we transition the Tamariki who are in our care to somewhere else’” The camera shot is back to her: “Yup” she says, her head nodding vigorously. Campbell is hoping she gets it this time: “What’s happening to those Tamariki?” Couldn’t be clearer than that. We are four minutes into the interview.

She draws a long breath. “Yeah” her eyes flutter and drift up as one does if things are a hassle, “so, where people have, um…” – she seems to go into inner thought as she focuses her gaze at a point on the carpet off to Campbell’s right, then refocuses on Campbell “…the ability to continue working with them they will continue working with them, but for some of the providers, all of their funding comes from Oranga Tamariki and for some providers all of that funding has gone…” her eyes roll in thought briefly, “…or the funding that has gone is to the level they can’t continue, it’s untenable.” At this point Campbell has had enough and does interrupt without the apology, his voice almost breaking in stress: “So what’s happening to these children?” She answers “Everyone’s doing their best…” and twaddles off into generic management-speak about “we don’t believe that decision-making has been made in such a way as being able to identify what each community actually needs and services will or won’t continue in each community…” Then finally, “For instance….” Cuts to Campbell nodding rapidly in approval anticipating what has taken a painful five minutes to get to. “…I trained as a counsellor myself…because I could build a relationship with a child… not as simple as saying we’re closing go see John down the road next week he’ll pick up your case – doesn’t work like that.”

Campbell picks it up and then mansplains the scenario to her like she’s a five year old, indeed mansplains it to a woman who just laid out her professional credentials. It is for the audience’s benefit – not her’s – that he outlines the situation, but her answers were obtuse enough to justify the patronising treatment.

She nods along in agreement, “yup.” She is encouraged and sets off to describe some of the programmes affected – from a funding perspective, of course. “Some of those are 24/17 parenting units…” She might have said 24/7 teen parenting units, but it’s probably not clear to him either – so he repeats it back saying 24/7 parenting units – “yes”. He asks “…and what’s happening to those children?” He has to ask that because she seems incapable of factoring them into her funding schema and more incapable of comprehending why he cares about them. Alas, she is back to “transparency…criteria…decision-making…social investment approach…as Professor Gluckman says…” Fuck Professor Gluckman – what about the kids!? We are seven minutes in now.

She says the parenting units need money “poured in” and have good outcomes, but offers no data or examples (this is becoming quite annoying – and not just to me). Campbell gets to the Royal Commission on Abuse in Care and the timing of the OT cut-backs. She has a nice line for this: “When we reduce funding we reduce the adults in their lives”. Sounds like an axiomatic good, but it all depends on who those adults are and whether they – being Christian social services staff in this instance – do in fact need to be in their lives. At this point Campbell releases out an audible sigh, a frustration-tinged sigh, but again it seems more as a response to her than to government policy.

He has yet another crack – and I’ve lost count of how many attempts he has made, but he is persisting valiantly to scrape some humanity off this embodiment of mediocre white woman syndrome before the end of the interview despite her best efforts to disavow it. He puts both hands out, palms vertical, and chops to make a segment to signal precision is required to the guest. “Can you,” he pauses mid-sentence and he struggles to get the wording right to prevent what is bound to be just another one of her heel turns back to the money, “are you hearing from the frontline,” he goes back to the segment motion and concertinas in and out to signal specificity, he starts to say explicit but changes it, “specific stories – and I don’t want you to identify anyone – about children who are now in positions of peril, essentially?” Please, for your own sake, lady, answer the question.

“Yeah, um, and, and…” Her eyes however are already cast to the side in what I know by now is her thinking mode for gross obtusity “…one of the things I’m really grateful for at this moment in time is the really strong independent childrens’ monitor…” Oh no, please. Then a flurry of familiar words “…systemic level…data…challenges are still happening…hold to account what’s happening in that space…” Oh God. Then! “Stories within their number… include one that I heard this year: a young person who…” Oh thank you – God I suppose it was – for getting to this point albeit after an excruciating nine and a half minutes. “He got really, really brave and told his school teacher that his stepfather was physically assaulting him. He repeated that to his headmaster and they did the right thing – they made a report of concern to Oranga Tamariki, told them what was happening… the local Oranga Tamariki office didn’t have the resources to respond to that child. What happened was that child was put on a 21 day notice [to a family group conference]…” Campbell sense the drift into the bog of process and procedure occurring and prompts: “Quickly: was this child safe in the home?”

She starts off by saying she doesn’t know because she wasn’t there, but recovers, “one of our members has been alerted to the situation and has been going in every day to the school to confirm that that child is at least feeling supported…” She expands on it slightly and Campbell gets to go to a break. What a saga to get to this point. What seems obvious to me is there is no physical evidence of abuse in this case or else action would be more straight forward, surely. Her example, after all this, was very much underwhelming.

After the break it was directly into Oranga Tamariki processes – which is what she had turned the first half into anyway. What does it need to do? Who knows – she doesn’t anyway. Boot camps? Not helpful – agreed. One third of kids placed without certainty. Campbell is astounded, he gasps repeatedly, but I’m not sure what that means exactly. She’s off onto data, but later confesses to being “a data geek” so that explain things.

Campbell goes to the Commission’s findings on faith-based care, he lifts his glasses briefly as if it was so unbelievable he has to check his eyes, “a terrible insight” – he checks off the list on his fingers of those who have been asked to apologise: “the Catholics, the Anglicans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Sallies. What’s your take on this? How do you respond to this as the head of Christian Social Services?” Her eyes dart up and around, she breaks into a smile as she stares at the ceiling, “yeah,” she directs her look back to Campbell, “it’s a challenging one and one that each of those faith-based organisations will have to make a decision themselves, um, I heard Justin Duckworth Archbishop of New Zealand on the radio this morning talking to that and, um, I think that it’s really best if each of them individually talk to what’s possible for them.” She has her left eyebrow raised and her right lowered in anxiety – so she is clearly concerned, but not for the abused kids, she is concerned at what his next question will be.

She obviously does not give, and has not throughout the interview now past the twenty minute mark, given any thought for the children, just for the money to run the institutions. A data geek – more like a sociopath. Like the staff at Auschwitz they don’t appear to be drooling, cloven-hooved monsters, they are like the average sort of person that she is: a banal, blonde, dowdy, dumpy, middle-aged, middle-class, mediocre Caucasian – a ‘Karen’ if you will. Someone that appeared as a beast from the firmament could never partake in the systemic destruction and exploitation of the most vulnerable – you need someone who can hide in the open, like this woman, a front-person almost devoid of personality. So, no answer. No concession or admission or statement or expression or hint of concern whatsoever from her. Nothing. Zip. Zippity fucking do-da.

As I said, she smiled when asked the question, she smiled. Like a fucking sociopath. I can’t even call her an apologist – because she never even attempted to apologise! What’s worse than an apologist? An enabler, I understand is the favoured descriptor.  And Campbell, with his black, thick-rimmed, Mr Serious glasses, with his impressive style pallet of pat sincerity intonations, with his reputation for barrages of no nonsense questions, with his decades of journalistic acumen and credibility – for all that moral weight he just sits there, passive, says nothing, and just moves along. Moves right along. His line of questioning, like the lines of victims – instantly abandoned. Just straight to “If we just stick with the Royal Commission…” and he faffs about and asks something around what the report says is “empowering communities” – he serves an easy one, in her preferred nomenclature, her safe space, back to her gently and she nods aggressively.

She can’t believe her luck, her entirely undeserved good fortune. Campbell has given her a free pass. He has also given the cruelty of the system she represents a free pass. Yes he did that. Speaking truth to power!? – what a risible joke he made of that trite line so beloved of journalists. He enabled her to enable them to rape children without remorse – that’s what he did when he let that slide – didn’t he. No question mark required for that sentence. Yes, he did. Oh, yes he did. He failed most contemptibly. He failed those victims like everyone else in a position of authority has failed them. He wrote them off, because those victims are not worth upsetting Karen from social services because they sit higher in Campbell’s societal hierarchy. I’m not merely asserting this is possibly his thinking, I am stating it as a matter of fact evidenced by his single tokenistic question without follow up. He lifted the carpet for her and helped her sweep the sins underneath, like it wasn’t worth being troubled about. What an utterly shallow, hollow act of his. A womens’ magazine would have done a better job.

The scandal of the Presbyterian Support Otago destroying documents in an attempt to dispose of the evidence of their crimes occurred near the same time as the interview so I’m not sure if it was known then, but if there was anything to underscore the depravity and immorality of the Christian social services she speaks for then my God that was an exclamation mark to their litany of evils.

So I ask would he have gone all vague if he was interviewing Mengele or Speer, let it slide? Let them bitch for twenty minutes about how Hitler cut their budgets, finally get around to Nuremberg and then just let them say the ones who ran the death camps have to make decisions on their responses individually, and then let’s talk about the framing of the “Total War” policy so they can go back to talking about the money? But she’s just Karen from social services, so she gets to play the victim to her heart’s content as Campbell frowns and furrows on cue for the cut-aways. He is just a phoney isn’t he – isn’t he. From his first days at TV3 in 1991 (if I recall) this young guy walking to camera as if deep in contemplative thought, deliberately dropping his voice to sound deeper, yes, he was always a phoney, it was always an act – that is what me and my friends said back then (we used to spoof him for laughs) and that is what I saw in that latest interview. An actor interviewing a sociopath in a pathetic charade.

He rolls out some more soft ones as the interview winds down allowing her to say the empty, predictable, platitudinous lines unworthy of quotation. That was 26 minutes. The credulous viewers, I guess, thought it was great. If the thrust aligns with one’s ideology most won’t delve into the substance of this sort of current affairs interviewing to make an objective assessment. What I saw was performance to reinforce prejudice, it really isn’t much more than that.

The interview ends and Campbell is in studio glowering into the barrel of the camera from behind his 2 Ronnies, mouth down-turned. He’s wearing a black jacket with a black tie, it’s all super serious and – after that long, hideous interview – faintly absurd. Could he try any harder?

But it didn’t stop there. Of course it gets worse, why wouldn’t it? I’m looking at the time on the clip and there’s two minutes left. In a nation where civil society can countenance such abuse, can conceal it for decades, can fund it, can conceive to have a commission into it only after most of the perpetrators are long gone, can contrive to have it stop inquiring into anything this century so most of the current perpetrators avoid detection and consequences, of course it gets worse. A government and a bureaucracy that stops funding services that are based on vulnerable children and dysfunctional families and the personal relationships they have, without – seemingly – any indication of continuity? Of course it is chronically inept, it all is, the system and the bureaucrats that run it are desperately inept, and more. The Venn diagram of ineptitude and funding also has a circle marked sadism.

“After we spoke to Nikki Hurst we went to Oranga Tamariki for a response, they confirmed they hope to send out contracts to a majority of service providers by the end of the month – that’s this Wednesday – those who aren’t out by Wednesday not long after they told us. And as for the services that kept operating this past month (remember contracts expired in June 30) despite being trapped in limbo.” Then cut to a man in a suit in an office who is talking mid-sentence by the looks of it: “We have been going through a number of processes at the moment.” Classic management wankspeak. The caption appears: ‘Darrin Haimona, Oranga Tamariki’, “So one is of course we are going through a restructure as an organisation at the same time.” His eyes go top right and down again.

He is a Maori man with a high, female type voice doing a softly, softly, matter of fact, borderline patronising statement. “But one of the things I probably want to say is that we will make sure that we will cover any of the expenses and costs that’s been put to those providers as a result of any delays that we have made. So, for example even if there’s changes or we’re disestablishing services etcetera we will pay an additional three months or six months on the time of notification, or if services have happened in this period we will make sure that those costs are covered.” On hearing this remedy am I the only one astounded? No contact with providers and it takes a TV programme to get a response which is don’t worry we’ll keep paying.

The Wellington bureaucracy is a congealed bucket of vomit, of deranged, lazy, unaccountable, arrogant arseholes. They are sick. Not so much the politicians, the Ministers, they are cretinous puppets, but the officials – they could not care less, they never suffer consequences for their ineptitude. Back to Campbell “…he also had this to say.” He acknowledges that it has taken longer than normal “to do in this area, and having a background myself in this area, 30+ years in the community, I do know what it’s like to actually depend on financial kinda support through funding etcetera so we do apologise round that.” Around that – God, what a half-hearted, half-arsed apology.

And here is where it gets fucked and negates the apology. “But,” his eyes swivel wildly around and off to the side and he shakes his head to signal no, “I don’t apologise for trying to think about making good decisions and to use money effectively.” A forced smile through the whole thing too. Creepy, deeply creepy. Christ what a piece of shit. Callous. His demeanour, his appearance, his voice, his presence, his attitude, his vibe is repulsive. I wouldn’t let him around a child for three seconds. I wouldn’t allow him around the internet for three seconds. And this is the spokesperson for Oranga Tamariki? The creepiest dude you could conjure is who they put up to reassure the public – holy fuck! This colonial entity – the government if not also civil society – is possessed by forces so demonic that to rid it of this evil will require a general exorcism rather than a general election.