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Watching the TV1 News on Thursday night, there was the inevitable article about Oranga Tamariki and how evil they are for taking children away from their deadbeat parents. The Ombudsman’s report on the agency was typically damaging; Oranga Tamariki have a default position on snatching babies away from parents, and it needs to change because whanau are upset by it.
Then came the Children’s Commissioner, Andrew Becroft, who agreed with every word and poured scorn on the agency, saying that they need to think about the whanau of the children.
No, Mr Becroft. They should be thinking about the welfare of the child, and nothing else.
An investigation into Oranga Tamariki has found the ministry has been routinely removing newborn babies from their parents under a “without notice” court order, rather than in exceptional cases only.
The ombudsman examined 74 case files of babies aged up to 30 days old over a two-year period, ending 30 June 2019.
Forty-five of those cases involved Maori babies. Oranga Tamariki chief executive Grainne Moss has apologised on behalf of her organisation.
“I want to say how deeply, deeply sorry we are, and that we will do everything we can to make sure other whanau don’t go through what you went through,” she told Checkpoint.
Why is it only the whanau that matters? These people have a history of letting down their children. Why is no one thinking about the children?
Let me share with you a few stories about uplifted children.
A family in my street fosters children. Sometimes, late at night, a vehicle arrives at their house, and social workers turn up with a couple of brown-skinned, scantily clad children. These kids will usually stay with the family for a few weeks. In that time, they are deloused, cleaned, dressed properly, fed properly, and made to attend school. While they are there, they learn to ride bikes, they play ball in the backyard, and generally have a bit of fun and exercise that they would never have at home.
Some of these children do go into long-term foster care, but the majority, after a few weeks, are returned to the awful life they were plucked from, having been given only a brief glimpse of what life could be like for them, if only they didn’t have such a dreadful family.
One young Maori girl was put into long term foster care with a European family. She was properly dressed, fed and went to school. After a few years, with her consent, the family adopted her officially. Now she is in her early twenties, has a job, a partner with a professional career, they have bought a house together and she is doing some part-time study. She has virtually no contact with her birth family, by her own choice.
Can you imagine what her life would have been like if she had not stayed with her adopted family?
Another one – this one a European child – has been taken off the mother and put into the care of a family member with young children. The foster child has behavioural problems, but is attending school and doing much better than she was doing before. Oranga Tamariki have sworn that she will never go back to her birth mother, who incidentally is pregnant again, and about to repeat the same awful cycle all over again.
I am sure there are many similar stories of children who have been taken away from awful families and have prospered as a result. Equally though, there are many more stories of children who continued to live in deprivation and squalor with families who just don’t care about them at all.
Oranga Tamariki has a hard enough job making the tough calls to remove children from families because, these days, it is not the first option. It is usually only a last resort. Instead of being forced to apologise to whanau who don’t really care about the children (because, if they did, they would not allow them to be abused and deprived, and they would never come to the notice of Oranga Tamariki at all), their first concern is the welfare of the children who are not getting a fair chance in life because they are being neglected by parents and their wider families.
Nowadays, the pandering to Maori has become so bad that we cannot stop the child abuse. We can only report the dreadful statistics as more children are beaten, starved or otherwise abused by whanau who are entrusted with their care.
Andrew Becroft could have stood up for the children of course and lent some support to the government agency that tries so hard to help neglected kids. But he piled into them as well, without a thought about the damage such an attitude is going to do to kids in the future who really should be taken away from abusive parents, but are not.
It is the role of the Children’s Commissioner to protect the lives and welfare of children. By criticising the agency that tries to help them he is allowing more children to be abused and possibly killed. I call on Andrew Becroft to do what he is supposed to be doing and put the welfare of children above all else. But, as he has not done that so far, he should be ashamed of himself.
Next time a child is murdered by a whanau member, Mr Becroft (particularly if Oranga Tamariki tried to intervene and were rendered powerless by interfering bureaucrats), I really hope it keeps you awake at night. Because, Mr Becroft, next time it happens, when you could have done something but you didn’t, you will have blood on your hands.
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