The failings of Oranga Tamariki go beyond the troubled chief executive Grainne Moss – Newsroom has learned the agency’s wholesale taking of Māori children until last year is now being reversed in a blunt instrument policy to return ‘uplifted’ tamariki even when they face new trauma.
There are multiple examples of young children who were taken and placed in foster care with non-Māori being uprooted again and returned to wider whānau as the children’s ministry tries to clean up the mess it caused in the years up to 2019.
In this new video documentary below, Melanie Reid, who first revealed the extent of Oranga Tamariki’s heavy-handed and unlawful ‘without notice’ removals of babies and children, tells the story of four Māori children who – after removal from a violent home – were told they had been moved to a “forever home”. But later, they were parted from their new home and foster parents for good.
WATCH the full video story below:
The Pākehā foster parents, vetted, approved and previously responsible for caring for others from the state, sold their home to get a bigger property to care for their new children, the mother left her childcare job to be with them and they sought help from Oranga Tamariki to learn and adopt culturally appropriate practices.
For more than a year the situation was positive for all, with the couple commended by social workers. But after a law change – and the Newsroom expose of the uplift practices against Māori mothers and children – in 2019, that all changed. The parents were reported and investigated, judged for being ‘white’ and English, told no plan existed to take the children back but, eventually, forced to wave the four siblings goodbye.
When the children were taken from the couple’s South Island semi-rural home to whānau previously unknown to them in the North Island, teachers, parents and children from their local school gathered to farewell them, many tearful. The school’s principal had written in vain to Oranga Tamariki urging it to abandon its decision to once again separate the children from a family environment.
The circumstances are disturbing for the children and parents but also for the tactics deployed by Oranga Tamariki to enforce its new change of policy, which were, at best, deceptive and at worst underhanded.
South Island Māori leader Tā Mark Solomon was so aghast at the re-traumatisation of the children he directed the couple to complain to the Ombudsman. Solomon bluntly labels what has happened as reverse racism.
“I still look at the fact that [after] two and a half years, traumatised children have been traumatised again by the processes of Oranga Tamariki. You’re re-traumatising all those children just so we’re ‘culturally safe’ now. Where’s the consideration of the trauma of doing that. I think that’s what’s missing from this whole picture. What will this do to those children?”
Nicola Atwool, associate professor of community and social work at the University of Otago, says of this latest re-uplift and separation for the children:
“Children are real live human beings, they’re not objects. They’re not parcels that we can move around. They have feelings, they have significant ties. Children’s very survival depends on their emotional connections to adults.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful, but it’s a simplistic belief that culture trumps all else. And so therefore it justifies the removal of these children from where they have been for two and a half years, and the movement to people who at this point in time are from a child’s perspective, strangers.
Our report on the Court of Appeal decision overturning the High Court ban on Newsroom’s story is here.
There is no one in this story that I don’t feel sorry for. Mostly the children who I really hope are happy and healthy 3 years on, then the foster mum to whom my heart goes out, then the social workers who simply don’t get paid enough and are way overworked meaning travesties like this are virtually inevitable because you need mental and emotional resource as well as presence of mind to assess beyond “mindlessly following the rules”.