Restored: the Newsroom story the Crown and court didn’t want you to see – ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’

“I told you I’d find you a new place to live. This is your forever home. You’ll never have to leave again.”

It was around six years ago, and these were the words of an Oranga Tamariki social worker to three little girls sitting in the lounge of their new home – their third in as many years – after being uplifted from a violent household as toddlers. They would soon be joined by their newborn brother.

Fast forward to a sunny Saturday morning, two Oranga Tamariki staff members pulled into the driveway of the children’s semi-rural South Island home.

WATCH the full video story below:

The older kids understood what was happening – they knew they were saying goodbye to the people and the place they had been told would be theirs forever.

Soon, they would be flying to a new home, hundreds of kilometres away in the North Island. Tears flowed from the children, the foster parents, and dozens of friends from the small community that had supported the family group.

Oranga Tamariki’s decision to take four Māori children from their English foster parents and place them with the far-away family of the birth mother’s half-brother is described by Ngāi Tahu elder, Tā Mark Solomon, as “reverse racism”.

“I’ve publicly stated quite a few times that Oranga Tamariki was set up to protect children from harm and abuse. But the problem is to achieve that they act in a harmful and abusive manner,” says Solomon.

The case has also drawn the attention of the country’s top expert in attachment trauma, University of Otago’s Dr Nicola Atwool. “Yes, the issue of cultural connection needs to be addressed. But whether that justifies inflicting further trauma on children who already have a trauma history is very questionable.”

“There are other ways in which these situations can be navigated and, in particular, if we are moving children, then we should not be doing that by this kind of uplift. There are other ways in which children can be moved.

“But the question in my mind is: did anybody ask where these children felt they belonged? Who did these children feel loved by? And we should only ever disrupt that when they are in imminent risk. And there was no evidence of that,” Atwool says.

“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.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Newsroom has seen hundreds of pages of documents that outline exactly how Oranga Tamariki went from celebrating this foster family to vilifying them. We also spoke to experts in the area of social work and child attachment, who said without a doubt these children would be re-traumatised as a result of Oranga Tamariki’s actions.

Home for life

This story begins back when the three girls were all under three years old. Family violence meant police and Oranga Tamariki got involved; the father was sent to prison and the mother deemed unable to care for them.

For 17 months the girls stayed with a temporary caregiver while Oranga Tamariki says it tried repeatedly to find “culturally appropriate placements” to take all three children, but with “no success”.

The preschool teacher of the two older girls discovered they were going to be split up, so she asked to take them. She and her husband, who migrated to New Zealand from England in 2009, have two adult children in their early 20s, are experienced caregivers, and have permanent care of another child, a six-year-old.

The couple let Oranga Tamariki know they would provide a home for the children if there were no whānau available. When they were told there was a third little girl, too young for preschool, they agreed to take her too.

“Nobody wanted them, they were going to split those three girls up. They could’ve gone anywhere. We took them to keep them together,” says the foster father.

The plight of the three little girls coincided with a “culture shift” within our child protection agency. Child, Youth and Family was scrapped and replaced with Oranga Tamariki, headed by former New Zealand managing director of aged care healthcare provider Bupa, Grainne Moss.

Oranga Tamariki’s focus was on ‘harm prevention’, the philosophy that would drive a 20 percent increase in children being taken from their parents under urgent interim custody ‘without notice’ section 78 orders, and a dramatic increase in Māori babies being taken at birth.

The new agency mounted a big push to encourage New Zealanders to consider providing a ‘safe, secure and loving’ Home for Life – a permanent care arrangement intended to provide stability for foster children.

Moss enthused during Foster Care Awareness Week three years ago that: “Any child affected by trauma needs understanding and a loving place to belong, so they can flourish. I’m always so impressed that New Zealanders from all walks of life are providing not just a home, but caring relationships that last well beyond the time a child might stay with a family. These caregivers play an important role in adding to a child’s sense of community, something every child deserves.”

By 2018, three Māori babies a week were being uplifted. New Children’s Minister Tracey Martin urged the wider community to help: “We can’t do it all, so we need to take New Zealand with us; we need more caregivers, more carers to step forward and provide loving homes for children.”

And that’s exactly what this couple did. They agreed to offer the girls a Home for Life, and the paperwork was drafted.

The social workers were thrilled. So was the children’s great-grandmother. “I was delighted when they got them, they did so much for them,” Nana L told Newsroom.

The English couple were fully committed. They sold their house to buy a bigger one with land for the children to play. They traded their car for a van. The foster mother left her job to take care of them.

Months later, the English couple were asked to provide emergency respite care for a newborn, who arrived at their home at just six hours old. He’d been uplifted at the maternity hospital from his mother by Oranga Tamariki before she could hold him. The couple were told a few days later the baby was the girls’ younger brother.

In the social worker’s notes from the time, she states: “The couple are willing to care for him permanently and are saying they want the siblings to be kept together. I believe the couple are more than capable of caring for him … and have no concerns about the level of care the children are receiving.”

She added: “(The couple) have a good understanding of the importance of promoting a positive cultural identity.”

The foster parents had asked Oranga Tamariki for help with their cultural knowledge – they knew as English caregivers of tamariki Māori this was their biggest challenge. Oranga Tamariki agreed to assist.

The foster mother set up a communication book so she and the birth mother could write messages to each other and the social workers could keep tabs on what was going on. “It was a good way to send updates about her boy crawling, how the kids enjoyed the presents she sent, and to check with her about any big decisions. She’s still their mum,” the foster mother told Newsroom.

The children’s birth mother wrote the couple letters and cards, one of which said: “Thank you so much for the awesome job you’re doing with my four babies, they mean the world to me.”

New agency aspirations

For the next year or so, the four settled in. They excelled in school and daycare. The oldest child joined kapa haka at the local school. Oranga Tamariki hadn’t made good on any of the promises to help with their cultural needs, but the foster parents did their best, buying books in te reo and CDs of waiata.

They looked forward to the arrival of parcels and cards from their Nana L and visits with their birth mother.

Late in the year, it was confirmed in internal case file documents that the children were to be with the couple permanently.

An email from the care supervisor to other case workers said: “…the three girls are in a home for life placement with (the couple) and this is the permanent arrangement and they are not available to whanau/iwi for permanent placement. However whanau would like to build connections. The care team will be able to share that and begin to plan a way forward in regards to building connections. However this is for connections and not for placement.”

But the family’s life would soon be turned upside down.

In June 2019, the practice of uplifting babies was exposed in a Newsroom Investigates video. The documentary, which showed what happened behind the scenes when a young Māori mother from Hastings refused to hand over her newborn, would force a huge shift in Oranga Tarmariki’s policies and operations.

The five official inquiries that followed our investigation slammed the agency’s approach to removing babies from their mothers and the systemic racism behind it: it was revealed tamariki Māori accounted for 70 percent of children in state care, and that Māori babies were being taken into custody at a rate five times that of non-Māori.

Then on July 1, 2019, section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act came into force. The new legislation laid out the ways in which the state needs to uphold the right of tamariki Māori to be connected to their culture and whakapapa.

The combined effect was immediate. With the Hastings uplift backlash building, Newsroom understands Oranga Tamariki requested an audit to find out where uplifted Māori children had been sent, looking specifically at non-kin carers.

“Essentially they were finding out exactly where the Māori kids were, and we were asked to find out the ethnicity of their carers and the status of their placements. That’s why they’re on spreadsheets in OT offices up and down the country,” an OT social worker told Newsroom.

Oranga Tamariki, it seems, were in a scramble to self-correct.

After more than a year when the family had rarely heard from the ministry, and with no suggestion they were doing anything wrong, they were suddenly under intense scrutiny.

The foster family’s social workers were replaced in a ‘hub restructure’ with two new ones, who we will refer to as social worker B and social worker S, and the Home for Life process for the tamariki stalled.

In a case note, social worker S writes: “We talked about how we needed to demonstrate how the requirements under 7AA and the care standards were being addressed and put into practice for the girls, given that the couple are from a white British heritage. Both foster parents reiterated that they would support the girls to remain connected to their culture and whānau as Māori. They requested support for this to happen as they said that the support previously set up by the Ministry had not been followed up with.”

The children’s birth mother informed the foster couple Oranga Tamariki had told her it was intending to move the children to whānau, yet social worker S was adamant in the same case note this was not the situation.

“I told them that I was not aware of any hidden agenda for the children to be moved from [the foster family] and that the ministry’s position for the [children] was no return home and this has not changed.”

Just two months later, the social workers dropped a bombshell.

‘They’ve turned us into monsters’

By the time a meeting was held between Oranga Tamariki staff and the foster couple, the foster parents were so wary of the agency that the foster father recorded it on his phone. (Staff attending the meeting attempted to get him to stop but he refused.)

The foster parents were lectured on why they could expect change. The supervisor says: “You guys have too much power and you’ve been given it over the years and we have to take responsibility for that as the journey’s gone by. But right now here we are and we are the custodians and we actually need to be telling you how things are and that’s where things have gone wrong. Because we’re trying to enforce our statutory requirements and there are barriers in the way.”

The site manager then tells the foster parents that whānau have been identified in the North Island and they would be discussing the placement of the children.

“So what we want to do is have a hui with whānau and allow them to have involvement in decisions around the long-term future for these children, which will include their care arrangements long term,” social workers told the foster parents at the meeting.

Despite promising the children this would be their home for life, the ministry was now making noises – although never committing to any explicit statements of intent – about moving them. The foster couple felt a growing sense of unease and confusion.

By February, visits were being arranged between the children and their North Island based maternal half-uncle and his wife, whom they had never met before.

“They told us it was just family visits. I kept asking them and saying, look, are you doing the transition? And they said no,” says the foster father.

Wrong school, wrong parents

During a required six-monthly review to the Family Court, social worker B added a supplementary report to the judge that the couple “have behaved in ways that are emotionally and psychologically harmful to the children. They have not been able to change their behaviour following feedback from the Ministry”.

She included accusations over the couple’s reticence to send the children to kura kaupapa, which appears to be one of the biggest bones of contention between social worker B and the foster parents.

To understand how this conflict developed, we need to go back to when the children were first placed in their care.

At the time, the couple say their first social worker told them not to send the children to kura kaupapa due to concerns over the children’s security and safety. This event has been corroborated to Newsroom by another social worker who was present at the time.

The second issue for the foster parents was practical: the foster mother was simply unable to drop five children off at three different locations within a reasonable time.

Social worker B also blamed the couple for sending the children to the local school without gaining consent from the children’s biological parents – something that is up to Oranga Tamariki itself to do.

The principal of the children’s local school was so disturbed by claims made by the children’s social worker she penned a letter of complaint to Oranga Tamariki, in which she wrote: “I am gravely concerned about the content of the court documents that have been prepared by the children’s social worker … I think the ‘report’ … has many comments in it that are grossly untrue; poor attachment and relationships with the foster parents, and that the siblings are not supported with Māori tikanga/te reo in the school or in the home.

“Reading this document really upset me as a principal, because I see siblings who are happy and flourishing here at school and in the home, which is the complete opposite to how the social worker has portrayed this. I find this abhorrent. I urge you to review the validity of this information and disregard its contents.”

Around the same time, social worker B submitted ‘a report of concern’, accusing the foster parents of locking the children in a goat paddock, smacking and not meeting their cultural needs.

A formal investigation was launched. The sentiment had shifted from gratitude that this couple would take in four siblings to hostility that they didn’t meet the new cultural framework.

The caregivers baulked. They were the first to admit they were not perfect, and they knew their biggest shortcoming as carers of tamariki Māori was their lack of tikanga, te reo and knowledge of te ao Māori. But they had been asking for help, repeatedly.

In Oranga Tamariki’s own documentation and again in the numerous meetings, the ministry acknowledges it did not provide the cultural support when it was needed and requested by the couple.

“We didn’t fit the bill anymore – where were they three years ago? No one was here. But to now have a safe home, an attachment to us, animals they love, sisters and parents looking after them – to be ripped out of it is cruel. They’ve turned us into monsters,” the couple told Newsroom.

The investigation

The internal investigation into social worker B’s allegations was carried out by two senior practitioners from another Oranga Tamariki region in the South Island.

Released the following year, it found the foster couple did not lock the children in the goat paddocks, did not limit whānau connections to a level that would be considered emotional abuse and the investigation also could not find that the couple had neglected to meet the cultural needs of the children.

While it did find that smacking had occurred, which the couple strenuously deny, the report concluded it did not constitute physical abuse.

Newsroom asked experienced and highly qualified social worker Vivienne Martini to review the way the foster parents were treated after the arrival of the new social workers.

“The foster couple had no caregiver support plan, and if the children had an ‘It’s All About Me’ plan, the couple were not invited for comment or input and were not given any copies. They have been damned for not doing the things a plan is meant to cover. Oranga Tamariki set them up to fail,” says Martini.

“It is also important to note that the couple were approved Oranga Tamariki caregivers, and had the mandatory caregiver training. This covers issues like managing challenging behaviour. The foster mother was training to be a preschool teacher. They have had many children in their care over the years and there have been no previous complaints.”

“They were promised support from Oranga Tamariki workers to help with cultural competency but Oranga Tamariki never followed through. The foster carers tried to get support but to no avail.”

Sensing time was running out, the couple turned to Ta Mark Solomon (Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Kurī), former chairperson of Ngāi Tahu council for 18 years.

Solomon was shocked at the way Oranga Tamariki has treated them.

“These children have been placed with this couple for over two and a half years. They were traumatised when they got them. And now two and a half years later, we’re going to take you away? 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?”

Two Whānau Ora navigators were also brought in to provide support for the couple at various meetings with Oranga Tamariki, however one was taken off the case at the request of the ministry because of a “conflict of interest”.

Later, a family court judge had recommended removal of the children and two Oranga Tamariki staff – but not their own social worker B – packed them into a car and moved them to whānau in the North Island.

The foster family are currently allowed one Skype call per month for 15 minutes with the children. This contact is monitored by an Oranga Tamariki staff member. Such intensive ‘supervision’ is usually reserved for contact where the children are considered at serious risk by the adult.

They have also lodged a comprehensive complaint about their treatment by Oranga Tamariki with the Ombudsman and are awaiting a judgment.

Transitions and trauma

“In an ideal world they would never have come to us in the first place – they would have been placed with family. But they weren’t. Oranga Tamariki were happy for us to have them and we changed our lives so we could look after them. Then they go and traumatise the kids again by moving them again,” the foster father told Newsroom.

“I said that at the time (to the OT social worker) you’re not going to come back in two years and take them off us and she said ‘No, this is their forever home’,” says the foster mother.

Her husband observes: “I think they truly believe moving the children is their only way to put things right. Well, it’s not. They’re harming those children again. And they’re harming a lot of children by doing this. It’s a tick in their little box for them. And they’re definitely not looking out for the welfare of these children. Any sane person or parent will tell them that.” 

Vivienne Martini tells Newsroom: “If you’re child-centred or focused, the question has to be: right now what is the best thing for these children – and it was pre-7AA, it was at a time when there were no other options available, no one was putting up a hand for a three or four sibling group.”

“Maybe it would have been better if Oranga Tamariki had put more energy into finding a Māori family in the area, then the transition could have been slow and gentle so the children could have gone back to the foster carers for holidays or weekends so it was less traumatic for the children. I question the veracity of their search for whānau when the children were uplifted by Oranga Tamariki.”

In total, the children in this story spent less than a fortnight with their new whānau before being moved there.

University of Otago associate professor of social and community work, Dr Nicola Atwool, is very concerned about this case and similar ones. She is a child and adolescent psychotherapist and longtime social worker.

“I wrote a journal article on attachment resiliency implications for kids in care and in that I talk about the importance of cultural connection because it’s a known resiliency factor, but the problem is two wrongs don’t make a right.

“So if you made the wrong decision by putting the kids in a Pākehā home you don’t make that right by – now that they’re secure there – by uplifting them and putting them with people who for all intents and purposes are strangers. You can move children but if you’re going to do it in a child-focused way, then it needs to be a graduated transition where the new people are introduced to the child in the home it is living in in a very non-threatening way. The relationship is built up over time and the transfer happens when you get the sense the child is ready for this.

“What I see time and time again are these mad ideas that are about uprooting a child from everything that is currently familiar to them, going to people who might be culturally connected to them but they’re strangers. That’s not right either. 7AA was not introduced to re-traumatise children.

“Oranga Tamariki started off with ‘our success will be measured on how many children we’ve made safe’, now it’s ‘how many children we’ve returned’ and there’s just no understanding of the processes and these are real human beings’ lives and you don’t do that to human beings without having pretty massive fallout.

“It’s all either/or instead of and/and, that’s the problem. You can’t just take one part of a child’s life and make a decision based on one part. Every decision needs to be tailor-made for the situation and that’s the problem – they’re not doing it. It’s reactive and knee-jerk.”

A final blow

When the four children were taken from them, the foster parents packed up all their possessions – including bikes, clothes, music boxes, teddies from their birth mother, birthday and Christmas gifts from their Nana L – and sent them to Oranga Tamariki to be delivered to the children’s North Island home.

When the foster father asked the site manager why they had not all arrived, she told him: “We went through all the items collected and looked at what they needed, in consultation with whānau, which did result in not everything being sent in the end.

“Unfortunately we did not keep the items we did not send as we believed that they belonged to the tamariki and given they were not required we found other uses for them.”

The foster parents say it’s just another example of the underhanded way they, and the children, have been treated by Oranga Tamariki.

Our report on the Court of Appeal decision overturning the High Court injunction against Newsroom’s story is here.

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