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Evening sunlight shines on a child’s pavement chalk drawing.
New Zealand’s latest report on the child welfare system Photograph: Annie Otzen/Getty Images
New Zealand’s latest report on the child welfare system Photograph: Annie Otzen/Getty Images

In its latest cut-and-paste child welfare report, New Zealand fails Māori again

This article is more than 2 years old
Aaron Smale

The Māori who have been screwed by the system are once again being silenced and ignored

Sorry means you don’t do it again. So goes a phrase used by Aboriginal protesters in Australia in recent years.

The phrase references the national apology in 2008 by prime minister Kevin Rudd to Aboriginal peoples for the Stolen Generations, the thousands of children who were taken from their families.

But if the apology was supposed to be a dawning of a new era, it wasn’t. The number of Aboriginal children taken by the states of Australia after the apology has continued to escalate. Hence the ironic turn of phrase – if you’re really sorry, then stop taking our kids.

Australia is not the only settler colonial state that has a habit of taking indigenous children.

The US provided the template with Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the late 19th century, a model that was replicated in residential schools in both the US and Canada.

And New Zealand has its own history of children being taken by the welfare system and incarcerated in welfare homes, which is now the subject of a royal commission. Whether these countries apologise or not – and unlike Australia and Canada, New Zealand hasn’t – it doesn’t seem to prevent them repeating the same mistakes ad infinitum.

After being invisible to the white majorities in these countries, these histories of harm have periodically broken into public view, only to subside and be forgotten and ignored again. A documentary by my colleague Melanie Reid smashed into New Zealand’s consciousness in 2019, showing state welfare employees trying to take a newborn child from its mother literally in the dead of night. Prime minister Jacinda Ardern dropped her empathy branding and refused to watch it. To do so would have required taking responsibility, something the New Zealand government has actively resisted for decades.

After several damning reports on New Zealand’s child protection system, including from the Waitangi Tribunal, the minister for children, Kelvin Davis, decided to commission another report to find out what was wrong.

That report has just dropped.

If it’s is a dull read it’s because it trots out bland statements of the obvious that virtually repeat a number of phrases from a similar report five years ago. That previous report was commissioned by the National-led government when it was supposedly overhauling the child welfare system in 2016. But its findings and recommendations obviously weren’t implemented because the latest iteration repeats similar phrases like “not fit for purpose” and other bureaucratic banalities. Davis has effectively got a $1m cut-and-paste job.

The new report recommends, among other things, that the Ministry for Children/Oranga Tamariki establish a new operating model and shift resources to communities. But these have been recommended before.

The report calls Oranga Tamariki “self-centred”, which is ironic because the whole report is centred on the state’s role in what comes next. This directly contradicts the recommendation from the Waitangi Tribunal that the crown needs to step back and let Māori lead the way. There are token gestures in this direction but it looks like the usual box-ticking exercise. And the report is written by a group appointed by a minister of the crown and is therefore part of the same problem. Davis wants to retain control while claiming to hand it over.

But that begs another question – which Māori are we talking about? When the government does engage with Māori, it will always set the terms of engagement and that includes carefully selecting Māori who will toe the line. State agencies will pick the Māori they want to talk to, choosing those they think are more malleable and will bend to the government’s will. Until they don’t, and then they’re out.

There’s another group of Māori who are getting screwed by that same system, such as those who went through the welfare system. They get silenced and ignored and don’t get a place at the table. And yet they know more than anyone what is broken about the system because they’ve been broken by it.

The government’s latest report on child welfare is more of the same. Part of that repetition is that the state will never fully admit that its interventions in removing Māori children has caused intergenerational trauma and harm to tens of thousands of individuals and their families. The Māori that the government will select to work with don’t necessarily have any insight or skills to deal with that level of trauma.

And so the cycle is once again at risk of repeating itself.

  • Aaron Smale is a freelance journalist and PhD candidate. He won the Best Investigation in New Zealand’s national media awards in 2021. He was an Ochberg fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Center in 2019. He has a claim on adoption before the Waitangi Tribunal.

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