The latest Oranga Tamariki scandal has erupted while the abuse by the State of children in its care continues to horrify…
More than 130 children and teens wrongly given electric shocks at Lake Alice
Police have identified more than 130 former patients of the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital’s child and adolescent unit who received electric shocks to their genitals or as punishment, rather than treatment.
…130 children tortured by electricity purely for sadistic punishment.
I’ve said it once, I’ll never stop saying it, the NZ State is the biggest abuse of human rights in the country.
While we are disgusted with the abuse of the past, Oranga Tamariki can’t even spend the money Government are desperately spending on them in the hope to make real changes…
Poor financial management forces Oranga Tamariki to review funding used from Budget 2019-2020
Poor financial management of sexual violence services has forced Oranga Tamariki to take the “additional measure” of reviewing what it did with all the funding it got in Budget 2019-20.
In a briefing released under the OIA, the ministry said it was doing the review of “financial management and controls to minimise the risk of the issues described in this report occurring again”, referring to a damning report into its sexual violence services project.
It said it would give the review to the government by the end of this month.
In the briefing, OT admitted its “inadequate” work and “slow delivery” led to the project having to be shut down last August.
“We did not get this right and we have let down the communities we were meant to be assisting,” OT chief executive Chappie Te Kani told the Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis.
His briefing came on the same day, 26 May, that RNZ detailed the damning report into the project.
Up till then, Davis had not been aware the project had had to be canned, he told RNZ earlier. He then asked Te Kani for more information.
…this is all happening at a time when the Children’s Commissioner has been removed as oversight over Oranga Tamariki…
Oranga Tamariki oversight: Minister Carmel Sepuloni defends changes amid widespread opposition
Labour is defending plans to overhaul oversight of Oranga Tamariki despite the vast majority of submitters, many of them state care “survivors”, and every other political party opposing them.
…let’s be very clear why Labour are bewilderingly amputating the Children’s Commissioners oversight of Oranga Tamariki by folding it into ERO (Education Review Office).
It’s because Labour are cowards when it comes to taking on the Wellington Bureaucracy!
As The Daily Blog has been pointing out for months since this was mooted, the State want the Children’s Commissioner amputated from oversight because it’s currently juggling the horrific Abuse in State Care inquiry which is highlighting the despicable tactics MSD used to discredit those they abused.
The sheer scope and scale of abuse by the State must be urgently smothered in an ocean of faceless bureaucracy so no one who was responsible in making these decisions can ever be held accountable.
Oranga Tamariki is a neoliberal experiment in welfare who justify their expense by arguing early intervention saves the State downstream costs so using Big Data algorithms can predict which troubled child will cost us more.
This has NEVER been about the welfare of the vulnerable kid, it’s always been about the welfare of the State’s wallet!
Recently, once the new Government made it clear that uplifting Māori children was no longer acceptable, Oranga Tamariki cravenly embarked upon reverse uplifting Māori children settled with Pakeha families because their are ‘culturally unsafe’. This sudden tide change in uplifting was driven not by any real danger to those children, but by a Bureaucracy attempting to pander to the Government of the day!
To ensure their arses are covered, the Wellington Bureaucracy want oversight removed from the Children’s Commissioner, because they are actually independent, and hidden inside the Education Review Office, the same Education Review Office that didn’t note all that sexual abuse at Dilworth over the decades they were reviewing Dilworth.
This is an arse covering exercise by the Wellington Bureaucracy over the most vulnerable children and Labour are letting the Wellington Bureaucracy get away with it because Labour are terrified of the Unions and power represented by that Wellington Bureaucracy.
Meanwhile vulnerable children are being hurt right now by a system that refers to them as ‘clients’.
This whole stinking neoliberal experiment in Welfare should be smashed to bits by Labour, not fucking protected or enabled!
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