Oranga Tamariki: How far has it come and where does it need to go from here?

Thursday, 15 October 2020

The head of Oranga Tamariki, Grainne Moss, is deeply concerned about the rise in methamphetamine use and the effects it has on children and families. (Video first published in October 2020)

Ahead of the 2017 General Election, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern and then-National leader Bill English argued about whose party would do more to improve child welfare. This time around, we’ve heard much less from the two party leaders (National is now led by Judith Collins) about the country’s most vulnerable.

Despite fiery commentary throughout the year in response to babies being uplifted, there’s been little public reflection on the first full term of the country’s new state care agency.

In 2016, it was made public the long and chequered story of Child, Youth and Family was officially coming to an end. It would be replaced by a new agency from April 2017.

The work had started two years prior, when then-Minister for Social Development Anne Tolley established an expert panel tasked with overhauling the system, to “transform the lives of our vulnerable children once and for all”.

* Let's direct our anger to the real cause of child abuse, not the social workers

* Babies are caught between the state and their families

The panel, headed by senior civil servant Dame Paula Rebstock, proposed a new, ‘tamariki-first’ operating model, that would provide a single point of accountability for the country’s most at-risk children and young people. In May 2016, Cabinet agreed.

Given CYF’s name had been subtly changed three times before and the organisation had been restructured at least 14 times since its inception in 1992, the move was greeted with scepticism. But almost everyone agreed the current system was failing those in statutory care.

Minister for Children and NZ First MP Tracey Martin says the next minister in charge of the state care agency will need to be brave enough to continue pushing for Oranga Tamariki partnerships with Māori and community organisations.

When the new, Labour-led Government came into power, CYF’s transformation into the new Ministry for Vulnerable Children Oranga Tamariki (later named Oranga Tamariki – Ministry for Children) was in full swing.

Before she’d even started as chief executive, Belfast-born Grainne Moss acknowledged she had “the most complex set of accountabilities of anyone in the public sector”. But as the agency enters the final stage of its five-year transformation process, how can we measure its success and tell whether it’s on the right track?

Senior lecturer in counselling, human services and social work at Auckland University, and a former social worker, Dr Ian Hyslop says the agency got off on the wrong foot.

“It was politically driven. It was part of National’s social investment vision. It was about identifying costly and dangerous sections of the community, and assuming you could fix one family at a time.”

The expert panel ignored other social indicators of poor parenting such as inadequate housing, childcare, and poorly-resourced communities, he says. What resulted was a “huge growth in centralised bureaucracy”.

But over time, pressure from within and outside the agency has seen a shift towards devolution of services. While there are still power struggles over who controls what, and tensions between Māori and Crown organisations, essentially, he says, that’s the way to go.

“It’s not just a care system that needs solving, it’s the whole social support system for high-needs families.”

Now, the agency has reached a critical point, where it needs to commit to community partnerships, he says. “We don’t want knee-jerk reactions, but we want to reform child protection to empower Māori to care for their own.”

New Zealand has one of the worst records of child abuse in the developed world, despite efforts from successive governments. Nine children are killed each year, on average. A child is admitted to hospital with non-accidental injuries every second day. It’s estimated 70 per cent of children in state care are Māori.

There have been 146 victims under the age of 15 since January 2004, representing one-eighth of all homicide victims, according to Stuff’s Homicide Report, the first publicly searchable database of homicides in New Zealand. Overwhelmingly, the killers are parents and caregivers.

The former deputy head of Oranga Tamariki, Hoani Lambert believes the call for no children requiring being uplifted should be supported. (Video first published in October 2020)

In 2019, 13 children died as a result of homicide; the largest number since 2015, when 18 were killed. So far this year, six children have died in suspicious circumstances.

But homicide numbers aren’t a good indicator of wider trends in child abuse, mistreatment and neglect.

Shortly after taking power, Ardern scrapped the previous government’s public service targets, including targets aimed at reducing the number of children experiencing physical and sexual abuse by 20 per cent by 2021. The targets wouldn’t provide the “systemic change” needed, she said.

Oranga Tamariki continues to collect the data though no longer makes it available on its website. In the 2017 financial year, there were 3136 findings of physical abuse and 1038 findings of sexual abuse.

The numbers haven’t changed much since then. Last year – normalised by population over time – physical abuse was up 10 per cent, relative to 2017, and sexual abuse was up 1 per cent. But in 2020, physical abuse was down 3 per cent, relative to 2017, and sexual abuse was down 2 per cent. Still, a far cry from the initial goal of a reduction of 20 per cent.

While it’s important to have aspirational goals, Moss says, a single target can’t reflect the complexity and challenges of the work.

“I’m comfortable about [the targets] we have now. In particular, we have very strong public accountability and reporting around things that really matter for tamariki and rangatahi.”

She’s referring to amendments passed under the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 (Children’s and Young People’s Well-being Act 1989), which impose, among other things, specific duties on the chief executive of the day to recognise and commit to principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as well as new national standards of care, and changes to information sharing.

As for other metrics that suggest the agency is heading in the right direction, she says, the average caseload for social workers is down from 33 in 2017 to 21 in 2020. The age of state care has been raised from 17 to 21 and the agency is supporting 600 young people each year as they leave the system. It’s also seen a 44 per cent drop in the number of children entering care since 2017.

One of her current, most pressing concerns is the impact of methamphetamine on families. The drug was a factor in decisions relating to almost half of the children who came into care in the year ended 29 February 2020.

“It’s highly addictive, and leads to the wide-scale destruction of families,” Moss says. “That’s one of the things that keeps me up at night.”

But witnessing the successes of care-experienced children and young people – “they’re passing NCEA Level 1 with Excellence and playing representative netball and becoming singing teachers” – balances out the darker parts of the job, she says.

Despite calls for her resignation in response to the agency’s uplift practises, Moss hasn’t considered stepping down.

Former Minister for Children Anne Tolley says it would be “right and proper” to review Oranga Tamariki after its official transformation process is complete next year.

“One of the things about this job is you get a completely different perspective on life. A bad day for me in the office is nothing compared to a bad day for a child. … The criticism is actually something we need to lean into, and I think that’s what we’ve done.”

In April 2019, Minister for Children Tracey Martin was alerted to a case that was about to be made public in the media. Four weeks later, Newsroom published stories about an attempted uplift by Oranga Tamariki of a newborn baby from its mother at Hawke’s Bay Hospital.

The standoff between social workers and the young, Māori mother prompted iwi leaders to call for a new, national approach to resolve the high numbers of Māori parents losing their babies through Oranga Tamariki applications to the Family Court.

Soon, thousands were calling for the name Oranga Tamariki to be removed, and for Māori to take control of the care system. Thousands more signed the 'Hands Off Our Tamariki' petition.

In Parliament in June, Martin and Moss were grilled about whether the state was getting things right, and what difference a $1.1 billion boost to services in the Wellbeing Budget would achieve.

'What Māori say is: 'Give us our children back.' What the children say is: 'We want to be with our families, but we want to be safe.' Oranga Tamariki was created for a single purpose, and that was to keep children safe,' an emotional Martin told the social services and community select committee.

The stories continued in 2020, with Children's Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft releasing statistics showing Māori babies were five times more likely to end up in state care than non-Māori.

Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier in his report, “He Take Kōhukihuki, A Matter of Urgency”, found the agency was routinely using emergency court orders to take newborns without family consultation.

Oranga Tamariki has said its partnerships with Māori organisations and iwi are already driving change.

For example, data from Waikato Tainui showed in 2019, 253 children were prevented from coming into state care through Mokopuna Ora, a framework that connects children with their cultural identity through whānau, hapū and iwi. According to Katie Murray, of Far North provider Waitomo Papakāinga, 170 Māori children were prevented from going into care.

Oranga Tamariki deputy chief executive Hoani Lambert says overall, increased investment in early and intensive intervention, via partnerships with iwi and Māori organisations, is responsible for the reduction in uplifts.

For the last 18 months, the agency has been co-designing new, intensive services in four locations around the country. In Tokoroa, the new service has started taking on families who have raised care and protection concerns. In some cases, social workers and key whānau workers will be embedded in families, promoting good parenting for one to two years.

“Previously, unless we brought a child into care, our ability to provide support was limited. This is the sort of support Māori have been asking for. It’s a different way of working, but it’s an important part of the transformation of the agency,” Lambert says.

When asked how he responds to those who say not one more baby should be taken by the state, he says it’s something everyone should be saying.

“I’d be surprised if anyone thought uplifting a baby was a good thing. The reason reducing the numbers coming into care is so important is there’s harm in the process of removing a child from their birth parents.

“I think the call for no children requiring being uplifted is one we should all be supporting.”

Emily Keddell, an associate professor of social and community work at Otago University, has written about the risk of media and public spotlight actually increasing risk-averse social practise.

She says data suggests Oranga Tamariki is already applying a higher threshold to uplifting Māori babies. But uplift figures shouldn’t be the only outcome we’re looking for when assessing whether things have improved, she says.

“I’m always going to put in a plug for greater research, but we need longitudinal research on what’s happened to those families.

”We need to know every decision point; reports of concern, substantiation, who was removed, who was returned, and more importantly, what the outcomes were for children and families, of all of those things.”

Currently, she says, it’s still a battle to get information. Oranga Tamariki has not provided the number of families involved in intensive intervention pilots.

Martin says she’s told Oranga Tamariki to be “less defensive, more transparent and to articulate what’s happening in language people understand”.

She describes the Hastings case as “a really obvious manifestation of bad practise”, and is confident the agency is moving in the right direction.

In December 2018, Stuff published ‘Who Cares?’ an investigation into the care of children by the state. The project highlighted an alarming rise in the number of Māori newborn babies being removed from their parents by the state.

But she worries a single-minded focus on reducing uplifts will compromise child safety.

Martin’s mother was abandoned at the age of two and eventually taken in, along with her brother, by their grandmother.

“Children through time immemorial have had to be removed from particular circumstances. In my family, and in my understanding, that’s whāngai. Culturally, appropriately moving a child from one place to another, that’s called whāngai and it’s been done for a long time.”

Next to her desk, Martin has a board where she marks every child homicide.

“There are still children being killed by people who are supposed to love them. There was a two-year-old recently who showed up in hospital, and someone had stubbed their cigarette out in the child’s eye. It wasn’t an accident.”

Adults shouting at each other doesn’t solve the problem, she says. The system has to change: “We can’t keep doing what we’ve done before.”

Like Hyslop, she says one of the greatest challenges coming will be the continued devolution of services.

“My biggest worry is the next person to sit in this chair won’t believe in [devolution]. You’ve got to be quite brave, to say we’re going to devolve to Māori, to iwi, to the community.”

Also keeping an eye on things will be the country’s first Minister for Children, Tolley, who announced her retirement from Parliament this year.

While she described having to hand over the new ministry as a “great regret”, Tolley says Martin has done a great job. The two women kept in touch for at least the first year after the handover.

“By and large, she kept true to the roll-out programme,” Tolley says. “She got the finance. It was never going to be cheap. We’d changed the system from a crisis management one to one that focussed on prevention. A huge change.”

But Tolley also laments the lack of information coming out of Oranga Tamariki.

“What are the results of the intensive intervention pilots? How many families have been successfully helped? Our measurements of success have to be far wider, now. We need a wide-angle lens, not a focus one.”

Along with Martin, she’s hoping the next minister completes the transformation, the final stage.

“This next year is the final year. Then, it’d be right and proper to have a good look at it all and identify where improvements need to be made.

“It might be helpful to have some of the original advisory group back but also some fresh eyes. The world has changed dramatically in the last five years.”