The Minister responsible for the beleaguered children's ministry, Oranga Tamariki, expects a substantial shift in how tamariki are protected in New Zealand within the next year.
Kelvin Davis told MPs at Parliament on Wednesday that both the ministry and an advisory board set up to be his “eyes and ears” will report back with a proposed new direction by the end of June.
In 2019 Newsroom exposed the realities of child uplifts in Hastings, which eventually led to the then-chief executive Grainne Moss stepping down from the top job.
This came on the back of more than two years of Newsroom investigations into the child protection agency, including a documentary into the attempted uplift of a newborn from his mother at Hawke's Bay Hospital in 2019, which sparked five separate inquiries, four of which slammed the agency, and an urgent Waitangi Tribunal hearing, which is still underway.
Shocking structural racism revealed pēpi Māori were five times more likely to be taken into care than non-Māori.
On Wednesday, Davis said the uplifts “really shone a spotlight on what’s going on and it has made people more aware that everyone needs to work together’’.
“I’d like to think we can make changes as quickly as possible. It will take as long as it takes, but I’d like to think it wouldn’t take a year,’’ he said.
While the details of a new approach to child protection are still to be formalised, Davis said it needed to centre around “entrusting funding and decision-making to people in regions and to Māori, to ensure children stay in the care of whānau where possible’’.
He said that was a very new way of working for Oranga Tamariki but it was a necessary change.
Using the example of children who require foster carers, Davis said a good outcome of the current reviews would be leaving it to iwi to identify safe local caregivers.
“If each of the 10 iwi in the North can provide 20 people who are safe then you’ve got 200 potential caregivers in the North alone,’’ he said.
In order to do that, the ministry needed to support iwi to identify those people.
Speaking to media after his select committee appearance, Davis said “we need to have faith we have the solutions for these issues within our communities – Māori communities in particular’’.
“Everybody knows who are safe people in iwi, it’s just a matter of having a system that when a child is in need, we respond rather than react.’’
While the ministry has worked in partnership with iwi before now, Davis said that “almost implies a contractural arrangement’’ and in some cases that won’t be what works best.
“More work needs to be done on that and that’s why Oranga Tamariki need to get into communities and work out how it can be enablers, rather than being the know-it-alls telling people what to do.’’
