KEY POINTS:
The number of children being killed in New Zealand every year is dropping, despite the outcry over the two latest child abuse cases in Rotorua.
A former chief social worker for Child, Youth and Family Services, Mike Doolan, has analysed police data to show that the rate of children killed rose from 0.94 killings a year for every 100,000 children in the decade up to 1987 to 1.07 a year in the 1990s, but fell to just 0.79 a year in the first five years of this decade.
The rate for non-Maori children fell steadily throughout the past 30 years from 0.92 killings for every 100,000 children up to 1987 to 0.67 in the 1990s and 0.60 in the latest period.
The rate for Maori children more than doubled from a comparable rate to the rest of the population up to 1987 to a peak of 2.40 killings for every 100,000 children in the 1990s - higher than any country in the Western world.
But it has dropped back to 1.34 killings for every 100,000 children in this decade. This is still more than twice the non-Maori rate, but the gap is narrowing dramatically.
Mr Doolan, now a senior fellow at Canterbury University, said international experience pointed to a link between child deaths and economic conditions such as those stemming from the removal of import protection and other reforms in New Zealand in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"One can't draw a direct causal link between the social changes and what happened with New Zealand behaviours, but what is clear is that any people who suffer adversely from social and economic changes at a higher rate than other populations are likely to exhibit these sorts of patterns," he said.
Maori suffered more than others from the economic reforms because they were over-represented in formerly protected or state-owned sectors such as manufacturing, forestry and the railways.
The number of Maori people in paid work dropped by 15 per cent between 1986 and 1991, when total employment fell by only 6 per cent.
Maori unemployment peaked at 26 per cent in 1991, when the non-Maori rate was only 9 per cent.
The Maori unemployment rate has fallen, but the latest survey in March found it was still 8.6 per cent, almost as high as the peak rate of non-Maori joblessness 16 years ago. The non-Maori rate is down to 3.7 per cent.
Politicians yesterday blamed the latest cases of 3-year-old Nia Glassie and another Rotorua family, and last year's deaths of the Kahui twins in Auckland, on a failure of Maori leadership.
United Future leader Peter Dunne said: "It's time to stop pretending that the kind of child abuse suffered by Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins is not a Maori problem.
"Until Maori leadership accepts that they are the key to finding a solution for child abuse by Maori, we will continue treading water waiting for the next child to die."
But Mr Doolan said there was a risk of focusing on race just because that was the most obvious common factor in such tragedies.
"One of the disadvantages of my research is that it was based on police data, and police, not unexpectedly when working on a homicide, don't collect economic data," he said.
"They record gender, age and ethnicity, so we only have a very limited range of demographic characteristics.
"The danger is that any variation you see gets related to one of those descriptors, and race can assume a prominence it doesn't deserve if we had data around household income or drug and alcohol abuse or family criminality or family violence."
Labour list MP Shane Jones said the Maori families who abused their children were only a small minority "who are gripped by a poverty of spirit and an impoverished morality".
He called for "rapid and ruthless intervention" to remove children from such families.
An Auckland Anglican priest and kaumatua of the Royal New Zealand Navy, Bert McLean, said a generation of young Maori parents born in the 1970s, 80s and 90s had lost contact with their culture and identity.
"If you look at the 2001 Census, there were 120,000 Maori who declared that they did not know their hapu, iwi, language and culture." (This number dropped to 102,000, or 18 per cent of all Maori, in 2006).
"This is the subculture that are now having children," Mr McLean said. "They do not know their culture and language and tikanga and everything else, and have created a culture of their own.
"We have to work a lot harder to identify where they all are and work towards helping them connect with their hapu and iwi and their language. I believe that will be a huge step towards resolving this issue of abuse among some Maori families."
GETTING BETTER AT LAST?
Children killed per 100,000 aged 0-14
1978-1987
Non-Maori - 0.92
Maori - 1.05
Total - 0.94
1991-2000
Non-Maori - 0.67
Maori - 2.40
Total - 1.07
2001-2005
Non-Maori - 0.60
Maori - 1.34
Total - 0.79
Source: Mike Doolan, Canterbury University.
