National Urban Māori Authority calls for systemic clean out of Oranga Tamariki practices

National Urban Māori Authority Chair Lady Tureiti Moxon. Photo / NZME

By RNZ
A leading Māori authority is calling for the deconstruction and transformation of Oranga Tamariki in the wake of its failings in the case of murdered 5-year-old boy Malachi Subecz.

Oranga Tamariki and the minister responsible, Kelvin Davis, both admit the agency failed Malachi, but neither have taken any immediate action, instead waiting for the results of yet another investigation.

On Wednesday the Chief Ombudsman released a scathing report into the agency's handling of the case saying it did less than the bare minimum.

Malachi's extended whānau reported abuse and provided photographic evidence, but Oranga Tamariki failed to refer the allegations to police and did not see or talk to the boy, who was later tortured and killed by his caregiver.

National Urban Māori Authority chairwoman Lady Tureiti Moxon told RNZ's Checkpoint that despite multiple reports into Oranga Tamariki, nothing has really changed in terms of the agency's overall structure.

"It's systemically broken," she said.

Oranga Tamariki Minister Kelvin Davis. Photo / NZME

"We need to transform it, it needs to be changed from the way they do things, and Māori should be much more involved in terms of our rangatiratanga and our mana motuhake."

Moxon said there would undoubtedly be several reports into how the agency could have better responded to the situation.

However, this would not change the fact that Oranga Tamariki could have saved Malachi's life had they followed their own processes, she said.

"They need to take responsibility for this because this was foreseeable and it wasn't dealt with in a way that a lot of their policies and a lot of their processes would ask of them.

"If any of us had done something like that and been remiss, there would have been criminal charges brought, there would have been some kind of whakatika to put things right but in this situation there's been nothing."

The agency needed to be completely deconstructed as it was impossible to change the systemic issues within the organisation using the current approach, she said.

"There are a lot of practices and a lot of racial discrimination that has gone on unchecked for a very long time and that needs to change.

"You can't change it as I believe they are doing it now which is to tweak it here, tweak it there, fix here, fix there... it's systemically broken."

Consultation with Māori was necessary to determining the future of its operation, she said.

Its child-centric approach to care needed to be shifted to better involve whānau, Moxon said.

"I know that they are having contracting with iwi and so on and so forth but is that enough? Because the same rules apply everywhere and it's actually very much in many ways a barrier to being able to be responsive to families.

"We need to be thinking about our families not just in terms of our children but that they belong to a whānau, hapū and iwi."

Contracting services to iwi was not equivalent to enabling Māori to actively respond within their communities, Moxon said.