KEY POINTS:
Public servants are seldom free in public to call a spade a spade. Their roles in government departments and agencies require political neutrality and acute sensitivity to avoiding public controversy. Some, such as the Controller and Auditor-General, are officers of Parliament and have an independence which frees them from ministerial influence. Auditor-General Kevin Brady exercised his freedom through the scandal over political parties' election misspending and spoke out, repeatedly, despite the frownings of the Prime Minister. Most bureaucrats, however, have no such latitude. Few join public debates; most keep within the shadows thrown by the ministers overseeing their departments.
It is encouraging, therefore, that Peter Hughes, the chief executive of the Ministry of Social Development, has spoken his mind, hammering home the responsibility for child abuse to its source - the nation's parents and families. In a long grilling before Parliament's social services select committee, Mr Hughes told the public to stop blaming the Government and its departments for tragedies such as the deaths of the Kahui twins. Adults needed to take personal responsibility, not indulge in rhetoric about systems failing and social workers not preventing child deaths.
He has been involved with Child, Youth and Family for almost a year, so he will be aware of that agency's occasional, spectacular failures over the past decade or more. But his message that it is wrong simply to seek a system or government department to blame whenever such tragedy occurs is long overdue. In the Kahui case, CYF had no involvement. It was never alerted, consulted or engaged in any way with the lives and deaths of the twins.
Social workers responsible for child welfare have a thoroughly unenviable task. To the country's shame, child abuse statistics remain shockingly bad even in times of economic progress, when work is more readily available and living conditions ought to be less miserable among the poor. Where CYF or its staff fail, there ought to be vigorous accountability. The mistakes can literally be of a life and death nature. But social workers do not cause or perpetrate abuse itself; they are not the ones who protect and hide the abusers. While they can perhaps anticipate problems from family and parental histories, they need, and children need, every adult associated with the young to have the courage to speak up when things go wrong.
Mr Hughes' message seems to have been prompted by questioning from MPs as to why his staff had not involved themselves in the Kahui household before the twins' deaths, even if no alert had been received. His strong response cut through a blame-the-state mindset that for too long has allowed individuals and families and communities to absolve themselves from the most basic social responsibility. "Those children were killed by an adult New Zealander," he said. "They were not murdered by a government department." And he noted that no one had called CYF, even anonymously, over the Kahui case. "Unless individual New Zealanders do that we will never get in front of this problem." His comments echoed the memorable words of Senator Hillary Clinton that "it takes a village to raise a child".
Mr Hughes' challenge will be shrugged off by some but applauded by many. Facing MPs, some of whom seemed intent on scoring political points off his staff, he spoke truth to power. It was a rare and welcome example of a public servant armed with knowledge and not afraid to challenge rhetoric and political correctness, calling on society to look to itself. His political masters should take up the theme, urgently and incessantly, to prick consciences of those who, right now, may resort to dumb silence or to blaming the system as the next Kahui case unfolds.
