Five-year-old Malachi Subecz died in November, 2021, after Oranga Tamariki had been alerted to concerns about his care. Photo / Supplied, File
Five-year-old Malachi Subecz died in November, 2021, after Oranga Tamariki had been alerted to concerns about his care. Photo / Supplied, File
OPINION
This month marks a year since the tragic and preventable death of 5-year-old Malachi Subecz from Te Puna.
In the six months after his death, six more children died of suspected neglect and abuse, and a total of eight children have died so far this year.
Behind that statisticare also the thousands of children who have been abused, many unknown to the police or Oranga Tamariki.
As the year continues, we will hear more of the same rhetoric from politicians over the past 20 years as successive political parties have tried to tackle this issue.
The genuine intent of these politicians cannot be questioned, but the method that they choose to tackle the problem is as predictable as it is repetitive.
For more than 30 years, the go-to tool of governments to address the issue of child abuse has been reviews and reports.
Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier released his report on Oranga Tamariki in August 2020.
Thousands of pages of these reports, action plans and strategy documents are gathering dust in Wellington or being consulted and worked on, and yet we are still losing children at the same alarming rate.
The finding of these reports, for the most part, have merit, but overall say the same things.
In 2015, the then National government appointed an independent expert panel to review Child Youth and Family.
Fast forward six years and the current Government appointed the Ministerial Advisory Board to review the same agency but with a name change – Oranga Tamariki.
The resulting reports and the many reports that have been completed in between are filled with condemning and repetitive findings.
After all the money spent, there is little to show for it, as evidenced by the finding of the Office of the Ombudsman in October this year describing Oranga Tamariki’s actions as “a litany of failures”.
The core of how to fix the failings at Oranga Tamariki is stated repeatedly in the pages of these reports but is never implemented to any real degree.
Jane Searle. Photo / Stephen Barker
Addressing the issues within Oranga Tamariki needs to start with the basics.
The team needs to be rebuilt so staff are well trained and resourced, have manageable caseloads and are enabled to deliver good social work practice.
The issues with Oranga Tamariki are not with individual social workers or staff; it is the system that does not support them to get on with their jobs and allows substandard practice to be accepted.
Hence last month Oranga Tamariki staff voted to strike over low wages and unsafe workloads.
While there are areas of bad practice within the organisation, there are also committed and skilled social workers who need to fight the system they work in, just to be able to do their job.
Meanwhile, successive governments continue to play with reviews, language, policy and budgets in a misguided effort to put their stamp on the next new plan. What is needed is leadership that recognises the need for urgent action and is willing to fight to ensure Oranga Tamariki gets the money and resourcing required to implement the change that a succession of reviews have told us is needed.
We need that change now.
Jane Searle is chief executive of Child Matters, which works throughout New Zealand to educate and support adults to protect children.
