Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (file photo) Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Te Pāti Māori has proposed putting an end to state care for Māori children, saying it's a response to a "fundamentally broken" system.
The party unveiled its policy on Wednesday, calling for Oranga Tamariki (OT) to be reformed, with a new Māori-run independent Mokopuna Māori Authority.
The Authority would be set up as a by-Māori for-Māori organisation with the goal of eliminating state care of mokopuna, tamariki and rangatahi
Māori. It would do this by establishing a partnership network across hapū, iwi and other Māori organisations "to ensure mokopuna Māori remain connected to their whakapapa".
This would be set down under new legislation partially repealing the Oranga Tamariki Act, with a three-year transition period. The new Authority would be funded with $1 billion from the state, coming out of OT's current $1.5b budget.
The policy promised further changes:
- All Youth Care and Protection residences shut down
- Immediate end to at-birth uplifts
- Immediate end to uplifts done without consent from whānau, hapū and iwi
- Review of the Child Protection Protocol, which dictates how OT and police respond to reports of potential harm to children
- Ngā Tini Whetū, a Whānau Ora early-support trial joint project involving Te Puni Kōkiri, OT, ACC and the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency, would be scaled up
- Workers would be required to undergo de-escalation and use-of-force training.
Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said with Māori making up 70 percent of children in state care, the funding split for the two organisations made sense.
"We've said this numerous times before, Māori are not the problem waiting to be punished.
"It's broken, it's fundamentally broken because it's designed off a system that assumed Māori could not look after our tamariki, our mokopuna, so that's the basis of our policy today."
The party's policy document said Oranga Tamariki simply could not be changed from within, quoting the Waitangi Tribunal's conclusion that "reform of Oranga Tamariki, no matter how well designed, will ultimately fail another generation of children".
"Generations of our kids have been abused and mistreated by the state, and report after report has shown the racism and abuse that lies at the heart of Oranga Tamariki", Ngarewa-Packer said in a statement.
Co-leader Rawiri Waititi said the Crown had no legal rigth to remove mokopuna from their whānau, hapū and iwi.
"How many more chances do we give a Crown agency which continues to breach Te Tiriti in removing our tamariki and mokopuna from their whānau? The answer? None
Children's Minister Kelvin Davis said building another bureaucracy would be just missing the point.
"I believe that our communities, our hapū, our iwi, our Māori providers know how to look after our tamariki. So to build another bureaucracy I think is just missing the point."
