Māori babies five times more likely to end up in state care - stats

4:12 pm on 16 January 2020

Māori babies were five times more likely to end up in state care than non-Māori last year and their rate of urgent entries into state care has doubled since 2010, official figures show.

(File image). Photo: 123RF

In that same period, 61 Māori babies were ordered into state care before they were born, compared to just 21 non-Māori.

Children's Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft released the statistics this morning as part of a widescale inquiry into the removal of Māori babies, aged up to three months old, by the state.

That age group had been selected because that was where the statistics showed there were problems, and because it was a crucial bonding time for mother and child.

Judge Becroft said the figures raised clear questions about racism and bias within the state care sector.

"I've said previously that it's impossible to factor out the enduring legacy of colonisation... or modern day systemic bias," he said.

"Now that, to some extent, will obviously be at play here as it is across all decision-making and all government departments."

The inequities for Māori had grown over time and continued to worsen, Judge Becroft said.

In 2018, the rate of state custody for Māori under the age of 18 was almost seven times higher than non-Māori, up from five times higher in 2014.

Judge Becroft said another concerning statistic was that the rate of urgent entries into state care for Māori babies had doubled since 2010.

In comparison, the rate for non-Māori had not changed.

Urgent entries were most often made without notice or family knowledge, for what were considered to be serious safety concerns.

"It's a terribly invasive and distressing process, it's got to be reserved for the absolutely most serious cases - it ought to be rare" - Judge Andrew Becroft 5:28

from Summer Report

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Judge Becroft said the fact urgent applications were being made at such a high rate was something his office would examine closely.

"These stats reveal clearly, I think for the first time to the whole country, what is really going on and how concerning the problem is," he said.

"The question as to why, is one that is occupying the minds of all those involved in three different inquiries."

"We are really committed to drilling down as to why these stats are continuing, in almost all cases, to get worse, and why the inequities are so profound," Becroft said.

"But the first step for us was to ask what is actually happening? What do the stats really show?"

Speaking to RNZ's Summer Report, midwife Jean Te Huia said the problem wasn't with Oranga Tamariki itself, but a lack of support and education for whānau.

Te Huia was the midwife of the mother whose baby Oranga Tamariki tried to take in Hastings early last year - sparking investigations into the processes around uplifting children.

"I think that's it's disappointing that these statistics have been around for generations," she said. "When we look at the percentage, almost 48 percent of those pregnant women whose pēpi are Māori who have been taken, their parents themselves were in care. So we have an intergenerational problem and an issue which the state has been unable and unwilling to tackle."

"We have problems that far outweigh the need to improve a child welfare system" - Jean Te Huia 4:44

from Summer Report

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She also pointed out that while Māori made up over 69 percent of babies taken, the others were often Pasifika and other nationalities, rather than Pākehā.

"This is a brown problem, this is a problem where we have poverty, lack of housing. We don't have support for good kaupapa Māori antenatal education for these young mums, we have an insidious problem where whānau don't have education.

"We have problems that far outweigh the need to improve a child welfare system."

But Oranga Tamariki deputy chief executive Hoani Lambert said the ministry couldn't bring those numbers down on its own.

"Oranga Tamariki, unfortunately, is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. What we need to make sure is that we're working with other government agencies to look at issues with housing, employment, supporting young Māori parents to be able to work through relationship issues without exposing their children to violence."

The first full report is due to be released later this year.

Pākehā invading the Māori mind: The strange case of Roderick Finlayson We continue our week-long examination of New Zealand writer Roderick Finlayson with an essay by Anahera Gildea on cultural appropriation ... Anahera Gildea (Ngāti Tukorehe) is a Wellington-based essayist, poet and short story writer. Her first book of poetry was published in 2016; The Ngawhika family (in Pukehina, c.1927), were the model for many of Roderick Finlayson's short stories. ... ; "There can be little dispute...that [Finlayson's] stories are vivid and compassionate attempts to portray the early twentieth-century effects of Māori deracination and broken communal integrity." ... ; The 1970s were a crucial time in the recent history of Aotearoa. Writers like JC Sturm, Patricia Grace, and Witi Ihimaera emerged into the literary world; Pope John Paul II insisted that the rosary be the preferred meditative practice for Catholics worldwide; ngā iwi Māori rose up politically in the Land March, at the occupation of Bastion Point and the Raglan golf course, in the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal; and so much more. It was also the decade in which I was born and baptised, and that saw the first revival and republication of Finlayson’s work. ... (newsroom) /// Finlayson, Roderick David 1904–1992 ... ; Farm life introduced Finlayson to rural Maori. He stayed with the family of Hone Ngawhika at Pukehina for several summers during the 1920s until about 1931, learning from him traditional ways of living with the land. ... ; Finlayson showed Cresswell his satiric writing, but Cresswell was more impressed by some short stories, modelled on those of the Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga. These were written about the Pukehina community from which Finlayson now felt himself to be in exile, possibly as the result of a failed love affair. ... ; He won third prize in the short story section of the centennial literary competitions with 'The totara tree'. Cresswell wrote to him in the early 1940s, 'Men like you & Sargeson are founding our native style, if we are to have any.' Although eclipsed by Sargeson, Finlayson participated in the emergence of a regional literature that seemed to be revealing the country to itself, critically, for the first time. He shared the romanticism of many of his contemporaries, celebrating what he called the poetic life, 'a life dependent on the forces and powers of Nature', and lamented its loss in the kainga (village), on the farm, within the human heart. ... ; Roderick Finlayson's distinctive contribution to the writing of New Zealand was the Maori stories of his first two collections. They portrayed a people caught between two worlds, as the urban economy insinuated its influence into traditional communities, bringing Pakeha bent on their dispossession. Although his rendering of Maori thought and speech has sometimes been criticised as simplistic, Finlayson's sympathetic yet unsentimental stories make him an important transitional figure between the colonial apologia of precursors such as A. A. Grace and the Maori writers who have succeeded him.

Like Sargeson’s, his earliest stories were published in the 1930s in the left-wing journal Tomorrow. Brown Man’s Burden appeared in 1938, and his second collection, Sweet Beulah Land, in 1942. Other work would follow at somewhat irregular intervals: a couple of novels, some later stories, a study of D’Arcy Cresswell, and various polemical writings of which the most trenchant are about the evils of mechanised agriculture. It’s the stories, however, that are Finlayson’s claim to posterity. Brief, ostensibly simple, and reticent, they are Sargeson-like except in one key aspect: that where Sargeson explored the world of fringe-dwelling Pākehā men, Finlayson wrote about rural Māori. In this respect he was out on his own. Among a nationalist generation who (with the exception of Robin Hyde) were writing Māori out of the picture, Finlayson alone could see that the Māori world of the 1920s – for all its material poverty – had a vibrancy that Pākehā might envy. This, I would like to think, is what Sargeson had in mind when he speculated that Finlayson’s work might outlast his own. ... ; in transcribing their broken speech – at the height of the active suppression of te reo Māori – he was recording neither more nor less than the damage wrought by colonisation. But that doesn’t put the problem to bed. In giving voice to somebody else’s inarticulacy it is fiendishly difficult not to objectify them. On top of which Finlayson is not really language-minded; he’s a ‘content’ writer, always keen get the story told. Indeed, perhaps it was only a certain degree of innocence that allowed him to carry on in that prohibitively difficult territory he felt most drawn to. This is not say, however, that he failed to recognise the vulnerability of his own position. We never learn more about the unspecified "events" that led to his "exile" from Pukehina. We can infer, however, what it felt like to lose that footing in a Māori community. Among his best stories is the later piece, "Great Times Ahead" (1973). The elderly narrator is the son of a Pākehā store-keeper and a "half-caste Maori" mother. He’s Māori, in other words, yet conscious of a kind of Pākehā difference: "Perhaps it’s just because I take after Dad that I don’t look much of a Maori now . . ." But he has lived his whole life in a Māori environment, and owns, through his mother, a fragment of Māori land. It’s the forced sale of this that takes him on a rare visit to Auckland; there he finds himself in a pub:

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Māori babies five times more likely to end up in state care - stats | RNZ News

Māori babies five times more likely to end up in state care - stats

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