John Campbell asks Nikki Hurst: How safe are NZ kids in state care now?

Now that New Zealand has faced up to its shameful national history of abuse in state care, John Campbell asks Nikki Hurst, executive officer of the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services: how well does Oranga Tamariki protect vulnerable kids today?

In a week in which New Zealand was finally forced to confront the appalling reality of our state "care" of children for the past 70 years, I sat down with Nikki Hurst, of the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services. I asked her about the findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, and the cost of getting care wrong, not just in the past, but now.

“Horrendous", Nikki Hurst begins. "There's not enough words in the world for what happened. But when I read the Independent Children's Monitor’s reports, the thing that sticks with me is where it talks about this continuing to happen, that children are continuing to make disclosures of abuse happening to them, in our society right now. In state care.”

Right now. In state care.

I went to the most recent “Experiences of Care in Aotearoa” report from the Independent Children's Monitor.

“Most tamariki and rangatahi indicated that they feel safe, supported and cared for," it read.

Which is good – and as it should be.

But then, this. “Despite a decrease in the number of tamariki and rangatahi in the custody of Oranga Tamariki, an increased number are being abused or neglected.”

That’s now. In state care.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, as American writer Joan Didion famously said. (And then, less famously, grew tired of people repeating.)

Our story was “Godzone”.

What a lie it was for so many of “the estimated 655,000 children, young people and adults in care from 1950 to 2019". The Inquiry of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care estimates that 200,000 were abused and even more were neglected.

Abuse in care. It ought to be an oxymoron. We made it childhood.

The Inquiry’s Report was released on Wednesday.

“Instead of receiving care and support”, it told us, “children, young people and adults in care were exposed to unimaginable physical, emotional, mental and sexual abuse, severe exploitation and neglect.”

Christopher Luxon received it in Parliament with what may be the best speech he’s made as Prime Minister.

“It is important that, as a country, we bring to the surface and understand the hard truths of what happened so we can try and move forward together. I say to the survivors, the burden is no longer yours to carry alone.

“The State is now standing here beside you, accountable and ready to take action.”

And yet, and there is always a “yet” with how we treat some of our children, issues remain regarding the performance of Oranga Tamariki.

Which is not say that anyone’s suggesting the Ministry for Children is as damaging now as its predecessors were. (Although that’s a cruelly low bar.) But it is to say that some people who work with the children whose lives orbit Oranga Tamariki, feel that something is not right there. And worse than “not right”, that something is seriously wrong.

In the week the Royal Commission reported back, and the Prime Minister promised to “ensure the state carries its care and protection responsibilities with great weight”, it feels timely and necessary to ask, how?

It’s important to remember that Oranga Tamariki was only formed in 2017.

Prior to that, we had Child, Youth and Family. And prior to that we had the filing cabinet paternalism of the Department of Social Welfare.

Except the files were sometimes lies. Or empty.

One survivor, Ms HA, was sexually abused and raped. She told someone what was happening. “They took me to the police station to make a complaint.” She was 11 or 12. Imagine how brave she was to do that. Imagine the risk. Nothing came of her complaint, “and nothing was written in my Social Welfare file.”

“I didn’t have a childhood," she said, with the kind of heartbreaking understatement you place over a chasm.

Godzone.

Even before we’d finally made the effort to really hear these stories, and to acknowledge the damage done, the formation of Oranga Tamariki contained a promise to do better.

If you go back to the language accompanying its launch, you'll see the National party's Minister for Children at the time, Anne Tolley, committing to a “new child-centred operating model, focused on harm and trauma prevention and early intervention. A single point of accountability for children and young people, with the voice of the child represented in planning and strategy.”

Child-centred, harm prevention, the voice of children.

“This is the start of a four- to five-year major transformation programme to build a more child-centred care and protection system, focusing on harm and trauma prevention and early intervention, rather than crisis management.”

Seven years later, boot camps.

So, in the week that Christopher Luxon promised to “ensure the State carries its care and protection responsibilities with great weight,” is Oranga Tamariki fit for purpose?

We met Nikki Hurst at the beginning of this story. The executive officer of the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services (NZCCSS), which itself receives no funding from Oranga Tamariki, but somewhere in the region of 80 to 90% of the 230 organisations the Council’s umbrella stretches over, do.

This gives Nikki Hurst an insight into how OT is operating. Both at a macro level, and in the ministry’s micro interactions and behaviours.

“I just feel like we’ve had two years of chaos and strange decision making.”

Nikki Hurst wants us to know “how amazing a lot of the people who work there are and how much heart everyone has”, but, and everyone I’ve spoken to for this story has made “but” qualifications, “it just feels like, for a ministry that was new, it never formed the structures it needed to do what it needs to do.”

Does it know what it needs to do?

“I don’t know," Nikki Hurst answers. “It feels from the outside like it doesn't.”

Remember, as Anne Tolley put it in 2017, Oranga Tamariki was intended to be “a single point of accountability”. The A word.

This was the government declaring Oranga Tamariki fit to lead – to lead the care of children.

To do that, Nikki Hurst says, “when you are the person whose role in our society is to sit above everything and know… where tamariki are and where parenting support needs to go," you have to have what she calls, perhaps aptly for the head of a Christian Social Services organisation, a “giant spreadsheet in the sky”.

Nikki Hurst can’t see sufficient evidence of that, of the “clear data” that would tell Oranga Tamariki “what's happening on a day to day basis.”

In part, this speaks to what the Ombudsman, Peter Boshier, identified as “inadequate record keeping”, in his report, released in February, which identified “the themes emerging from complaints and enquiries made between 2019 and 2023 about Oranga Tamariki.”

But neither Nikki Hurst nor Peter Boshier mean this in a strictly clerical sense. To have data means you know. It means the filing cabinets contain the true and updated story of every child. It means there are fewer places for failings to hide.

“Young people said they had not been listened to when they complained about an issue," Peter Boshier wrote. “Reports of Concern were not acted on, recorded properly, or responded to adequately.” This is February, of this year.

If Oranga Tamariki doesn’t know “what’s happening on a day to day basis”, and isn’t sufficiently listening to young people, and isn’t responding adequately to Reports of Concern, then who will?

Aroturuki Tamariki, the Independent Children’s Monitor, is a government established (but operationally independent) agency whose work is widely regarded as robust, insightful and genuinely independent, and whose role includes monitoring “the whole of the Oranga Tamariki system”. It files an annual report entitled, Experiences of Care in Aotearoa.

The most recent available report is for the 2022-2023 year. It tells us: “Caregivers also raised concerns that the voices of tamariki and rangatahi were not always heard by Oranga Tamariki, and they felt they needed to speak up on behalf of the tamariki and rangatahi in their care. In addition, caregivers have told us over several years that they feel excluded from decision making, despite feeling like they know the tamariki and rangatahi in their care better than others.”

These recurring themes, so at odds with Oranga Tamariki’s originally stated purpose.

In its previous report, the Independent Children’s Monitor had noted that regulations, “require Oranga Tamariki to assess prospective caregivers and their household before placing tamariki or rangatahi with them.”

But, and this feels like such a significant “but”, “32 percent of tamariki were placed before all parts of the assessment were completed, or before provisionally approved.”

That’s one in three.

The most recent report follows up on this. “In its response to us last year, Oranga Tamariki noted it was concerned by the finding that caregivers were not always assessed prior to placing tamariki and rangatahi in their care. They noted it would remedy this with urgency, by reviewing when and why this is happening, and following up with practitioners to ensure the approval process is being followed. There has been no evidence of change this year…”

“Should we be worried about that?” I asked Nikki Hurst.

“Yes, we absolutely should.”

It’s been raised with Oranga Tamariki, she tells me.

What response did they get?

“Well, not a lot.”

“I just want to clarify that," I asked her. “What we're learning is that roughly one in three children are being placed without absolute certainty…” I paused, trying to find the right words, and Nikki Hurst continued for me:

“…of safety, of support for those people, of those children coming into care with what they need, of the people who are caring for them feeling supported and able to do an effective job.”

“One in three?”

“One in three.”

It’s worth returning to the Independent Children’s Monitor (ICM) here, whose report refers to regulations which “provide for provisional approvals to be granted in an urgent situation with a requirement that close monitoring must take place until a full assessment is completed.”

“This year," the ICM observes, “case file analysis again found there was minimal evidence of ‘close monitoring’ of provisionally approved caregivers. Consistent with previous years, close monitoring was only evident in 11% of cases.”

But wait, as they say, there’s more. Or less.

“Social workers are not able to see tamariki and rangatahi as often as they need. The frequency of social worker visits was a key finding in our previous reports, and there has been no improvement in this area. Only 61 percent of tamariki and rangatahi are being seen by social workers to the frequency set out in plans, or at least once every eight weeks.”

In the context of everything we heard from the Royal Commission on Wednesday, silent and absent agencies, children going unheard, I asked Nikki Hurst if we should still be in this kind of space.

“We absolutely shouldn't. We need to get this right. We continue as a society to hope that it will get better, while not putting every single effort we can into making it better.”

If children and young people aren’t always being heard, if their caregivers feel “excluded from decision making”, it seems reasonable, even essential, to ask, who is Oranga Tamariki listening to?

Oranga Tamariki was born of politics, of course.

“The Prime Minister Bill English attended today’s launch in Wellington with Minister Tolley," the government’s 2017 media release tells us. And there’s reference to “social investment”, which Bill English has such a fervent belief in.

But people I’ve spoken to during the past week have repeatedly told me they believe the coalition government’s political directions are giving Oranga Tamariki what one person called “the spins”.

It’s important to remember what Nikki Hurst said in our interview, that “we’ve had two years of chaos and strange decision making” – and that’s a period that begins before this government.

Indeed, Labour’s Kelvin Davis regarded Oranga Tamariki as so “broken” in its relationship with Māori (among other things) that, in February 2021, the then Children’s Minister, charged a Ministerial Advisory Board with looking into it.

OT’s chief executive and secretary for children, Grainne Moss, stepped down at the beginning of 2021. Sir Wira Gardiner was appointed as acting chief executive, but stepped down due to illness.

And on it goes. A kind of tumult. A stumbling towards, what?

“It’s not getting materially better," one provider told me.

A provider who didn’t want to be named.

While Nikki Hurst spoke to me on-the-record, and on camera for TVNZ’s Q + A programme, other people, working with providers directly contracted to Oranga Tamariki, were less keen to be identified.

In part, this speaks to contractual uncertainty (to put it politely), which we’ll return to.

But it also speaks to a sense that whistleblowers won’t be thanked for their work. And if that's true, we risk echoes of one of the most profound failures the Royal Commission identified: the refusal to listen and to hear.

A recurring theme of my discussions with people in the sector has been the belief that Oranga Tamariki itself is struggling to respond to the prescriptions of its Minister, Karen Chhour, who was interviewed by Jack Tame on Q + A, last month.

It feels as if, one provider told me, there’s “an almost existential identity crisis at Oranga Tamariki… They’re looking over their shoulders so much they can’t see where they’re going.”

If you visit the Ministry’s website you can perhaps see part of the reason for this, encapsulated in a single word, “also”.

Defining itself, Oranga Tamariki states, “We're a Ministry dedicated to supporting any child in Aotearoa New Zealand whose wellbeing is at significant risk of harm now, or in the future. We also work with young people who may have offended, or are likely to offend.” (My italics.)

The “also” is the fissure. On one side, “supporting” the “wellbeing” of children “at significant risk of harm now”. Anne Tolley’s 2017 vision for OT, “focused on harm and trauma prevention and early intervention.” Critical, pressing work, that, providers tell me, feels vulnerable to contractual uncertainties, funding uncertainties, staff turnover, data deficiencies, and what one caregiver called “distracted” oversight.

On the other side, the Ministry’s requirement to respond to youth offenders.

Again, the ministry’s own website may be illustrative: “Oranga Tamariki was directed to lead the establishment of a Military-Style Academy Pilot…”

“Directed.” There’s a word with weight.

Not a single one of the providers I spoke to supported the boot camps or Oranga Tamariki’s role in them.

“Look, if I go back to the evidence," Nikki Hurst tells me, “what I know is that if we're taking an approach to try and reduce crime for young people… we've got to get in early, and we've got to do it really well, and it will take really strong intervention very early on… I think a boot camp approach is not the right approach for any of these children. And they are children. I think in the longer term, what they need is a holistic wrap-around support, and I'm glad to hear that that's a component of it. I don't think making them wear a uniform is going to have the outcome people want.”

My TVNZ colleague, Gill Higgins, has done fine work looking at the boot camp idea, and whether it will work for the ten young men who “will be entering Te Au Rere A Tonga on Monday morning, to begin day one of the Government’s Military-Style Academy Pilot.

But even here, where the coalition government is full of vocal purpose, things have sometimes seemed forced beyond comfort.

It feels like “they’re scrambling”, one provider told me, citing the Minister’s lack of empirical evidence for boot camps and the 7AA repeal.

The same provider also cited the example of an RNZ story, by Lillian Hanly, early last week. “Oranga Tamariki has acknowledged it should have engaged with mana whenua earlier when designing the government's pilot boot camps for young offenders in Palmerston North.”

If, as RNZ states, nine out of ten boys taking part in the boot camp pilot are Māori, engagement with mana whenua would be a given, surely? Remember, the boot camps are, as we’re repeatedly being assured, and as Nikki Hurst hopes, also about the support provided to the young offenders after the “camp” ends.

You look to the government for a larger sense of direction, and it’s easier to find Party politics. Karen Chhour’s Ministerial website lists just eight media releases in eight months. Four on youth offenders, three on repealing 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act, and one on re-establishing the Oranga Tamariki Advisory Board.

Seven of the eight are born of coalition agreements and ideological sabre-rattling. The eighth, the re-establishing of the Oranga Tamariki Advisory Board, contains the minister saying these striking words, “I look forward to working with the new board to continue to ensure Oranga Tamariki and the care and protection system, are entirely child centric.”

The word “continue” feels at odds with the messages from the Royal Commission, the Independent Children’s Monitor, the Ombudsman, all the providers I spoke to, and Nikki Hurst at NZCCSS about how far from child-centric Oranga Tamariki is, and has been. But it’s a dream that many people cherish.

The sense of being adrift from both purpose and delivery is arguably most apparent in the extraordinary uncertainty around hundreds of services contracted by Oranga Tamariki to external providers.

Stuff’s Anna Whyte has been doing such excellent work on this, detailing, the “types of contracts that are among those not being reviewed by the Ministry”, which include “counselling for girls who have been through domestic violence, support for new parents and babies, and 24/7 care for children.”

Her work has detailed a kind of limbo. “The Post understands many of the providers are still in the dark as to whether their contracts will be renewed.”

On Thursday, I took a list of roughly 1000 of these contracts to my Q + A interview with Nikki Hurst. The list was from March. All the contracts were expiring at the end of June, four weeks ago.

How many of those contracted service providers will know exactly what their situation is?

“Nobody will know for sure”, Hurst answered. “So they will have had an indication whether or not they were going to go ahead or not. The only information that we can actually find is that the budget talks about a $30 million reduction.”

That’s per annum, over four years, a total of $120 million.

Why does this matter?

Because the contracts have expired. And the contracts are about services, to children and young people.

“We're hearing a lot of distress," Hurst says. “What we're actually seeing, in reality, is for people who no longer have contracts moving forward, some of them really, genuinely did not find out till the last minute when they rang up the Oranga Tamariki office, the regional office… to say, what do we do now? We've got no direction around how do we transition the tamariki who might be in our care out to another service or to continue until we finish working with them?”

What will happen to those tamariki?

“So where people have the ability to continue working with them," says Hurst. "They will continue working with them. But for some providers, all of their funding comes from Oranga Tamariki, and… all of that funding has gone… It's untenable.”

What's happening to these children?

“Everyone's doing their best.”

So, here we are, in the week that the Royal Commission has told us how far short we fell in our care (and that c word is contaminated by so much survivor evidence), now relying on service providers whose contracts have expired, to do “their best”.

Nikki Hurst continued. “So yes, absolutely, there are children who are in care residences right now where the people providing that care are wondering how they're going to continue.”

“We know that some of the organisations that have been impacted are 24/7 teen parenting units. So we know that there is some sort of challenge for those places to stay open.”

On Friday, Oranga Tamariki told us that while its chief executive, Chappie Te Kani, wasn't available for an interview (and Q + A remains keen to speak to him, in depth), Darrin Haimona, its deputy chief executive, Māori partnerships & communities, would be available in the late afternoon.

Responding to questions about the expired contracts, and to Nikki Hurst's concern about the impact of that, Darrin Haimona said, "absolutely... we want to make sure that there's continuity of support and services out in the community. I do acknowledge that it has taken longer than what we normally would.

"We are processing contracts now, as we speak. So, we're hoping to get the majority of them out by the [this Wednesday] 31st of July. If not, it will not be long after that."

Darrin Haimona then said, "having a background, myself, of thirty plus years in the community I know what it's like to actually depend on financial support, funding, etc."

And then he apologised for the contracts situation.

"We do apologise for that. But I don't apologise for trying to think about making good decisions to use money effectively... These are difficult situations. Some agencies will get the news that their service is no longer demanded, or a priority... but every year we need to make decisions that the money is being spent well for tamariki and whānau."

And Darrin Haimona is right. Oranga Tamariki do have to make those decisions, well.

But with budget cuts (not OT's choice), with the Royal Commission's staggering insight into a history of failing in the most important thing the Ministry (in its many previous manifestations) has ever been asked to do – caring for children, and with the Independent Children's Monitor, the Ombudsman, the NZCCSS, and so many providers, all saying things must get better, is Oranga Tamariki making decisions well?

Or is it saving money we can't afford for them to save?

I asked Nikki Hurst if she has specific examples of where care is not what it should be.

She tells me of a child who “did the right thing. He got really, really brave, and he told his schoolteacher that his stepfather was physically assaulting him. He repeated that to his headmaster, and they did the right thing. They made a report of concern to Oranga Tamariki. They told them what was happening.”

The echoes of the survivor evidence to the Royal Commission. All the children who told but were not heard. Or were heard but nothing was done.

“That's the heartbreaking thing, right?” Nikki Hurst continues. “It is, we know it's the hardest thing in the world to tell people about abuse and that abuse is happening to us. You have a child who's in a primary school, who's done the really brave thing, the really hard thing, they've asked for help. They've said what's happening. All of the grown-ups in their lives need to sprint to solve that problem, and none of them can.”

The child was put on a 21-day notice. Twenty-one days has long gone. As far as Niki Hurst’s aware, he is still in that home.

In response to the evidence being heard by the Royal Commission of Inquiry, Oranga Tamariki's latest chief executive Chappie Te Kani said, “It is a fundamental right of those who have been or continue to be in the care of the state to feel safe and protected by those who care for them.”

He is so right.

Nikki Hurst says to achieve that, we have to do better. Now.

“I mean, my preference is that we addressed this two years ago, you know, or six years ago when we stood up Oranga Tamariki," she says.

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"If we can't get this right, then we're perpetuating another generation that experiences trauma, trauma that will then show up as behaviour society doesn't want to accept… We let down those future generations by doing absolutely nothing today. And doing some stuff isn't good enough. We need to do everything we can.”

Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of NZ On Air