Offices of Children’s ministry agency Oranga Tamariki will be targeted on Monday in a day of nationwide protest aimed at getting child uplift issues onto the political agenda in the last week of the election campaign.

Co-ordinator Steve Evans said protests will be staged outside at least 31 offices throughout the country, starting mainly about 10am, plus other offices around the major centres during the week.

“This has been a major public issue since the exposure of an attempted uplift of a newborn baby in Hawke’s Bay Hospital just 17 months ago,” he said.

“There have since been five damning reports on the agency, its processes and management, almost nothing has changed,” he said. “Yet almost all parties have ignored the issue, avoided it like the plague.

“This is an election issue, what’s everyone going to do about it....For the parties to ignore it is simply gutless,” Mr Evans said.

He describes Oranga Tamariki as “corrupt and lawless”, but says that to understand that the public need to know why.

“The fact is there is no accountability, and the people who have the power in this agency, the supervisors and managers, can make whatever decisions they like, without fear of challenge or recrimination,” he said.

He said there are cases which have none of the hallmarks of the most highly publicised situations.

“Cases where there was no particular violence, no significant drugs or alcohol issues, just families under stress who could do with a bit of a leg-up, not the bullying foot up the backside that is so often delivered as the first and only option,” he said.

“We are not saying that no children should be removed from their families, because there are some very dangerous situations around, but there are a vast number where any need for removal or taking into permanent care would have been avoided if Oranga Tamariki had done their job properly,” he said. “There are many cases where decisions by Oranga Tamariki have made it worse.”

“The lack of accountability means that the door is white open to systemic abuse by the senior staff, and illicit pecuniary gain outweighing the real purpose of their occupation,” he said.

“The result is we have a battlefield littered not only with victims of this constant of abuse of process, but also broken people who entered the career of social work believing they could help create change, only battered into the ground by their own bosses.”

He said Oranga Tamariki is desperately short of social workers but has only itself to blame.

“At the end of the day, there have been five damning reports, and the CEO. Grainne Moss, should resign or be sacked, and a lot of others of the management team should be walking the same plank, ” he said. “No one – the Minister, The Government, and the public – should have to put up with such a poor performance.”

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