How culture wars impact on people’s lives

Last week the Waitangi Tribunal kicked off their urgent inquiry into the repeal of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act, which requires the child protection agency give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The hearings are already proving controversial, with a legal dispute heating up over Minister for Children Karen Chhour’s refusal to attend and explain her issues with the law.

The tribunal has formally summonsed the minister, the first time it has ever had to in its history. But the government lawyers, Crown Law, are challenging their legal right to do so and may take the case to the High Court.

Crown Law’s reasoning that Chhour shouldn’t need to appear was because “the repeal was a political decision not based on empirical evidence”.

Therein lies the problem. There is no empirical evidence to support this decision. It is purely ideological.

What the evidence does say is that tamariki Māori experience profound harm when they are removed from the care of their wider whānau, hapū or iwi.

When more than 60% of children in state care are Māori, it just makes sense to prioritise kaupapa Māori approaches and involve Māori in the decision-making regarding their care.

Removing a child from the care of their immediate family is always going to be a traumatic event, even if it’s necessary to ensure their safety and wellbeing. To go further and completely remove that child from its wider extended family, community and cultural context adds another layer of traumatisation that should be avoided at all costs.

Section 7AA shouldn’t be a controversial piece of law. It was drafted and made law under the previous National government and their Minister for Children, Anne Tolley. After receiving huge backlash at her plan to remove the “whānau-first” care commitment, she conceded the need to ensure that the law placed duties on the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

However, this didn’t go nearly as far as Māori leaders were pushing for. In fact, the tribunal has said that the section waters down the Crown’s Te Tiriti obligations.

Te Tiriti guaranteed Māori tino rangatiratanga, which included the right to make their own decisions over the care and wellbeing of their whānau.

In the words of the late Moana Jackson “there is nothing in Te Tiriti that gives the Crown the right to incarcerate our people or take our children into state institutions”.

So clearly Section 7AA was already a compromise position.

But it was the first time that Te Tiriti had ever been mentioned in Aotearoa’s child protection laws. And it did enable strategic partnerships between Oranga Tamariki, iwi and Māori organisations.

By Māori, for Māori services such as Whānau Ora have had extraordinary success working alongside Oranga Tamariki to place children in safe, secure, and culturally appropriate care.

The minister has claimed that repealing the section won’t get rid of iwi strategic partnerships, even though the obligation on Oranga Tamariki to enter those partnerships is derived from that section. If the minister continues to ignore the evidence and pushes ahead to remove Te Tiriti references from the law, she needs to front up with what she’s going to replace it with, to ensure that the practical work to heal whānau and improve outcomes for tamariki Māori can continue.

That a compromise position put in place by Tolley to protect children is now being sacrificed to the ACT Party’s anti-Treaty crusade, points to Christopher Luxon’s failure to provide leadership and rein in the extremists in his coalition.

It is frankly disgraceful that the Prime Minister is allowing David Seymour’s ideological agenda to risk the safety and wellbeing of children.

There couldn’t be a clearer example of how Seymour’s culture war impacts on people’s lives. This isn’t rhetorical. It’s not a question of highbrow constitutional debates. This is about whether a child can grow up connected to their family and culture. Nothing says more about a society than how it treats its children.

The child protection system in this country is deeply flawed and has its roots in a colonial history that has been used to try and assimilate Māori and disrupt traditional familial and communal support structures.

The work to dismantle that system and the antiquated ways of thinking about children protection has been a slow and fraught process. But Section 7AA was an important step in that journey and has made real change in changing the way Oranga Tamariki operates, allowing a focus on whānau healing alongside child wellbeing. Winding back that process will set us back years.

While the Government is pursuing so many divisive, anti-Māori policies that it’s hard to keep up, the repeal of Oranga Tamariki’s Te Tiriti commitments will likely do more long-term harm to race relations in Aotearoa than any other.