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1/ One of things that hasn’t really been discussed about the OT Hawkes Bay case was how deliberate OT’s response was and how illustrative it is of bigger problems. Normally when mistakes happen in child protection systems, the person in charge (i.e. the CE or Minister) has to...
2/ respond really quickly, in complex circumstances, often without the full information at hand. They might not want to throw people under the bus and in those circumstances you can kind of understand (without necessarily excusing) a defensive or kneejerk response...
3/ But the Hawkes Bay case was unique in that there was a full month between what happened and the subsequent @NewsroomNZ documentary being released. That one month gap tells you that everything that came next was calculated. That oranga tamariki STILL chose to double down...
4/ despite the very rare opportunity to actually have time to figure out what went wrong is illustrative of a bigger problem. Don’t forget that the Minister and CE refused to even watch the video, even after being made to apologise (6 months later) and admit OT got it wrong...
5/ Child protection involves complex decisions which affect people’s entire lives, so if you’re going to put your hand up to lead you HAVE to be willing to do it with your eyes open. Mistakes may unfortunately always be possible but what really made me angry about the...
6/ response to that case was that there was no effort whatsoever to learn from what had happened and avoid making those mistakes again. And it wasn’t a kneejerk reaction, the refusal to acknowledge what happened was completely calculated. To me it speaks to an arrogance and...
7/ an interest in ass-covering which trumps an interest in actually doing better for children/whānau. I believe that the true nature of a system reveals itself in a crisis, and the circumstances and timing of Hawkes Bay case was unique in the extent to which it illustrated that.
