Newman Muriel: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services—Report  
Newman Muriel: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services—Report  
[Volume:613;Page:9947] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT) 
: 
 The two reports from the Commissioner for Children and the Department of Child Youth and Family Services are a damning indictment on the Labour Government’s ability to provide a child welfare service that adequately caters for at-risk children. The reports are quite frightening. Again they highlight systemic failure within the department. It is very easy for us in Parliament to forget that we are dealing with real people and bad things. 
I want to put on the record what the commissioner reported about Saliel who was 12 and Olympia who was 11 each of whom were killed by a single knife wound on the night of 3 December 2001. According to the police Saliel was found lying on her back surrounded by blood. She would have lost consciousness within a minute and died within 10 minutes. Olympia was found leaning over her bed in the prayer position. It could have taken anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours for her to die from blood loss. Their stepfather was convicted of their murders. 
I say that we have to do something so that this situation does not happen again. It is so awful for members of Parliament to read these reports and to hear that Government departments have failed again in one way or another—whether by social workers the police or education services. It is easy for us to read that but the reality is that it is children’s lives we are talking about. At-risk children are the most vulnerable children in society. The Department of Child Youth and Family Services has tens of thousands of at-risk children to deal with. What all of us want to know in our hearts is that the Government has got its act together so that this sort of situation does not happen again. The really worrying thing about the reports is that they highlight the poor social work practice the serious practice errors and the flawed investigations that all contributed to the tragedy. But what comes through more than any of that is the fragmentation of social work in New Zealand at every level. 
The report states: “Many opportunities for appropriate interventions were lost because no single agency had the whole picture or a complete understanding of the risks present in their lives.” No one agency stepped back and asked: “What is going on here? Are these children safe?’ The report goes on to say that New Zealand has a fragmented approach to the well-being of children. While no lead agency is responsible for at-risk children their rights interests and well-being will continue to be compromised. The most important finding in the reports is that we have service groups that try their hardest and do their best. But those services—none of them having the whole picture—do not understand the crisis that is developing and therefore do not act in a way that after the fact we wish they had. 
The reports go on to confirm the vital role the education sector plays in the care and protection of children. It is the education system that sees these kids for most of the day. It notices whether things are going wrong. It is the first line of defence for children yet it is not properly tied in with the process of painting the picture of what is happening in the children’s lives. The report also states that social workers failed to recognise the risk that family violence played in respect of those children—that in an environment where warfare was going on between parents the children were in danger. It also stated that the police called at the house 18 times over a period of years but again because they did not believe that in that environment of quite severe domestic family violence the children were at risk they did not notify the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. 
Every time we read such a report what comes back to us is that so many New Zealand children are born into families where they are loved supported and cared for with parents and grandparents and the rest of the family who just fall head over heels in love with them and love them to bits. Yet other children are not born into such surroundings. It is to the Government that we turn for support and help for those children whose parents are failing them. I want to talk about what we should be doing about the situation we have in New Zealand today where children in tens of thousands of families are at risk every single day of their lives. Some of that is preventable but I shall come back to that. 
Page 16 of the Commissioner for Children’s report paints a picture of the lives Saliel and Olympia were leading. It states that in their short lives they lived in 10 homes attended six different schools lived in eight different towns and cities and lived with grandparents for 2 years having been removed from their mother’s care. They lived apart from their younger sister for 5 years; lived with their mother and two different partners both of whom were violent; and lived in a house intermittently with up to 10 children for 4 years. They were exposed to 12 recorded incidents of violence and at least 35 violent incidents were not reported. There was alleged abuse on at least five occasions. They had attended counselling intermittently since they were 3 and 4 years old. They were psychologically assessed by court order on at least two occasions and they were monitored by the Department of Child Youth and Family Services for nearly all their lives. 
This is a family where the red alert flag should have been waving where when things happened to those kids somebody should have stepped in. However people can do that I suppose only if they know what else is going on with all of the other organisations also working with the children. The mother was 15 years old when she had her first child. She had Saliel when she was 19 and 20 months later had Olympia. There were five children living with that young mother in an unstable family environment—and we have to wonder why there were tragedies. 
The Opposition—and the Government when in Opposition—always calls for fences to be built at the top of the cliff. We have ambulances at the bottom—the Department of Child Youth and Family Services the police and so on—but we need to do more to stop child abuse. The Children’s Commissioner has called for new community-based child protection teams. But that will not go far enough. We will have an organisation the Department of Child Youth and Family Services—and we will have the police and all the other support agencies—and then we will have a brand new agency. The fragmentation will increase. 
I believe that we need to do three things in New Zealand if we are to put a stop to the terrible legacy we have in this country of growing child abuse and if we are to take a stand of zero tolerance on that abuse. First we need to do something about a welfare system that pays people to be irresponsible—to have children they cannot care for; to not realise they cannot rely on the taxpayer to give them a living all their lives if they are able-bodied; to not realise that they have a responsibility to get out there to earn a living and fend for themselves and their families. We need welfare reform urgently but not the sort that the Minister of Social Services talks about. We want to address the problem of long-term welfare dependence and that involves women on the domestic purposes benefit as well. Many women on the domestic purposes benefit have it as their aim to get off that benefit because they know they will do better for their children by being out in the workforce. We need to encourage adoption for those families that genuinely cannot look after their children because there are lots of families out there who can. When we come to child welfare we need a one-stop shop community-based agency with police welfare education and health officials working side by side and with the police taking a stronger role in the investigation of child abuse and in the catching and sentencing of perpetrators.