Bradford Sue: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services—Report  
Bradford Sue: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services—Report  
[Volume:613;Page:9945] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The case of Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson the two girls who were murdered by Bruce Howse in December 2001 hangs like a grim backdrop to the more recent loss of 6-year-old Coral Burrows. Today we have seen the release of the two long-awaited reports from the chief social worker of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services and the Commissioner for Children Cindy Kiro which outline the details of what went wrong from a Government perspective and make a series of recommendations for change. I know some of my fellow MPs who are here today will have read those reports from cover to cover by now as I have. They will be sharing my feelings of both sadness and disbelief that yet again a whole community could somehow fail those two young girls despite all the overt talk in most parts of New Zealand society about how our children must come first and about how much we love them. 
Letting two children live their lives in an almost never-ending stream of violence and emotional abuse is not about love or putting children first. It is about the New Zealand underbelly—a place where beating up and abusing women and children is such an everyday matter that it is accepted by the family neighbours community groups police the Department of Youth Child and Family Services and other adults as OK and just something to get along with. It is about a New Zealand where adults even when they are police teachers or social workers appear to prefer to listen to and believe adults rather than to listen to and believe children. 
Those two reports are not just a harrowing indictment of some of the State agencies involved with Olympia and Saliel—and I stress that the Department of Child Youth and Family Services is not the only agency talked about—but also provide a chilling insight into the reality around New Zealanders’ tolerance of violence against children. 
The reports reveal a whole range of issues which I do not have time to go into fully this afternoon. First of all it is quite apparent there were a number of critical failures in the Department of Child Youth and Family Services social work practice. The critical failures included social workers who were so familiar with the family that they seemed not to comprehend the serious nature of what they were dealing with. One of them wrote a letter to the children’s mother that was intercepted by the killer and in all likelihood helped to precipitate the children’s deaths. In this case there is a more direct causal relationship between the action of a social worker and the deaths of children than I have seen in similar reports. I would think that common sense alone much less years of social work training would suggest that to send a letter about possible abuse by a stepfather into the home where he lived might actually create a dangerous situation for the abused people living in that home. But no that social worker obviously did not give this factor any consideration when he or she wrote that letter. 
I am not here to denigrate social workers. They have one of the most thankless and difficult jobs in our community especially those who work for statutory agencies like the Department of Youth Child and Family Services. However when social workers are working with one of the most disempowered and vulnerable groups in our community—abused children—surely higher standards must be expected at every point in that social worker’s working life. The Brown report and the baseline review of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services have both clearly demonstrated systemic failures on a number of fronts. Those latest reports are actually a case study of what goes wrong when a department is poorly managed has chronic failures in its information systems and does not train supervise or support its social workers properly. 
One thing that needs to happen if the Government is serious about reforming the Department of Child Youth and Family Services is that the chief social worker needs to be enabled to play a much more significant role as part of the leadership team of the organisation rather than being someone in a minor position off to the side as appears to have been the case up until now. The key role of care and protection—the statutory function of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services—is played by social workers. Best practice needs to be led from the top not diverted by dodgy management systems that are focused on maintaining the status quo and making the numbers look good instead of ensuring that the department has enough social workers who are experienced well trained and sufficiently supported in their work to not make the kinds of fundamental mistakes that have been highlighted by those reports. I am pleased that the Minister for Social Development and Employment Steve Maharey indicated earlier this afternoon in the House that the Government has some sympathy for the chief social worker playing a bigger role at the top of the organisation. 
A second key issue arising from these two reports is the seeming inability or unwillingness of adults to listen to what children are telling them and their preference for hearing the evidence and statements of other adults. There is a need for adults whether they are social workers teachers mental health workers or police to be prepared to spend time with children and to listen to what they are actually saying. If the New Zealand Government is to support the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which we are about to pass into law through the Commissioner for Children legislation we should expect public servants to be willing and able to listen to children and not just ignore them in favour of what they as adults are hearing from other adults. 
Thirdly it is apparent from these reports that there is a semi-acceptance in many parts of our society that domestic violence is OK—that it is really just a minor matter—and that somehow sexual abuse is a lot worse and domestic violence is somewhere much further down the scale. The adults around this family seem to have accepted that the domestic violence in their home was just a fact of life that rarely needed any action taken. That is very peculiar especially given all the training and focus that has gone in recent years in trying to ensure that the police take domestic violence seriously. 
Again the needs of the children involved seem to have been of minor importance. The report found that social workers have used a lack of resources as an excuse to try to disguise poor social work practice. That is simply unacceptable at any level. The care and protection of children should come first and I commend the writers of both the Department of Child Youth and Family Services and Commissioner for Children reports for not trying to hide behind a lack of resources as some excuse for what happened. 
This Government is pouring more resources into the department. I hope that in future the Government the Department of Child Youth and Family Services police the Ministry of Education and all sectors mentioned in the report will take the recommendations of the report seriously regarding how they deal with children who report and who are visibly victims of abuse. 
One aspect of the report in relation to schools particularly disturbed me which was the suspension of one of the girls from school for a month because of her poor behaviour at school. I find it incomprehensible that the reaction of the school when dealing with children from a situation that it did know about was to suspend the child and put her back into the home rather than keep her at school. I hope that the education sector is paying as much attention to this report as the Department of Child Youth and Family Services is. 
The Green Party supports the push from the Commissioner for Children for a return to community child protection teams to protect abused children. Those teams existed until they were abolished foolishly by Labour in 1989. It seems from that report—and all the other reports—that the ability to work cooperatively between agencies is a critical factor that we need to have integrated into social work practice again. 
The Commissioner for Children’s report also highlights the inadequacies and gaps in the provision of mental health care for children and adolescents. I renew my call which I have made very often to the Government to act more urgently to bring the resourcing of child and adolescent mental health services back up to a more reasonable proportion of the blueprint guidelines. Again it is children who miss out because their mental health services are the least well funded proportionately of all our mental health services. 
I commend the Commissioner for Children and the chief social worker of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services for the honesty and lucidity of their reports into this most difficult case. I just hope that those reports are not yet again wasted and used as a parliamentary doorstop or filed in the rubbish bin. 
Finally it is important to note that the Commissioner for Children’s report does make considerable mention of the way in which the media dealt with children in the family and outside it and with the victims themselves in the aftermath of the killings. Some of it makes most distasteful reading and I hope that the Press Council schools of journalism journalists and editors will pay some attention to the commissioner’s findings and recommendations in that area. 
But in the end all of us are accountable. I hope yet again that this might be an occasion when New Zealanders think a little more deeply about our fundamental attitudes to children in our care. The serious way in which all colleagues in the House have talked about this matter this afternoon reflects I think the way that we all feel about it. We all want to change for the better what has happened. I hope that that determination can be reflected in every level of the New Zealand community right now.