Baby Farming

A Dirty Little Secret

One of the worst experiences of my working life was practising law as a staff solicitor for a law firm in South Auckland.  Part of my role was to make applications on instructions from CYFS staff for care orders, guardianship orders and adoption orders for children under the care of the government.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with my part, not just as a professional doing my job, but as a human being.

Sadly, my experience was that the primary motivator for most of the adults involved with these children was money.

How Long Must This Go On?

 A Nation Eating Its Young

It's difficult to know where to begin in endeavouring to comment upon the terrible case of child abuse now daily being reported upon in the media.  There are so many things that scream for attention.

A nine year old girl has been living under a regime of sexual abuse and latterly torture by her father and mother, whilst her family was being supported, counselled, and nurtured by about five state agencies.  (The commentary below assumes the accuracy and truthfulness of the reports in the media, thus far.  This assumption may be regarded by some readers as generous.) 

Here are some initial  thoughts:

1.  New Zealand desperately needs to reject the institutional racism that results in official policy pandering to Maori "whanauism".  Modern Maori, in trying to rediscover and reassert their traditional cultural values, have championed the merit and value of the whanau--the extended family.  Actually they have idolised it.  When a family is abusing children, the agencies of state, in genuflection to Maori insistence on the primacy of whanau, look to remove the child from the home and place him or her with relatives.  "Keep it in the family, bro'"  Whanau is not just a substitute family--it is regarded in Maori ideology as more important than a nuclear family of husband, father, and children.

It turns out that this poor abused child was removed from her parents and placed with "caregivers" who were actually relatives, whanau.  Whilst being basking in whanau warmth and being nurtured in the mana of whakapapa, she was raped, according to a report in the NZ Herald.  This occurred while she was under CYFS "care" who had placed her with extended family and were "supervising".

Now, it would be reasonable to assume that the responsible state agencies would perform extensive checks and suitability assessments before placing an abused child with care-givers.  Yes, but in this case it was not necessary, because the care-givers were whanau.  Whanau trumps scrutiny, examination and proving up, every time.  The ideology of whanauism says so.  The government is complicit in accepting this nonsense.  This is what we mean by institutional racism running rampant through the government.


(Some may wonder why we are presenting these degenerate parents as Maori while they have name suppression.  Good point.  But if reports are true, they are indeed a Maori family. 

The mother of a tortured girl allegedly told authorities she was at a tangi "down south" in order to avoid anyone seeing the extensive injuries across her daughter's body.

Pakeha and other races/cultures do not have tangis.)

2.  New Zealand has an antipathy to adoption.  It seems to us that when a child has been genuinely abused, criminally so, there ought never to be a possibility of returning the child to his or her progenitors.  Judgement should be sought from the courts to put the child up for adoption.

But in this country we persist in the naive and childish notion that  somehow blood and genes trump ethics and righteous behaviour.  Under the dominant humanist ideology, a child is believed to suffer great harm and deprivation if it is separated from its bloodlines and the culture represented therein.  When a family culture, however, is so degenerate that it turns upon its own defenceless children, it has to come under permanent interdiction.  Children must be removed and given a permanent replacement home with adoptive parents who are characterised by righteous and holy living--and we use those ethical adjectives deliberately, for this is where the issues lie. 

Here also we end up being confronted by institutional racism.  Given a choice between putting a Maori child up for adoption to white parents and working to restore that child to abusive Maori parents, state agencies persistently favour the latter.  It is regarded as a far better, superior outcome.  Try telling that to the poor child in West Auckland who was eventually restored to her birth parents, after being raped whilst in the care of whanau and CYFS, only to have her toenails ripped off and boiling water poured on them--by her mother!

Now, lest some may think that this sword has only one edge, let us be clear.  Degenerate white parents criminally abuse their children also.  Would we argue strenuously for white children to be taken from such parents permanently and adopted out to (Maori) parents, or Polynesian parents, or Chinese parents provided they proved up to be decent, loving, righteous people.  Of course.

3.  Bureaucratic incompetence is endemic.  The proof of this is before us in large relief  This was an extreme case of abuse.  Dita De Boni reports:

Although CYF had apparently worked "intensively" with the family, no one understood the level of abuse this girl suffered until her grandmother called the police, many months after her torture had begun.  Not only was the girl known to authorities, but her parents were too.
Her mother had received medical care for two broken hands she sustained after beating her daughter. She probably even qualified for ACC payouts from these injuries. (Emphasis, ours)

Yet, state agencies were oblivious.  And just how many state agencies were involved?

The family had been involved with CYF, a family support agency, a registered ACC counsellor, a court-appointed psychologist, the child's court-appointed lawyer and a child and youth mental health service.  "Sadly, the primary focus of most of this professional engagement was not based on concerns she was at risk in her home," Ms MacKenzie said.  "Rather it was to help the young girl and her family work through the sexual abuse she had suffered while previously living with close family caregivers."

"Along with other professionals, we believed the family was genuinely engaged in achieving that goal.  "It appears we have been terribly misled and this has had tragic consequences."

You don't say.  You could only get such myopia, such blindness, such refusal to see, such a willing suspension of disbelief when one is blinded by false ideology and is, therefore, profoundly incompetent.  "Just tick the boxes.  Nothing to see here.  Moving right along." 

For two years this abuse went on!  In the end, when the poor child was removed, she was admitted to hospital suffering starvation and dehydration!  The state agencies were misled. This indicates that they just took words at face value.  They failed to inspect what they expected. 

But it gets worse.  The child's teacher was sufficiently observant to see that the child was likely suffering abuse of some kind.  She contacted authorities.  The reported response is unbelievable.

CYF will also investigate claims by the girl's teacher that reports of abuse by the school were not investigated.  In an email to Prime Minister John Key, the teacher said she reported her concerns about "constant abuse" the girl was suffering to school management on a "weekly, almost daily" basis. But the message the school got back from the child's social worker was that she was "clumsy and accident prone".

In her email, the teacher said she felt powerless to do anything to protect the girl and keep her safe. "This child has come to school with black eyes, a swollen face, swollen nose, bruises, abrasions and infected wounds that have all been explained as her being 'clumsy and accident prone'.  "However she is only accident prone at home, she has not had a so-called accident while at school ...

"Why do we have to wait for a child to be seriously injured or killed before action is taken?"

No doubt we will get the usual litany of how overstretched the agencies are--overworked, understaffed--etc. etc.  But this will not wash for a moment.  State agencies were all over this family.  CYFS worked intensively with them--to use their own word.  The family were cocooned by state agencies and bureaucrats.  This case represents a systemic failure.  It has to.  We believe it will turn out (but never be acknowledged) that the failure lies primarily in the working ideology, the world-view, the culture of belief that currently dominates the social services. Above all else, this ideology is dominated by the principle that state agencies can make people change, they can make a difference, they can redeem people and make them righteous.  That entrenched belief produces a culture of credulity, mixed with naive hope.  Evil is not seen as intrinsic to the human heart, but the product of circumstances.  Change those and people will change for the better.  This is the blindness that prevents state agencies from seeing the brutal truth of bruises, black eyes, abrasions, and infected wounds.

The sad moral of the story is this: once you are under CYFS care you can get away with murder.  They will never see it.  It would be interpreted as only an accident.  It has to be, for thus spake Zarathustra.

How long will be put up with this.  How long will we, as a nation, continue with these false ideologies? 

Idolatry and Maori Child Abuse, Part II

The Destiny of Those Maori Remaining in New Zealand

We have spoken of the great Maori diaspora—many of whom have left New Zealand to escape the pervasive influence of Maori whanau culture, which hangs as an albatross around their necks. We believe it to be an indirect cause of the high incidence of child abuse amongst Maori today.

The problem with whanau culture is that it elevates the whanau above the nuclear family, thus undermining the roles and responsibilities of parents to their own children. It represents a rejection of God's command that a man shall leave his parents and shall cleave to his wife when he marries. In modern Maori culture, whanau claims regularly supersede and trump the legitimate claims of children upon their own parents. This, in turn, entices and tempts far too many Maori parents to look to their extended families to take over what it is their responsibility to provide for their own children. This has led to the neglect of Maori children, since passing responsibility over to the whanau for one's children fails far too often. The extended family has not soul to damn and no butt to kick. All too often no one couple ends up standing as a strong tower of refuge for vulnerable children. Shared parenting all to often produces neglected children who slip through cracks.

A third reason for such an appalling record of child abuse within Maori communities is state welfare. Sir Apirana Ngata is reported to have said, when social welfare was first introduced by Michael Savage, that “this will be the death of our people”. To be sure, it has been the death of a good many pakeha as well. But Maori have proved particularly susceptible to its deadly effects. We believe the reason is the combination of secular state welfarism with Maori whanau culture. Maori extended families and whanau socialism easily combine with the ideology and values of state welfarism to make a destructive and deadly cocktail. Sir Apirana Ngata was right.

The whanau socialist model was already in place when European Fabian socialism was institutionalised in New Zealand in the nineteen-thirties by the first Labour government. Because whanau socialism already undermined private property rights, and forced many Maori families to look to the whanau for economic support and sustenance, it was a small step for Maori to extend this beyond their extended family to the government. Hence Maori to this day have been strong supporters of socialist political doctrines and institutions. Their culture leads them to regard national social welfare as intrinsically right and therefore receiving support from other people not only an ethnic right, but a fundamental civil right as well. Maori are culturally inclined to socialism and progressive political and economic doctrines fit hand in glove with Maori cultural beliefs.

Those who argue that it is relative Maori poverty which inclines them to socialist doctrines over-simplify the case. Relative Maori poverty continues entrenched first and foremost because the economic demands of the whanau keep many Maori families in a state of poverty and dependency. In such a culture if any Maori family prospers, their economic obligations to their blood relatives rise. Consequently children rapidly become dependent upon “others” and when the increasingly impoverished whanau will not provide, Maori naturally look to the state. It is just exchanging one form of socialism for another.

Welfare dependent families, which are disproportionately represented in the Maori population, often reproduce their welfare dependency, binding the next generation to degradation and destruction. Husbands and fathers as providers become an optional extra. Women become the dominant adult in such families because welfare is normally dolled out by the State through and around the power matrix of mother or the woman who happens to be the designated care-giver du jour. In such a degraded state, children easily become an economic tool, a means of extracting more money from government. Welfarism leads to inter-generational cycles of poverty, which causes and results in the neglect and abuse of children. Throwing more money at the “problem” is the worst possible thing that could be done. It is also the most naïve, simplistic, and stupid.

Does this mean that Maori are beyond hope? Not at all. This is not primarily an ethnic or cultural problem. It is a spiritual problem. Religious constructs have pervasive cultural consequences. False and wrong religious constructs normally have pervasively bad cultural consequences. But Maori are not beyond the grace of God; His hand is not shortened that it cannot save. There is a great need in our day for biblically informed teachers to help Maori Christians, in this particular instance, reform their ethnic cultural inheritance around the constructs of the Scripture, to enable the development of a reformed Christian Maori culture and a reconstruction of biblical families. This will necessitate a rejection of aspects of the whanau culture and a reformation of those aspects which are redeemable. The need is great.

It is from the Church and the Believing community that the answers and help will come, not from more government-extorted welfare and a paradigm of victim-entitlement. Let us pray for the Lord to raise up Maori leadership which will completely reject the ungodly claims of whanau upon Maori families and the much vaunted “Maori way of doing things”. Such racial and ethnic pride is completely unbecoming true faith in God. Maori long ago tragically decided they would adapt the pakeha's God to their own way of thinking. Maori must reject such pernicious idolatry.

Let us ask God to raise up Maori who will call for Maori to repent of their Unbelieving cultural assault upon biblical marriage and family. The idol of whanau-uber-family must be broken and Maori must do it—in faith, with their eyes upon the Lord, not upon the State.

One final word—some may be wondering whether Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church might be the first signs of a reformation within Maoridom back to biblical faith. We fear not. Without discounting or denigrating whatever good Destiny may have done, we believe it is right at the point of neglecting to reject the idolatry of whanau culture that Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church have failed the Maori people. To our mind they have simply substituted the blood whanau culture for an ecclesiastical whanau culture. The prior claims of the ecclesiastical whanau—which has elided across from the ethnic whanau culture—continue to undermine the biblical insistence on the primary authority of the nuclear Christian family.

To this extent we believe Destiny represents a false dawn and a pseudo-reformation. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot give the old household idols a new coat of paint and claim, thereby, that you are serving the Living God. The God of our fathers, it will do us all well to recall, commands first and foremost that there will be no other gods brought into His holy presence.

May it please God to be gracious to the people at Destiny and lead them to understand this. May He also once again remember mercy to those Maori who remain in New Zealand.

Idolatry and Maori Child Abuse, Part I

Whanau Culture's Collateral Damage

There was a small furore inside the Wellington beltway two weeks ago when Paula Bennett, Minister of Social Development had the temerity to suggest that Maori elites and the controllers of millions of dollars of Maori assets had a responsibility to commit more resources to looking after their own Maori children. The reason is that whilst representing around ten percent of the population, Maori account for 50% of the children identified on government roles as being at risk—which is to say, they don't have parents or caregivers that either parent or give proper care.

The risible response of the Green co-leader Turei was to accuse the Minister of racism. Such a response must be dismissed contemptuously. But, it begs the question: why are Maori children at such risk? Always the reasons are complex. We do not mean this sarcastically. Life is complex; all human culture is complex; it is exceedingly thick, with layer upon layer of reality (as God has wonderfully ordained it to be). Turning a culture so that it moves in a different direction is a complex undertaking—too complex for any one agency to achieve. Impossible for government agencies—for God has not ordained such tasks for government.

In general, however, Maori elites and those who control the power structures within Maoridom are agreed on where the problems lie and what the solution must be. To them the solution is monocular and straightforward: more money. Or, to be more precise, more of other people's money. Money poured forth is the simplistic naïve materialist solution offered. Yet the majority of non-Maori power elites would agree. So, the only debate in our society over the solution to the plight of Maori children is how much money of other people's money can be delivered, and by whom. The right generally argues for lesser amounts, citing the weak economy, national debt levels and so on, whilst the left always argues for more. The Maori party, in turn, always argues for much, much more.

It is noteworthy that the recent brouhaha was, once again, over money. The Minister of Social Development was arguing for more money for at risk Maori children—but was trying to source it from Maori elites (those tribal leaders who control the billions of dollars in various tribal settlements for historical grievances genuine and manufactured). For some reason, beyond the ken of rational people, this was deemed racist.

Why does Maoridom have such an appalling childcare record? (We generalise, of course. There are many salutary and excellent Maori parents, and fine Maori families. Sadly, however, they are relatively smaller in proportion to their population than non-Maori ethnicities.) Why?

Whilst the reasons are legion, there are at least three which we believe are the more pernicious. The first is the degradation of the nuclear family at the expense of extended family or whanau. Maori apologists have hailed their whanau-culture as a point of great superiority over pakeha culture. The paradigm of the extended family, we are told, means that every child grows up within a community of blood relatives, aunts and uncles, cousins, and more distant blood relatives. The whanau culture creates a bond of responsibility to many children, not just one's own. Children ostensibly grow up within a far wider and richer group of adults and children. Any weakness in parents can be compensated by the influence of the wider whanau.

Western culture is seen as inferior at this point, for the nuclear family is believed to be narrow, isolated, restricted and shallow. It does not have the breadth, colour, depth, and richness of an extended family structure.

To be sure, an extended and strong community, whether based on blood or other bonds should be a great blessing—but, and it is a colossal “but”, the extended community in the long run is destructive unless it takes up its roles and responsibilities upon the foundation of strong nuclear family structures. A true oneness of the community can only be sustained upon the solid ground of many strong nuclear families. When the community is misshapen to where it substitutes for a nuclear family, the outcome is most often destructive.

The problem is that the extended family has no soul to damn and no butt to kick. The whanau concept, as currently manifested within Maoridom, does not hold birth parents primarily accountable and responsible for their children. A major reason so many Maori children are neglected is that it is impossible to hold a community accountable for their care; there is no primary caregiver by definition. Thus, the Maori concept of whanau has in general become a hindrance to the proper care of children. Until Maori acknowledge that God gives children to parents first and foremost, and only to the community secondarily and indirectly, and that He holds birth parents responsible and accountable, and until Maori reform their whanau culture accordingly, high rates of child abuse amongst Maori will likely continue.

A second major cause of putting children at risk is the concept of whanau socialism—which of course is related to the first. Maori parents are inculcated in the heinous idea that commitments to whanau supersede their duties and commitments to their own children. So, when somebody dies all are obligated to attend the tangi, often taking days off work; all are obligated to contribute. Maori parents are continually needing to expend their cash and assets upon extended family obligations—most often at the expense of the care and provision for their own children. And when such impoverished families get into strife, whanau socialism makes it acceptable to cast them upon the whanau for care and help—as a sort of payback or return for having been a dutiful whanau member.

Many Maori have migrated to Australia for this reason: to escape the perpetual impoverishment that comes from the never-ceasing demands of the extended family upon their income, time, resources, and assets. The obligation to “share” and pay koha are often overwhelming. Until Maori cleanse their culture of such notions, and build their communities upon the principles of the sanctity of private property; the rejection of theft and immoral expropriation of the property of others; a rejection of whanau claims upon the income and assets of extended family members, and affirm the fundamental truth that commitments and duties to one's own children are more important than duties to one's whanau, high rates of neglect of children will continue.

The latter principle of commitment to one's marriage and family being more important and a higher priority than commitment to one's extended family is, of course, derived from the beginning of the human race, where God declared and commanded that a man, in marriage, should leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife. The modern whanau socialist model at root constitutes a rebellion against this divine plan and command. Evil consequences always flow when individuals and cultures think themselves smarter than the Living God.

God will not be mocked—and the truth of this is showing up in the incidence of child abuse amongst Maori.