Chief Children's Commissioner Says Oranga Tamariki Must Action Auditor-General's Recommendations On Contract Management
Press Release – Mana Mokopuna
It is vital that Oranga Tamariki actions the Auditor-Generals recommendations, to ensure that the rights and wellbeing of children, young people and their families are front and centre of funding decisions that affect them.
Today's report from the Auditor-General on Oranga Tamariki procurement and contract management is being welcomed by Chief Children's Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad.
'Last year, I was very clear about my concerns as to how Oranga Tamariki was making and communicating its decisions about contracted services for children, young people and their whānau.
'As the independent advocate for all children in Aotearoa New Zealand, I was very concerned that I did not see adequate evidence that children and young people, and their needs and rights, had been at the centre of the decisions being made about contract changes.
'I heard directly from iwi and communities that these funding changes were causing significant uncertainty, stress and harming their relationship with Oranga Tamariki. The Auditor-General's report today shows that my concerns, and those of others, were well-founded,' says Dr Achmad.
'Some of the contracts that were reduced or closed by Oranga Tamariki were in the important area of early intervention and prevention of harm, such as support for new families, Youth One Stop Shops (YOSSs), mentoring for young people and counselling for children and families.
'In particular, I wanted to understand what evidence had informed these decisions, and what transition plans were in place for children, young people and whānau affected by changes and reductions to services. I note in particular the Auditor-General's finding that his Office's inquiry did not find evidence that Oranga Tamariki understood how its decisions would affect children and their families, before those decisions were made.
'Oranga Tamariki is our Ministry for Children – its core role is to support the wellbeing of children and young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Therefore, its decision-making must be informed by detailed analysis of the likely effect on children and young people. I am pleased to see that is one of the key recommendations made by the Auditor-General.
'Together with my oversight of oranga tamariki system colleagues, I'll be watching closely to ensure that Oranga Tamariki implements all of the recommendations in the Auditor-General's report, including establishing clear and standard processes for contracting services, and properly considering how funding changes will impact children and young people's lives. I'm pleased to know that the Chief Executive has said that Oranga Tamariki has accepted all the Auditor-General's recommendations, and I have discussed this with him today.
'It is vital that Oranga Tamariki actions the Auditor-General's recommendations, to ensure that the rights and wellbeing of children, young people and their families are front and centre of funding decisions that affect them. The relationships Oranga Tamariki holds with its partners are crucial to this, and must be continue to be strengthened.'
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RNZ News
3 days ago
- RNZ News
Indian parents fight to clear name after child abuse conviction saw baby seized
An Indian couple are fighting to clear their names after the mother was jailed for child abuse. Photo: Supplied An Indian family has spent six years battling government agencies to prove their innocence after Oranga Tamariki seized their 10-week-old baby in 2018 and sent the mother to prison for child abuse. Their story has since been reported on Newsroom's Fractured podcast by investigative journalist Melanie Reid. Zita and Ravi, who spoke on condition of anonymity, have spent the past six years navigating New Zealand's child protection and immigration systems in a bid to overturn an allegation that turned their lives upside-down. Their ordeal started when their 8-week-old baby was taken to Starship Hospital in 2018, referred by their GP for suspected meningitis. A CT scan revealed a non-depressed linear skull fracture and subdural haemorrhages - bleeding between the skull and the brain. A full-body X-ray showed fractures in 18 ribs, as well as in the baby's left femur and tibia - 39 fractures in total. Blood tests revealed extremely low levels of calcium and vitamin D. Within 24 hours, hospital specialists concluded the injuries were non-accidental. Baby K, as she is referred to, was hospitalised for 12 days before being placed in foster care. In 2021, Zita was convicted of intentionally injuring her newborn daughter and sentenced to two years and seven months in prison. Starship Hospital Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly During the three-week trial, four Starship doctors testified that the injuries were consistent with abusive head trauma. No medical experts appeared in Zita's defence, and she has consistently denied harming her child. Meanwhile, Baby K was moved between four different foster homes. Ravi, who has no criminal convictions, was repeatedly denied custody by Oranga Tamariki until April this year. When Zita was released after serving most of her sentence, the state maintained custody of Baby K and began deportation proceedings against her. Ravi, whose visa depended on his wife's, also faced deportation. He is currently in the process of applying for an extension to his visa. Zita came to New Zealand hopeful of a bright future but is now thinking of leaving after years of hardship and separation from her daughter. "I came to New Zealand with so many dreams, but now I'm thinking of leaving," she said. Zita said her dream of building a life in New Zealand had been shattered. After spending two years in prison over what she and her husband claim was a miscarriage of justice, she is struggling to rebuild her life. "Finally, I got a work visa in March, but the problem is I can't find a job because of my prison sentence," she said. "I just want my convictions overturned so I can live a normal life with my husband and daughter." The couple now live apart due to financial hardship related to housing. Zita lives with her brother, while her husband Ravi and their young daughter share accommodation with relatives. "I've lost so much since it all began," Zita said. "I lost my daughter, my family, my father and the chance to live in New Zealand without fear." Awaiting trial in 2019, Zita was informed that her father had died in India, but she was unable to attend the funeral because her passport was being held by the court. Zita recalled her early days in prison with anguish. "I didn't eat for weeks," she said. "I cried all the time." Ravi, who came to New Zealand on a partner visa, was also facing immigration challenges. The couple initially tried to to seek support from the Indian community but were disappointed by the results. "We thought that because we were Indians, our people would stand by us," Ravi said. "Unfortunately, that didn't happen." One exception was the Supreme Sikh Society, which provided a letter of support in 2023. The two years that Zita spent behind bars were some of the hardest of Ravi's life. "After the doctors were convinced we harmed our baby, the system took over and pointed fingers at us," he said. "They created a narrative that there were problems between me and my wife, that we had injured the baby. "But no one really told us how she got all those fractures - until the media brought in experts who finally explained it." He believed they had been treated as outsiders by every government agency they encountered. Meanwhile, their daughter had spent much of her life in foster care. "She doesn't know anything about Indian culture," Zita said. "We're trying our best to teach her Indian values and traditions," Ravi said. The couple had repeatedly asked Oranga Tamariki to place their daughter with an Indian family or with their own relatives in New Zealand, but their requests were denied. Zita and Ravi said they made a heartbreaking decision to terminate a second pregnancy in 2019, fearing Oranga Tamariki would remove the baby at birth. Joris de Bres Photo: Supplied Former Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres has been working with the couple for several years. "We've been on a roller-coaster ride the whole time and it's only in the last month really that we've got to the point where there's some light at the end of the tunnel, but there were still challenges to overcome," de Bres said. "They've been hounded by the police. They had their house bugged and they've been through a court case and the mother jailed. There's something wrong here." De Bres believed that ethnicity played a role. "I can attribute it to a degree of institutional racism and a general racial attitude within the state. You know, I was with the Race Relations Commission for 10 years, so I'm familiar with this situation," he said. "If you're a new arrival from another country and your skin colour is different from that of the majority, you're already starting at a disadvantage - especially when dealing with the system and even some of the people within it." Journalists Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner are behind Newsroom's investigative podcast, Fractured. Photo: Supplied De Bres eventually contacted investigative journalists Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner. Reid said the case was especially difficult. "It's about someone accused of abusing a child, which makes it unpopular - and you're up against the medical fraternity," she said. Over 18 months, Reid and her team obtained Baby K's medical records, including high-resolution 3D CT scans and X-rays. They consulted four leading international specialists in genetics, neurosurgery, obstetrics and neuropathology from Canada, Norway, the Netherlands and the United States. Each submitted a formal report. Their collective conclusion: Baby K's injuries were likely related to complications during labour and severely low levels of vitamin D. "One of the main takeaways from the podcast after two seasons is that you just have to keep going until you get that result," Reid said, "because there are so many points along the way where it gets too hard, and people just give up." Sumner agreed. "We couldn't figure out why Ravi couldn't see his daughter and there were so many injustices we could identify even before we started our investigation," Sumner said. A year after Zita's release from prison, Oranga Tamariki began allowing Zita regular supervised access with her daughter. In February, Newsroom unveiled that Zita's deportation had been cancelled after Associate Minister Chris Penk intervened. In April, the Family Court in Auckland discharged any remaining orders relating to Baby K. Restrictions on Baby K's travel were lifted, she was no longer in state care and custody was returned to her parents. Zita and Ravi believed Oranga Tamariki had come to realise the parents might not have been at fault, a shift they attributed to media pressure and new evidence uncovered by Newsroom journalists. "In the beginning, they told us we wouldn't get our daughter back until she was 18," Zita said. "They haven't admitted they got it wrong, but they've now granted us custody. So why did they make that decision?" "Things slowly began to change after the podcast was released," Ravi said. "Oranga Tamariki started listening to us and tried to understand our culture, which was completely different from how they were in the beginning." In May, the Fractured podcast announced that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) had accepted Zita's submission for review, paving the way for a potential referral to an appeal court. 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"We are confident of the expertise of our Starship Child Protection team and the work they do in conjunction with New Zealand Police and other relevant agencies." For Zita and Ravi, a long road lay ahead, but the couple remained hopeful. "I've lost so many years, and with the CCRC process, it will take even more time to get back to normality," Zita said. "I'm not planning much because the last time I did, things didn't end well. My only dream is to live with my husband and daughter as a family."
RNZ News
5 days ago
- RNZ News
Oranga Tamariki youth worker loses appeal, dismissal for excessive force upheld
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RNZ News
6 days ago
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Babies for sale: New Zealanders commissioning illegal surrogacy in Thailand
By Jeremy Wilkinson, Open Justice multimedia journalist of Oranga Tamariki has identified a trend where Kiwis are travelling to Thailand to commission illegal surrogacy arrangements. Photo: NZME / Paul Slater New Zealanders are travelling overseas to illegally commission surrogate babies from Thai women, and bringing them back home to adopt them despite opposition from Oranga Tamariki. It's a practice the agency has labelled a "concerning trend" and it said there had been five cases where surrogate parents have flouted international law to have children in recent years. In one of those cases a gay man paid a Thai fertility clinic worker to subvert the country's strict surrogacy laws, which prohibits foreigners from commissioning children from surrogate mothers. The man paid a "significant" sum of money, according to a Family Court ruling, to find a surrogate and then his sperm was used to fertilise a donor's egg. Once back in New Zealand, the man applied to the Family Court to adopt his son so he could be legally recognised as his father. Under the current legislation, which was written in 1955, every parent of a child born by surrogacy, whether the practice is illegal in the country of birth or not, must effectively adopt their own child even if they have a genetic link to them. This is because when the law was written more than 70 years ago lawmakers didn't foresee the advances in fertility medicine such as in vitro fertilisation. That legislation is currently before a select committee after the Improving Arrangements for Surrogacy Bill was first tabled before Parliament in 2022. The proposed law would effectively create a mechanism that accounts for these changes in science, technology and culture and mean that parents, lawyers and judges won't need to rely on a piece of legislation that was never intended to account for surrogacy. However, it's unlikely to change things for people who commission surrogacy arrangements in countries where it's illegal. They will still come under scrutiny from the courts when they attempt to bring their children back into New Zealand. It's a practice that Oranga Tamariki says is occurring more frequently, at least in Thailand, and there's a possibility New Zealanders desperate to have children will look further abroad to other countries as well. In the case of the gay man who paid a Thai surrogate, which made its way through the Family Court last year, Judge Belinda Pidwell noted that the law around surrogacy was complex and there was no statute in New Zealand to provide clarity. "A number of illegal steps or breaches of laws occurred in the creation of [the child]. However, he has now been born, and as a result, has the right to grow and thrive, to have a nationality, and the right to know and be cared for by his parent," her ruling reads. "The irregularities in his creation, or the sins of his father, should not be visited upon him." However, Oranga Tamariki objected to the adoption being granted by the courts, despite finding that the father was the only real parental option for the child and that, barring the illegal way in which the baby was created, he was an otherwise suitable parent. Lawyers for the agency tabled a report from a senior adviser in its Intercountry Adoption Team, which identified a "concerning trend where New Zealanders have engaged in surrogacy around involving Thai surrogates, despite the illegality". "The concern is if children born of illegal surrogacy arrangements are allowed entry into New Zealand, and their parentage is then endorsed by an adoption order, that could be seen as an endorsement of unlawful actions," the report read. Oranga Tamariki says the release of its report could cause diplomacy issues, but didn't give the courts any evidence about why. Photo: NZME / Supplied Oranga Tamariki refused to release the full report to NZME under the Official Information Act, and then opposed its release through the Family Court claiming that it could impact New Zealand's diplomatic relations with other countries. However, it didn't provide any evidence about that specific impact. Judge Pidwell recently released the full report to NZME, which outlines how there has been an increased demand for women to become surrogates, and this demand has caused an increase in the number of women being trafficked from countries where the practice has been banned. The report found that between 2015 and 2020 the agency wasn't aware of any evidence New Zealanders had been involved in these situations, but from 2020 it had encountered five cases where a commercial surrogacy arrangement had been commissioned by Kiwis involving Thai surrogates. Three of these cases have involved the transfer of the surrogate across international borders for the purpose of an embryo transfer. In the other two cases, the mothers were transferred to another country to give birth. "Not only do these emerging trends demonstrate New Zealanders are breaching and demonstrating disregard to Thailand's domestic laws, but there are also significant concerns about the risks these practices pose for the safety and wellbeing of surrogates and the children born via the arrangements," the report reads. "Whilst we have noticed these examples of illegal practices have occurred in Thailand, we are mindful to the possibility of surrogacies being commissioned in other countries where it is illegal and would place similar scrutiny on New Zealanders engaging in illegal surrogacy arrangements in any jurisdiction." In New Zealand there is currently no legal pathway for a surrogate child to obtain residency except via an exemption from the ministers of immigration or internal affairs, or through the antiquated Adoption Act. Oranga Tamariki receives referrals from commissioning parents, private lawyers or requests from the Family Court to complete reports under the Adoption Act, which assesses their suitability to adopt. Since international surrogacy was outlawed in Thailand in 2015, Oranga Tamariki as well as the Ministry of Social Development, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Immigration New Zealand and the Department of Internal Affairs have all published advice for New Zealanders about the law change. Those agencies held a meeting in January 2024 to discuss the trend where New Zealand was flouting these rules. Then in May, Oranga Tamariki effected a policy to refuse to provide pre-court adoptive applicant assessments for people who commission surrogacy in a country where it is illegal. NZME asked Oranga Tamariki questions about whether it had liaised with the Thai Government about its concerns, about other countries where New Zealanders were commissioning illegal surrogacy and about its submissions to the new bill. New Zealand First MP and Children's Minister Karen Chhour says she hasn't received advice from Oranga Tamariki about the report. Photo: NZME / Mark Mitchell In an emailed statement the agency did not respond to those questions, instead noting that following an inter-agency meeting in 2024 Oranga Tamariki put in a formal policy to not support an immigration exemption for anyone commissioning an illegal surrogacy. "As outlined, we do not undertake any pre-court assessments of adoptive applicants who commission an international surrogacy in a country where it is illegal but will undertake such an assessment if we are required to do so by the court once an adoption application is received," the spokesperson said. "Oranga Tamariki has contributed along with other agencies to the review of surrogacy that has been led by the Ministry of Justice. "Through the course of that work, discussions were held about the issue of illegal surrogacy actions." A spokesperson for the Minister for Children, Karen Chhour, confirmed her office had not received any reports or advice from Oranga Tamariki about the illegal surrogacy its staff had identified. The Thai Embassy in Wellington did not respond to questions about whether it had seen the report, and was concerned by it. Domestic surrogacy, where someone volunteers to carry a baby for someone else, is legal in New Zealand, as long as no money changes hands. However, there's also no legal pathway to enforce this arrangement meaning that if the birth mother wants to keep the child, she can. If in vitro fertilisation needs to be done to get a surrogate pregnant then it has to be approved by the Ethics on Human Assisted Reproductive Technology committee (ECART). Oranga Tamariki will also assess the intended parents for their suitability. According to official information released by Oranga Tamariki there were 89 domestic surrogacy adoptions in New Zealand between 2020 and 2024, and over the same period there were 69 from international surrogacy arrangements. Barrister Margaret Casey, KC, says not much will change under proposed new legislation when it comes to illegal surrogacy. Photo: NZME / Supplied Margaret Casey, KC, is one of three legal experts who assist with surrogacy arrangements in New Zealand and told NZME under the new proposed surrogacy law, people would no longer have to adopt their own genetic children, rather it would become a parenting order. "The courts will still be juggling the same kinds of issues, it will just be through a different lens," she said. "Illegal surrogacies will still come before the court, and the court will still look at the background and make a decision about whether or not when you balance it all out it can make a parentage order." In terms of illegal surrogacy, Casey said not much would change under the new legislation, and there were already checks and balances in place that served to disincentivise people deliberately pursuing illegal arrangements. "You may not get to live where you want or with your child for a long time, you may have to give detailed evidence at a court hearing, be subject of further reports from Oranga Tamariki ... you will live in this state of uncertainty and probably panic for a long period of time," she said. In all five cases in recent years where New Zealanders have commissioned babies in Thailand, the New Zealanders who had paid a surrogate claimed that they didn't know it was illegal, despite clear advice from agencies in New Zealand to the contrary. Casey said this was likely born from optimism, rather than wilful blindness. "People are paying too much attention to the process of creating the baby and not concentrating on whether they can bring the child home and how long it will take, and is there anything I'm doing that will be a problem," she said. "Do your research and ask questions. If you don't do that and rely on an agency whose business is reproductive optimism, then you might not look as deeply as you should." Associate Minister for Justice Nicole McKee said the Improving Arrangements for Surrogacy Bill won't prevent people from seeking illegal surrogacies abroad. "It will expressly enable the Family Court to scrutinise these arrangements. The court will be able to consider whether it is in the surrogate-born child's best interests for the intended parents to become the child's legal parents," she said in a statement. Another expert in New Zealand surrogacy law is Jennifer Wademan, who agreed that in her experience there's nothing Machiavellian in parents seeking out illegal surrogacy. "I've never come across a case where someone has had the knowledge that it is illegal and still gone ahead. We simply point them in a direction where people can do it legally," she said. Wademan said she primarily gets two kinds of clients; those who work with her from the start, and those who only come to her once they realise their baby's foreign birth certificate won't get them through the border in New Zealand. "By the time these families are turning to international surrogacies they've been through hell and back and their desire to have a child is so great, it's optimism rather than deliberate avoidance of research," Wademan said. "I think for many it's putting the blinkers on. As human beings we can all understand that." As for Oranga Tamariki identifying cases of this happening, Wademan said that while the numbers might appear small, a spike of five is quite significant in the world of international surrogacy. "It's enough for me to go, hmm, I don't like that," she said. In terms of the proposed law change, Wademan doesn't see it changing much in the way of illegal surrogacy, but for domestic parents she predicts it will change the landscape altogether for an area of law that is particularly ad hoc. "Every day we get a new challenge," she said, "We're having to be innovative about legislative process about science and culture because our legislation doesn't provide for it. "The international landscape will always be more complex because we're dealing with another country's laws that we have no control over. "At the end of the day, these are overwhelmingly New Zealanders who just want to be parents so badly." -This story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald .
