May 11, 2015
Has the time for Whanau Ora come?
Has the time for Whanau Ora come?
MARTYN BRADBURY
When you consider the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for Maori development that disappears into the bureaucratic black hole that is Wellington, you can appreciate the resentment from flax-roots and grass-root Maori organizations at the way money supposedly for Maori is spent so recklessly and unwisely.
7 years of a National Party Government has seen welfare agencies become places where no is the only answer. Everything about trying to gain state help has been turned into a minefield of rules and reasons to disqualify you from ever receiving any help. The benefit application is 72 pages long, most mortgages are only a few pages long. There's a reason for that, it's to intimidate, confuse and bewilder anyone seeking help.
What Whanau Ora could achieve if it was re-tooled, is as a state funded advocacy agency that advises Maori flax root and grass root organizations of how to access those budgets and work their way around the gatekeepers of social agency funding.
Allowing frontline organizations to decentralize these budgets is a first step towards social autonomy and democratic independence because I don't believe the current social agencies have the internal culture or desire to be person focused as opposed to disqualify focused. We need money in the community, we don't need it in Wellington.
Martyn Bradbury
Editor – TheDailyBlog.co.nz
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