July 30, 2019
Child uplift policies cultural genocide
One of the organisers of today's Hands off Our Tamariki march on parliament says politicians need to wake up to the genocide on their watch.
Hundreds of people have gathered at the Cenotaph in Wellington for the short march to parliament, where they will present an open letter calling for an end to the Ministry for Children's uplift practices and for decisions about Māori children's wellbeing to be made by whānau, hapū, and iwi, supported by Iwi and Māori organisations.
Paora Moyle says while Children's Commissioner Andrew Becroft has identified what he calls unconscious bias in the child protection system, she sees it as racism and worse.
"And what we've got in this country is training up our babies in order to go into the prison system. I call it genocidal pipelining. It's the UN definition, when you take a child from their own culture and put it with another, that's absolutely genocide and we've got it going on," she says.
Paora Moyle says like her predecessor the Minister for Children is ignoring the weight of statistics about the abuse of children in care and continuing to insist it's something her ministry can fix.
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