August 29, 2022
Public service slammed for slow abuse response
The chief executive of West Auckland Māori service provider Te Whānau o Waipareira says apologies by crown agencies to the Royal Commission on Abuse in State Care ring hollow.
The inquiry has just finished a two-week hearing in which the chief executives of agencies like Oranga Tamariki, Police and Social Development fronted up.
John Tamihere says the current leaders of the public services are people who oversaw the abuse, and it’s not good enough for them to say sorry and walk away.
“I sat with this bloke Peter Hughes, who’s the head of the public service today when he was the head of the MSD, and he did nothing when we pointed it out to him in his office down there in Bowen St in Wellington and I remember it to this day. In fact, I’ve written to say ‘you’ve got a cheek sitting in that job given what you did in perpetrating the problems,'” he says.
John Tamihere says bureaucrats feasted off Maori failure rather than fix a broken system, and it’s only through protests by survivors and Maori that a door has been opened to resolution.