June 29, 2023
Moxon demands end to OT pipeline
Māori health advocate Lady Tureti Moxon says Māori need to be trusted to look after their children.
Following on allegations of abuse by staff in Oranga Tamariki residential facilities, the National Urban Maori Authority chair says the agency needs to be dismantled and care for children handed back to the community.
She says there has been no action on the recommendations made by the ministerial advisory group which called for resource-sharing and more localised and community-driven approaches.
Lady Moxon says there’s a huge government pipeline dedicated to moving mokopuna from state care to prisons or mental institutions.
“So how do you break the pipeline? You say enough, stop! Stop beating us up. Stop taking away our children and making us into the kinds of people this society loathes. We are a proud people. We are a people born of royalty, we are a people born of chiefs. We are a people who have navigated Te Maoananui a Kiwi, and yet we are treated still like we are the problem child of this nation,” she says.
Lady Moxon says reforms needs to start with providing for children, rather than the calls from todays colonialists for tough er law and order measures, more police and more people in prison.