Cam Slater: You Might Have Missed It, but This Story Is Important

An important story dropped on Friday, just as Kiwis were waking up to the sad news that Queen Elizabeth II had passed away. The author of the story must have been gutted, but this story is important and must be addressed, rather than swept under the rather lumpy carpet that hides all the screw-ups of the worst government in living memory.

Treasury gave the Government a scathing review of its $1.1 billion investment in Oranga Tamariki in the 2019 Budget, calling the spend a “disparate collection of ideas” that was “not governed by a clear organisational strategy”.

One Treasury paper warned that the agency had “loose fiscal controls” and that the per child cost of putting a child into Oranga Tamariki was increasing without any appreciable improvement in outcomes.

Overall, analysts said Oranga Tamariki had a “[w]eak organisational strategy and direction”.

In the first Wellbeing Budget, the Government invested $1.1 billion over four years into Oranga Tamariki to transform the organisation.

NZ Herald

We have heard this over and over again about this Labour Government. They are spendthrifts rather than careful guardians of taxpayers’ dollars. The waste is enormous, from over a billion dollars in Mental Health that disappeared without a trace, to hundreds of millions wasted on feasibility studies for forlorn projects like the Auckland Cycle Bridge.

Basically, the socialists and communists in charge all believe that they know best; that government should control all, and that dumping huge swathes of cash without any demonstrable or tangible management of that spending will magically produce solutions. It is a poverty of leadership under which we are suffering and it starts from the top and gets progressively worse the further down the food chain we go.

As part of that funding, Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis was meant to report back to Cabinet on whether any transformation had taken place every six months.

The first report was back in April 2021, but the papers released under the Official Information Act say that “from … Treasury’s perspective” the report itself “did not meet the expectations Cabinet set”.

The next report was due at the end of the year. Once again, Treasury felt the report itself was sub par, and underplayed issues at the agency.

Treasury papers and correspondence show the agency was scathing about the lack of progress.

“This will be the second report back Cabinet receives, and while it is a significant improvement on the first, some key issues remain,” the papers say.

They add that Treasury had to second short-term staff to the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki to “provide financial expertise”.

Treasury was concerned Davis’ original Cabinet paper had “not adequately addressed” the “key issues” of Oranga Tamariki’s lacklustre performance.

These were “[l]imited evidence of effective and consistent fiscal controls”, the fact that the “cost per child has increased significantly in the past two years with no clear explanation”, and that Oranga Tamariki had not revised down their “demand forecasts” of the number of children in care, despite having lower demand.

The analyst then turned to the organisational structure of Oranga Tamariki, saying that an “absence of appropriate strategic thinking and framework limits OT’s ability to prioritise and sequence decisions effectively”.

NZ Herald

That is Treasury’s polite way of saying that neither the minister nor the department could organise a root in a brothel with a fistful of fifties.

Will Kelvin Davis or indeed anyone else ever be held accountable for this profligate waste of time, effort and money? Unlikely.

What is more likely is that anyone criticising this will be labelled a racist and colonialist, seeking to perpetuate outdated ways of thinking.

All we will hear is how the Government “expects better” and they will stamp their foot, show us some frowny faces and move on.

But that simply isn’t good enough. We tolerate these sub-par performances at our peril. We are truly being led by glorified student politicians and functional idiots masquerading at being charge while the Prime Minister insists on calling these fools by their inflated titles.

If they were managers in business, they’d have been sacked long ago.

The next election can’t come soon enough.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE