Campaigner marches to Parliament to protest children being taken from families

Tracey Martin announces a Royal Commission of Inquiry into historical abuse of children in state care in February. Photo / File

A former Hawke's Bay woman is at Parliament today protesting against what she says is the unjustified separation of children from families in the crackdown against domestic violence.

Ellie Hini, a trained nurse now living in the Waikato region, has been battling to have children returned within her own family.

She was back in Hawke's Bay on Wednesday en route to the Beehive, where she has been allocated an appointment, although she was still unaware who it would be with.

Her Hikoi for Justice Aotearoa is being supported by Auckland-based Families for Justice, with worries particularly about an apparent lowering of thresholds at which children are being removed, with the advent of the Oranga Tamariki "vulnerable children" service.

She said there was no issue with children being removed from clearly violent or neglectful families or where there were serious drug and alcohol issues.

But she said many children are being removed from other situations and devastated parents and families are facing long and usually unaffordable battles to get them back.

Hini claimed a lack of accountability has led to ministry social workers "making things up to suit themselves", often to try to justify action which had already taken place, sometimes "on no evidence at all".

"This is a timebomb," she said. "This Government, and the public, have to start learning what is really going on. They are being taken for a ride by the staff.

"There is a culture of dishonesty and bullying within the very department that is supposed to be addressing such issues."

Hini said she would particularly like to meet Minister for Children Tracey Martin, who revealed at Question Time in Parliament that the number of children placed in care by Oranga Tamariki had been increasing over the last nine months.

In the first year of the new ministry, which was formed on April 1 last year, 500 more children and young people had been placed with child protection services.

The minister said of the numbers, "this Government believes New Zealand has the potential to build a world-leading child protection service".

But Hini said the employment of an extra 160 social workers and finding of an extra 140 carers highlighted the plan is to remove more children from families, rather than work towards decreasing the numbers, at a time when the Government is looking at addressing the wrongs of separation of children from families in the past.

"They have lowered the threshold. Social workers will do anything to justify what they have done, and they get away with it," she said.