Opinion: Mickey Mouse police vetting needs to change

Malachi Subecz, was 5 when he died in hospital in November 2021 after what’s being described as prolonged abuse by his caregiver. Photo / Supplied

OPINION

Whenever a child is murdered and I see their photo online or in the paper, I always find myself staring at it thinking “you poor little thing, how the hell did things go so wrong”.

And today there’s yet another little face I’ve been looking at, thinking exactly the same thing.

Today’s “poor little thing” is Malachi Subecz, who was 5 when he died in hospital in November last year after what’s being described as prolonged abuse by his caregiver. I’m hesitant about using that term “caregiver” because it couldn’t be further from the truth.

But technically, Michaela Barriball was Malachi Subecz’s caregiver and she had been since the wee boy’s mother went to prison. His mother was jailed earlier in 2021 and he died in November 2021.

Barriball herself is now in prison, serving a 17-year sentence for murdering Malachi.

Now before Malachi died, his wider family had made multiple complaints to Oranga Tamariki because they were concerned for his safety. They were worried about Barriball.

But somehow, this so-called “caregiver” managed to pull the wool over Oranga Tamariki’s eyes and keep the wee guy living with her. She also resisted multiple efforts by his family to get custody of him.

So a report by an independent panel that looked into this tragedy came out yesterday, and here’s what the report said about how this so-called “caregiver” stonewalled everything.

“At no time was the system able to penetrate and defeat Ms Barriball’s consistent efforts to hide the repeated harm she was causing to Malachi that culminated in his murder.”

One of the amazing things about that is that Oranga Tamariki normally falls over itself trying to get kids who need care living with members of their family. But that enthusiasm wasn’t quite there in Malachi’s case and so Oranga Tamariki let him stay with the person who turned out to be his murderer. She wasn’t a caregiver, at all.

And so, this morning, Kelvin Davis was on Newstalk ZB. Kelvin Davis is the Minister for Children and so, when it comes to Oranga Tamariki and the care and protection of kids in this country, the buck stops with him.

There was a lot of stuff talked about and the minister banged on about how many reports of concern Oranga Tamariki has to deal with every year - it’s about 70,000. And he banged on about no social worker going to work each day wanting to do a bad job. And he went on about how Oranga Tamariki has to get better at telling us its success stories, and how it’s committed to changing and doing things better. All the stuff you would expect him to say.

And he talked about the 14 recommendations the independent panel has made after reviewing the case, and how the Government is giving the green light to nine of them straight away and thinking about the other five.

And there was one, in particular, that really stood out to me. This is one of the recommendations that the Government hasn’t agreed straight away to implement. And it’s to do with police vetting.

The independent panel, in its report that it released yesterday, says it was ridiculous that Malachi’s so-called caregiver was never vetted by the Police and it’s saying this needs to change. And that when a sole parent is arrested or taken into custody, and their child needs to be looked after, the caregiver should be vetted by the Police.

Can you believe that, at the moment, that doesn’t happen? No police checks. Nothing. What an absolute disgrace.

But if I want to go on a school camp or coach a sports team, I have to go through a police check. It is just nuts.

Now I’m not saying that I don’t think police checks should be done on people like you and me if we want to get involved in something at school or with a sports club - anything where kids are involved.

But I’ve had police checks done on me before when I applied for a job that involved sitting in an office eight hours a day. No involvement with kids. None of that. But still needed a police check.

But, at the same time, if I’ve got a friend who can’t look after their child because they go to prison or they get crook - any situation where they can’t be around - if that happens and I want to put my hand up and become their child’s caregiver, there is no check done. No police vetting.

And when I heard Kelvin Davis talking about it this morning, I realised that our approach to police checks or police vetting is Mickey Mouse.

Because when you have a situation where we require someone who wants to work in an office or coach a sports team needing to go through a police check, but we don’t require the same for someone who wants to be the caregiver of a child - then there is no other way to describe it but, Mickey Mouse.