Oranga Tamariki doesn’t have a figure on number of state care children

By Phil Pennington of RNZ

Oranga Tamariki has admitted it does not know just how many children it holds the records of, who were once in the state’s care, or all of their names.

The ministry has a statutory duty to look after the records which have been crucial in many cases for survivors of abuse to get a glimpse of their own personal history and find out what happened to them, as the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse has demonstrated.

“We are responsible for records of care, which date back to early last century,” the ministry’s head of data and information, Anita Easton, told RNZ in a statement on Tuesday.

“Given this timeframe, some of the earlier filing practices meant that individual files did not always include the names of children on its label.”

It held about 1.8 million physical files, but many files had multiple documents in them, and more than one record might be about the same person.

Job cuts

The crucial role of records has been known for years, underscored by the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse across the Tasman around 2013.

Oranga Tamariki (OT) had been planning to cut record-keeping jobs under its public-sector-savings change proposal, but reversed that last week, instead reinstating three positions and adding a new leadership one.

This came after feedback from staff questioning how the core records job would be done without them.

Video shows boss castigating some staff over feedback

Oranga Tamariki chief executive Chappie Te Kani.

However, chief executive Chappie Te Kani, in a video to staff last week, castigated some staff who he said gave feedback that in its “nature and tone” did not align with “our values”.

The video was released the same day he confirmed 419 jobs would be cut.

Someone who witnessed its delivery said: “It included amongst other things a lecture about how leaking isn’t okay and made absolutely no difference to the outcome, and another one about how some of the comments made in consultation feedback were unacceptable.

“Someone summarised it as, ‘I want you to be open and honest, but not about what you actually think and definitely not with anyone outside’.”

As well as records-keeping jobs, Te Kani reinstated some lawyers’ jobs he had intended to cut. He told RNZ this was because the lawyers were the “safety net” for social workers who lacked proper training on how to apply the law and prepare for court.

The original proposal was to cut about 10 of the 65 jobs in legal services. It is unclear how many were retained.

Ministry’s record-keeping background

The ministry’s record-keeping task is massive, and a lot of it is still manual, with OT holding about one million physical care records, plus another 800,000 files about care activities, Easton said.

Most of the files contained multiple documents - “the count is of the number of files, not the number of documents”.

It has digitised copies of the equivalent of about five billion pages of records of both care and adoption, scanned to preserve them.

Its current system was set up in 2001, and since then had digitised the records of 55,000 children, though not many records from the previous system had been digitised.

“Over time Oranga Tamariki has digitised the most at-risk” records held in old formats, Easton said.

The ministry is also the public office in charge of 77,000 records held by Archives NZ.