Actually he is not young any more, he is a 53-year-old grandfather.
I was married at 22 and my wife and I started taking in foster children two years later when our baby was aged 6 months. We had four to six children staying with us, aged 8 to 16 years. What on earth were we thinking? It was no surprise we only lasted six months fostering.
We did it again four years later, setting up a home for teenagers who needed some extra support as they grew into adults. We were smarter this time and had a couple of single friends move in to help with the stress. We lasted three years this time.
One of the things I observed with both these attempts to bring young people into our home was the importance of connection back to family.
We could love them, feed them, clothe them, support and guide them, but they still had their families that most desperately wanted to remain a part of.
The authorities down through the years have not always had a high regard for Māori families. Missionaries, educators and politicians saw the Māori home as preventing conversion to Christianity, interfering with academic achievement and preventing assimilation.
A statement I used to often hear in the 1980s was "if we can just get them away from their family we might have a chance." It is the height of arrogance to think that we know what is best for someone else’s family. In my early 20s I once said these exact words to a fellow youth worker from Porirua. Thankfully he admonished me and told me that our clients’ families will always be there and our job was to support families and help them flourish.
This was a turning point for me in the way that I looked at youth work. I had repeated that sad old trope that had become normalised based on the mistaken belief that the problem with many Māori who are struggling is the family environment.
Not poverty or hopelessness, or mental illness or addictions or the breakdown of support structures.
I remember arguing with a fellow foster parent when they said that they were caring for a young person because their family didn’t want them. I took exception to this and was arguing until I realised we were talking about two different things.
He was talking about the child’s parents, and I was talking about the child’s whānau — that wider group of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
I am not naive. I know that sometimes parents are not the right people at that time to raise their children, but that number is far smaller than the hundreds of thousands who have ended up in care since 1950 — many of them Māori and many could have been placed in their wider families.
The attempt by the coalition government to remove mention of the Treaty of Waitangi from the Oranga Tamariki Act is because it claims it puts race first before the welfare of the child.
This is essentially wrong because it is not about race, but relationships. Not just any relationship, but relatives.
Iwi and hapū concerns are not based on race, they are based on the child being descendants of the same ancestor. Every single member of my marae is descended from one of two of my great-great-grandfathers.
Even if I don’t like some of them, or even know who they are, I am still obligated to them because they are my relatives. Politicians and media may call these children Māori, but they just happen to be Māori because they are Ngā Puhi or Ngāti Porou or Tūhoe or one of the 50 other iwi named after an ancestor.
Child protection expert Prof Emily Keddell, from the University of Otago, summarised section 7aa as giving practical effect to the Treaty by "measuring and reducing disparities for Māori, creating partnerships with iwi and Māori organisations, delegating functions of the Act to Māori organisations, and ensuring cultural competency of staff".
The Iwi Leaders Forum leaders are fighting the removal of section 7aa because it gives them an opportunity to hold Oranga Tamariki accountable for what it does with their relatives and allows them to be involved in caring for them when nuclear families break down.
Removing the Treaty of Waitangi accountability and obligations could be detrimental for generations to come, as has been demonstrated in New Zealand’s past. We need to learn from the mistakes of the past, not repeat them.
• Dr Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in the University of Otago’s social and community work programme.
