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Will we see real change this time?

Dame Karen Poutasi’s report into the failure of care that led to the murder of 5-year-old Malachi Subecz in 2021 comes with two epigraphs.

One said ‘‘Ka puta te tamaiti ki te ao, me puta te ao ki te tamaiti’’, which means ‘‘When the child enters the world, the community must rally around the child’’.

Poutasi’s report is a frank, damning but familiar account of how a community sometimes looked the other way, and sometimes made warnings that were ignored.

The question it poses is: who was the community in this case? Was it Malachi’s immediate family and those he was in regular contact with? Was it the range of agencies who should have exchanged information and followed up reports? Or is it all of us?

It is easy in hindsight to be struck by how many opportunities were missed. Here are just three from the report.

On the day after Michaela Barriball, who is serving a life sentence for murder, became Malachi’s caregiver, the boy’s cousin reported concerns to Oranga Tamariki (OT), based on a photo that seemed to show Malachi with a bruised face.

OT did not see evidence of risk and failed to investigate further.

When staff at a childcare centre asked Barriball about Malachi’s injuries, she said he had fallen off his bike.

The boy revealed this was not the case and said Barriball would be angry with him. Staff took photos of the injuries and although there was a policy to report such injuries, they did not.

Barriball sent text messages to her partner only weeks before Malachi’s death ‘‘stating that, among other things, she hated Malachi and feared she would kill him, and to her sister and father saying she was too scared to take him to hospital or get medical attention in case she got into trouble’’.

Systems failed and individuals failed.

A sense of frustration and even disbelief emerges when Poutasi mentions the 33 reviews or reports that preceded hers over the past 30 years. Eight are especially relevant, focused on such names as Nia Glassie, Coral-Ellen Burrows and Riri-o-te-Rangi (James) Whakaruru.

Each name brings up a memory of an innocent child largely failed by the adults who formed his or her community, although the efforts of Malachi’s wider family must be acknowledged and it is distressing that they were ignored.

Poutasi has identified gaps and made recommendations. Not all of the recommendations will be immediately adopted by the Government, which seems hard to justify on the face of it. Two that stand out are around mandatory reporting of possible abuse and the vetting of caregivers when a sole parent is sent to prison.

These seem like common sense to the layperson, and as Poutasi points out, both New South Wales and Victoria have had mandatory reporting for decades. If the danger is that innocent people are sometimes investigated, that is a price worth paying.

Poutasi identifies another feature that makes long-term observers cynical, which is when heightened media and political reaction is followed by long periods of apathy.

‘‘The majority of my recommendations are not new,’’ she writes. ‘‘Appropriate information sharing and mandatory reporting have been called for multiple times before. There have been initial responses and public condemnation of child abuse, but the system has then defaulted backward and even the changes that had been made were not all sustained.’’

Can we hope that this report might finally lead to a plugging of the gaps Poutasi identifies? Sadly, both history and the non-committal responses from Minister for Children Kelvin Davis mean we cannot be certain.

Finally, it also calls on us, as a community, to remember the ordinary boy at the centre of it all. ‘‘Malachi had a passion for dinosaurs – he could name them all, and tell you about their body parts and what they ate,’’ she writes. ‘‘He would be cross with you if you got this wrong. He was learning the te reo Ma¯ ori names of dinosaurs.’’

Opinion

en-nz

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281672553967476

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