A report from South Auckland – it is time to change the government

Written By: - Date published: 10:48 am, September 22nd, 2017 - 17 comments
Categories: class war, poverty - Tags: , , , , ,

Reason #4637 why we need to change the government – Midwife reprimanded after speaking out about abuse and neglect in South Auckland

Hart-Murray’s Facebook post explained that although she grew up in a low decile school in Tauranga and worked at a hospital in Vanuatu she was still shocked by what she saw while working for Middlemore Hospital.

Without naming anyone she described teenagers with “rickets, bronchiectasis from neglect, infections, damage from lifelong abuse and neglect, who have never had an education, have learning deficits because of it but also due to the environment to which they were subjected to in utero. Oh and they’re pregnant to their much older brother potentially, or their father, who knows.”

She wrote of the abuse of children from the time they were infants, middle-aged women born in New Zealand who needed interpreters because their parents were immigrants and they didn’t get an education, and a family of six who felt lucky their cousin was allowing them to stay in the single-car garage of the rundown state home he had just been given.

“Its old, cold, there’s no running water, rats and it’s mouldy,” Hart-Murray wrote of the garage. “The baby to come will sleep in the bed with the parents and three toddlers, unless I can find an alternative in time. At least the baby will be warm, but that’s not going to improve [the] atrocious rates of SUDI New Zealand has. It’s better than the relatives van in a dodgy carpark, where the parents take turns staying awake to protect them. [sic]”

Nine long years.

17 comments on “A report from South Auckland – it is time to change the government ”

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  1. WILD KATIPO 1
    22 September 2017 at 11:13 am

    And yet the eye witness accounts of abuse and deprivation and poverty keep piling up right up to the eve of the general election , … and STILL there are those voting for the ones , … who ultimately , …. had it within their power to do something about it but chose not to , instead ,… enabled and created the very conditions for these social ills to continue…

    • Matt 1.1
      22 September 2017 at 3:30 pm

      And one of them keeps going on about 50,000 magically coming out of poverty in April next year. So effectively if Nationals changes are going to do this aren’t they in the same breath admitting that they have failed to do anything for 9 years.

  2. Darth smith 2
    22 September 2017 at 12:00 pm

    Voted labour last night

    • tracey 2.1
      22 September 2017 at 1:12 pm

      Yay you!

    • patricia bremner 2.2
      22 September 2017 at 1:31 pm

      Well done!! For the many not the few.

      • Matt 2.2.1
        22 September 2017 at 3:32 pm

        Yip you shouldn’t be thinking of what you will be better off under but who the majority will be better off under. I will theoretically be worse off under labour but I’m willing to give up National’s bribe next year for a fairer more equitable society.

  3. Pete 3
    22 September 2017 at 12:18 pm

    ” … had it within their power to do something about it but chose not to , instead ,… enabled and created the very conditions for these social ills to continue…”

    A striking case of what you say, yet in some ways worse.

    John Banks was an MP in Whangarei for 18 years, 1981 -1999. For six years in that time he sat at the Cabinet table. From 2011-2014 he was back in Parliament and at The Table for most of that time.

    30 years after being an MP in the district he returned to Whangarei. He came back to say that Charter Schools were needed for young Māori. He didn’t say that the need conditions had created was his legacy for the North. He didn’t say he was the author of the need. He didn’t say his vision in the 80s ended up to be a nightmare all those years later. He didn’t come back to say he shat in our nest. He didn’t come back to say he was sorry. He came back to tell us there was the smell of shit and that was because WE had fucked up.

    And of course he came back to tell us, “Boy have I got the solution for you!” The Great White hunter came back North, sent by the Good Folk of the leafy suburb of Epsom, those most caring about the plight of the poor downtrodden brown people in the provinces, to work his magic.

    For all that we get to call him “the Honourable.”

  4. adam 4
    22 September 2017 at 12:30 pm

    This is the society we live in now, well represented in one news story.

    We reward those who lie, and punish those for telling the truth.

    • Zeroque 4.1
      22 September 2017 at 1:52 pm

      Under this Government, particularly in the last 2-3 years, I’ve noticed an increase in public sector employers’ sensitivity towards actions its employees may take that have the potential to embarrass Ministers or more generally may appear critical of the Govt. And it is particularly obvious in DHBs where most managers and CEOs are very careful to tow the party line publicly that everything’s alright, nothing to see here etc. Health workers in particular have had a gutsful of having more and more work pushed on to them because of deliberate and systematic underfunding, meanwhile their management don’t stand up and say it isn’t sustainable.

  5. Siobhan 5
    22 September 2017 at 1:44 pm

    ‘Oh and they’re pregnant to their much older brother potentially, or their father, who knows.”…hmm, tone is everything and to many that tone is very off.
    And if I was one of her clients I would be rather upset to read such a sweeping generalisation and flippant judgment.
    Once called out she has managed to frame her post as ‘concern’, but that’s not how it came across.

    “Staff members recognised the cases referred to in the post and Counties Manukau Health acted quickly to have the post removed.”

    • Carolyn_nth 5.1
      22 September 2017 at 1:49 pm

      Yes. The content of the post seemed to put too much emphasis on deficiencies of people in the communities, rather than the more significant dire circumstances many low income people in South Auckland live within – ie the buck stops with the government and state agencies.

  6. ianmac 6
    22 September 2017 at 5:50 pm

    Mike Smith on the Panel was very fluent tonight. He said he had been driving around the early polling booths. He was amazed at the numbers of people lining up to enrol. They were mostly polynesian. Maybe the missing voters are emerging.

    • Pete 6.1
      22 September 2017 at 6:33 pm

      I lined up for 15 minutes or so early afternoon. After I’d done the deed I came outside and the line was longer than when I’d entered. The booths in the area last time were very low polling for Labour.

    • ianmac 6.2
      22 September 2017 at 7:40 pm

      Oops meant Mike Williams who was really on form with the Michelle Boag. He was defending Dame Anne Salmond against a personal attack from Michelle.

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