The Social Investment Agency’s new Social Investment Fund is being promoted as early support for children who are considered vulnerable. The model identifies three groups of tamariki: those with a parent in prison, those who have been in state care, and those who have been suspended or excluded from school by age twelve. These categories are presented as neutral markers of risk. They are simply the statistical footprints of colonisation and institutional violence. What is being offered as prevention is built on decades of harm the state inflicted and now uses to justify new predictive tools.
Across all of my research the same pattern repeats. In the Takatāpui, Rainbow and MVPFAFF+ Survivor Report, in He Whare, He Taonga, in Hauraki Māori Weathering Cyclone Gabrielle, and in the Gang Whānau Healing project, the deepest harms came not from whānau but from state institutions. These projects span different communities and contexts, but they tell one story. Participants described abuse in foster care, racism in schooling, over-policing, removal, and social service intervention that destabilised rather than strengthened their lives. These experiences are fed into data systems that convert trauma into risk. The state treats being harmed by its own institutions as proof that Māori parents cannot be trusted. This is the logic driving the Social Investment Fund.
Hāhā-uri, Hāhā-tea (2021) documented how Pākehā measures of acceptable parenting shaped child welfare for decades. Whāngai was dismissed as unstable. Whānau-based caregiving structures were misread as chaotic. Multigenerational homes were treated as dangerous. Māori children were removed because institutions could not understand Māori relationships. The practices behind these decisions have not changed. Only the vocabulary has. Predictive risk modelling is framed as science, but it is built on the same colonial assumptions.
Before turning to the policy itself, it is important to ground how these ideas are being discussed publicly. The Waikato Tainui Social Investment Summit I attended last Friday, offered a clear window into the assumptions behind this model. It showed how the language of innovation is being used to position Māori as subjects of analysis rather than as people with authority, belonging and whakapapa. What was said in that room matters because it shapes how these tools are built and how the public learns to understand Māori parenting.
Professor Rhema Vaithianathan was the first presenter. She discussed her work in predictive risk modelling and highlighted a project in the United States that she described as successful for Indigenous and Black families. The tone suggested that the lessons from that context could be transferred to ours. More than a decade earlier, in 2014, I told her directly that predictive risk modelling harms Māori because it embeds Pākehā norms as universal standards. It treats deviation from those norms as evidence of deficit. The assumptions behind these systems have not changed. The models still classify Māori through a colonial lens shaped by policing, schooling and child protection data. None of that data is neutral.
I stood again in 2025 to tell her, “We are not the United States. We are Aotearoa. We are Māori.”
I said it because her presentation treated the American model as if it could simply be laid over our people without acknowledging our distinct histories. American experiences of state violence are not the same as Māori experiences of colonisation, child removal and policing in Aotearoa. Treating these contexts as interchangeable erases the realities of our own whenua and our own survival.
Later, Minister Nicola Willis spoke to us in her suck-eggs style and affirmed the Social Investment Fund as evidence-based innovation. Her framing positioned these models as tools of support rather than mechanisms that categorise and monitor Māori. The language stayed tidy and managerial, with no acknowledgement of how these tools land in the lives of whānau Māori. She poured over us, her privilege, her supremacy, and her ability to “fix” our people.
I stood again and said across the room of two hundred people, “We are not your data. We are not your cohort. We are not your guinea pigs. We are Māori.”
I used the word “we” because each of the presenters referred to the survivors of state care and prison cohort, as if those experiences defined us. We were presented as problems to test ideas on rather than parents raising children with care and strength. Their language reduced our whānau to units of analysis and erased the evidence that many survivors grow into protective, grounded parents whose care is shaped by whakapapa and lived experience, not by deficit.
Behind every statistic are whānau who know exactly what it means to be treated as data. The assumptions behind these state framings shape public understandings of Māori parenting. When Māori make up 67 percent of children in state care, the state treats that figure as proof of Māori failure rather than the result of structural racism in reporting and intervention. When 75 percent of young people in youth justice custody are Māori, the state ignores school discipline practices that suspend Māori nearly 50 percent more often than Pākehā. When wāhine Māori make up 62 percent of the women’s prison population, the state treats it as individual responsibility rather than evidence of targeted policing. If non-Māori imprisonment rates applied, fewer than 650 Māori would be in prison. Instead, there are more than 4,000. These figures are repeatedly used to justify more intervention, but they reflect institutional violence, not parental incapacity.
My research with gang whānau makes this unmistakable. Between 80 and 90 percent of participants had been in state care as children. That was not because their parents failed. It was because the state removed them. As adults, many were steady, protective parents building homes grounded in whakapapa and cultural connection. They were supporting their whānau through the hardest parts of life. Yet Police and Oranga Tamariki subjected them to intensive surveillance. Their own childhood trauma was used as evidence that their children were unsafe. Officers sat outside their homes. Social workers arrived without notice. Every minor injury became a file note. The monitoring drained their time, energy and capacity to do the healing work they were already doing within their gang whānau. Some of these women lost children to state care based on assumptions, and many of those children were harmed in care.
Leadership across state agencies reinforces this climate. Police Commissioner Andrew Coster stands side by side with Oranga Tamariki management as if united in child safety. In the Waikato region, the OT regional manager leading investigations into gang whānau is a former police officer who has held the role for less than a year. Meanwhile Coster leads the Social Investment Agency, overseeing the very models that target Māori. At the same time, he is under investigation for his involvement in covering up a colleague’s sexual assault of a young woman and the presence of child exploitation material on that colleague’s work computer. These realities are not hidden from the women in our research. They know what hypocrisy looks like. They know the standards placed on them are not the standards applied within the institutions that judge them.
The messages delivered to Māori parents through these systems are consistent. You are suspect. You are watched. Your survival does not matter. To tamariki Māori, the message lands even harder. Their whakapapa is treated as risk. Their identity is read as a warning sign. They are assessed before they have lived. This is a harm that cuts across generations.
Yet the evidence across our projects shows something entirely different. Whānau support is the strongest protective factor for Takatāpui and MVPFAFF+ communities. Community-controlled services consistently outperform state agencies. Housing discrimination, not Māori parenting, drives instability. Whānau-led responses to disaster save lives while state agencies often arrive late. Ninety-two percent of Māori youth in youth justice have earlier care and protection reports, not because they were dangerous but because state care often produced further harm.
Our tamariki do not wait for the state to decide their worth. They are of this whenua. They carry their ancestors with them. Their safety and identity come from relationships that stretch across generations. The danger here is not that they miss out on something the state might choose to offer. The danger is that the state continues to disconnect them from what they already hold, and have always held, through whakapapa.
A survivor in our report said, “Putting it right starts with a genuine apology. You only know it is genuine when behaviour changes.” There is no genuine apology in the Social Investment Fund. There is no shift in power. Only a new vocabulary for the same systems of control.
Another survivor told us, “We need to stop putting our children in places to live with strangers.” That remains the foundation. Our tamariki are not future outcomes to be managed. They are part of a history that has survived every form of state intrusion. They will continue to survive because their relationships are older than any government. The role of the state is not to determine their potential. It is to stop causing harm.
This work is about accountability, not about innovation. The Social Investment Agency protects the state from facing its own violence. It does not protect the children it claims to care about. Our focus must remain on the strength of whānau, the authority of communities and the continuation of whakapapa that has carried us across generations and will continue to carry us long after these policies are gone.
POUHINE 