The Social Investment Agency’s (SIA) “priority” focus reads like prevention, but it recycles predictive risk modelling that profiles tamariki Māori and care experienced whānau. Our research shows the state ignores its own violence while using that harm to justify new surveillance.
“I don’t think anyone should have the power to make decisions about children who they don’t love.” Takatāpui, Rainbow and MVPFAFF+ Survivor Report, 2023
The Social Investment Agency says its first Social Investment Fund round will focus on three “priority” groups of tamariki: 1. those with a parent in prison, 2. those who have been in state care, and those suspended from school by age 12. It is framed as prevention. In reality, it is the same model of labelling, surveillance, and pathologising our whānau. It scales Māori and care experienced families by their history, not their present, then calls the results evidence.
Predictive risk modelling by another name
This is predictive risk modelling in soft language. Historic data is pushed through algorithms that scorecard whānau against a white, middle-class norm. Any deviation is scored as risk. For Māori, whose caregiving sits in whakapapa, whenua, and tikanga, the model is wired to fail.
I worked as a social worker for many years. I saw how the system targets. Risk assessments were predictive risk models dressed as neutrality. Everything was measured against a Pākehā idea of safety and stability. Being Māori was treated as a deficit. It fed white saviour thinking that assumed Māori children were better off with strangers, and it decimated many whānau.
None of this is new. Hāhā-uri, Hāhā-tea, Māori Involvement in State Care 1950 to 1999 showed how state definitions of “good parenting” were set against Pākehā norms. Māori practices like whāngai didn’t fit Pākehā nuclear family models. That logic powered mass removal of Māori children for decades. Today’s modelling repeats the same pattern with new tech. The vocabulary changed. The bias did not.
All of our research, from Takatāpui, Rainbow and MVPFAFF+, to Gang Whānau Healing, to He Whare, He Taonga, to Hauraki Māori Weathering Cyclone Gabrielle, documents the societal violence and institutional abuse survivors endured at the hands of the state. Yet the SIA proposal gives little attention to this history and avoids examining the state’s role in creating the trauma it now uses to justify profiling and surveillance.
Why Māori are still the target
The state’s own numbers show who gets caught.
67% of children in state care are Māori. 75% of those in youth justice custody are Māori. More than 80 in every 1,000 tamariki Māori are reported to Oranga Tamariki each year, compared with 24 per 1,000 non-Māori.
Māori students are nearly 50% more likely to be stood down or excluded than Pākehā students, even after controlling for poverty and background.
Māori are 52% of the prison population. Wāhine Māori face the worst outcomes, making up 62% of women in prison while being a small fraction of the population. If non-Māori imprisonment rates applied, there would be fewer than 650 Māori in prison. There are over 4,000.
This is a pipeline: disproportionate school discipline, disproportionate care involvement, disproportionate custody. SIA now uses those same categories to target the next generation.
The evidence they ignore
In our Gang Whānau Healing Intergenerational Trauma, 2023 mahi, 80 to 90% of participants had been in state care as children. Many were building strong families and turning their lives around, but the system kept treating them like threats.
In He Whare, He Taonga, 2024, wāhine described housing discrimination that misread cultural norms. Multigenerational living was called overcrowding. Long waitlists caused preventable harm for tamariki. The system forced wāhine Māori to carry the full weight of protecting their children from violence while threatening to remove those children if they failed to do it alone.
In the Takatāpui, Rainbow and MVPFAFF+ Survivor Report, 2023, whānau support was the single strongest protective factor. Identity affirmation reduced distress and risk. Community controlled services outperformed state intervention.
92% of young Māori in youth justice had earlier care and protection reports. Being in state care is linked to higher odds of prison, emergency housing, unemployment, and suicidality, not to safety or wellbeing. The contradiction is obvious. SIA wants to target the very communities that do best with whānau-led support and do worst under surveillance.
What this says to tamariki and whānau
To tamariki and rangatahi in these groups, the message lands like a sentence. Your identity makes you dangerous. We expect you to be damaged. You are a problem to be managed. You are not recipients of support but test subjects for interventions and data sharing. This harm of being labelled “at risk” from birth violates whakapapa connections and pathologises collective identity.
To survivor parents, the message is the old one. We still do not trust you. Your survival does not count. We are not sorry. The abuse the state inflicted on you is now evidence against you.
The silence problem
Most providers will not comment because funding is attached. Silence is not neutral. Silence is consent. The cost is another generation of Māori tamariki growing up under suspicion. As one survivor said in the Takatāpui, Rainbow and MVPFAFF+ Survivor Report, 2023, “putting it right starts with a genuine apology. You only know it is genuine when behaviour changes.”
What the state claims and what it really means
The state will say this is about “helping vulnerable children.” They will frame it as an investment in better outcomes. But that framing ignores four truths.
First, they are targeting data, not cause. Tamariki are overrepresented in care and youth justice not because they are inherently at risk, but because the state created that risk through colonisation, systemic racism, and decades of institutional violence.
Second, the “support” being offered is conditional, monitored, and delivered through a lens of risk. It often feels like surveillance dressed as care.
Third, these models bypass the whānau and communities who have always carried the solutions. They place tamariki under the microscope instead of resourcing whakapapa-based networks of protection, healing, and identity.
And fourth, the state avoids acknowledging the role it has played in producing harm. There is no serious attempt to address past abuse, issue genuine redress, or restructure power. Instead, it profiles and pathologises the next generation.
What real protection looks like
Real protection does not come from profiling. Return the illegal photos you took of our rangatahi. Strengthen whānau universally and do not gate resources behind labels. Fund community-controlled services long term. Back survivor-led design and delivery. Address racism, poverty, and housing inequality at a system level.
Changing the label to early intervention, or adding phrases like “child-led outcomes,” does not change who holds the power or whose norms the model serves.
Closing call
“We have just got to stop. We need to stop putting our children in places to live with strangers to be looked after.” Takatāpui, Rainbow and MVPFAFF+ Survivor Report, 2023.
The SIA proposal is not child protection. It is state protection. It protects the system from accountability and from real change. Our tamariki are still used as fodder. Our tamariki deserve more than to be profiled because of who their parents are. They deserve whānau who are supported, communities that are resourced, and a state that finally takes responsibility for the harm it has caused.
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