Source: Radio New Zealand
Youth on the roof of Korowai Manaaki in December 2024. Peter de Graaf/RNZ
The headlines were grim across 2023 and 2024: ‘Video of MMA-style fighting in youth justice facility‘, ‘Youths climb onto roof‘, ‘Four staff stood down from youth justice unit’, ‘Prison napalm mixture thrown at teenager’, ‘Staff smuggling in contraband‘.
Investigators gave Oranga Tamariki (OT) three years to turn things around at its biggest secure home for teenagers, Korowai Maaaki in south Auckland.
It even called in prison inspectors last year to get their help.
OT says it is on track.
But documents released to RNZ showed that as late as last November, the child protection ministry had had to hit the reset button yet again and was telling the government, “It has been difficult to create long-lasting change”.
The three years is up soon, in September 2026.
Sixty pages of internal documents chart the tug-of-war in plan after plan to try to embed changes to make the 40 or so children in the home safer, including using funding from Budget 2025.
“Previous action plans have brought in new leadership with the capability to demonstrate the required standard, which has often created an uplift, but residential practice, operations and culture have eventually reverted,” Childrens’ Minister Karen Chhour was told last September.
Work on recruitment and better standards had gone on but “in the case of Korowai Manaaki these actions are not driving change at the speed or depth that we want to see”.
A youth throws an object from the roof of Korowai Manaaki in December 2024. Peter de Graaf/RNZ
‘An environment where abuse occurs’
Early this month, the watchdog Independent Children’s Monitor put out its report for 2024-25 saying, “As we reported last year, multiple recent reports, including from Oranga Tamariki itself, highlight the safety issues in residences.
“We visited four of the five youth justice residences. We found that the underlying culture, including poorly trained staff and unstructured programmes, contributes to an environment where abuse occurs.
“Most of the abuse we heard about in our regional engagements happened in youth justice residences.”
It quoted a rangatahi saying: “Staff are inconsistent. Secure is horrible.”
On the plus side, access to healthcare was reported to be good, grievances were down 28 percent – and were not focused on Korowai Manaaki but on a residence at Burnham – and all the homes had youth councils to give the teenagers a voice.
‘A sprint due to the urgent care’
However, the south Auckland home’s problems have proved fairly untractable, the Official Information Act papers showed.
In the last year it has had the prison inspectors’ visit and two fast-tracked improvement programmes, one after the other, the last one described by the agency as “a sprint due to the urgent care the residence needs today”.
The origins of this were poor performance reports dating to at least 2020.
That led to the $85,000 rapid review by former police commissioner Mike Bush in September 2023 – a year when boys had got up on the home’s roof 15 times – which set the three-year turnaround target that ends in a few months.
Former police commissioner Mike Bush. RNZ / Ana Tovey
Late 2023 also saw 28 complaints over staff conduct to police, charges and 22 staff dismissed. Allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour surfaced; some staff were said to be just too close to the teenagers.
Independent inspectors emerged from a surprise swoop in February 2024 saying contraband smuggling and physical handling of teenagers were problems.
They were told by staff the home had a “corrupt” operating environment.
After some roof invasions, it turned to the boot camp pilot for help. The papers said it aimed to “apply lessons from Military-Style Academy Pilot” to address the rooftop incidents.
Later in 2024, secure youth residences like Korowai Manaaki – which was the largest of five and housed the oldest teens – became a focus for a new child protection unit set up by OT as a key response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in state care.
This unit said it would visit a secure home. It is not known if it has. The unit had not published any reports and OT told RNZ on Friday it would not make the unit’s reports public.
Accelerated action
By January 2025, the agency was busy categorising 134 recommendations over three years about how to make its youth justice residences better and safer.
So it launched an Accelerated Action Plan at Korowai Manaaki.
By March it had turned to the prisons for experience. Police Minister Mark Mitchell had asked how the Chief Inspector’s experience could be used.
While the inspectorate went on to recommend the various homes set standards for inspections, and ways to review complaints, it was not volunteering in that space.
“Oranga Tamariki and the Chief Inspector do not believe there is any value to the Inspectorate also gaining a mandate to conduct inspections or investigations of Oranga Tamariki secure residences, which would necessitate legislative amendments,” said a March 2025 report to Chhour.
Minister for Children Karen Chhour. RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The Prisons Inspectorate has no mandate over youth homes, but was invited in in mid-2025 to come up with ideas.
The inspectors found what a procession of other reviewers had found: recruitment and retention problems so that staff lacked experience, teenagers harming other teens, a ‘secure care unit’ in poor condition and “contraband issues”, among other things.
“They also noted pockets of good practice at the residence, such as good leadership visibility,” said a short report back.
At this point OT had just one year left of the three-year fixit period.
‘Embedding well’
The Inspector’s visit segued into a ‘Reset Plan’ that ran for three months to November 2025.
The home had “ongoing challenges which need to be addressed. Gaps in residential practice and workplace culture increase the level of operational risk at the residence. To address this risk, direct action and clear leadership is needed”, deputy chief executives reported on 11 November.
In December a log list of Reset work completed laid out to Chhour: over 750 staff training sessions – at one point it closed one of its five units so it could do training – two successful rounds of recruitment and stronger systems that had cut down on contraband. Parts of the home were getting painted and new windows.
Staff were stabilising: unplanned absences had dropped 40 percent and long-term leave which was very high had been cut in half, she heard. “Return-to-work support has been a key contributor to these improvements.
“The Reset has delivered tangible improvements in safety, culture, and operational stability, underpinned by strong leadership presence and investment in staff capability. Positive trends across all key metrics indicate that changes are embedding well,” it told the minister.
Three months later the agency told RNZ its youth justice leaders were “monitoring how well the improvements at the residence are embedding, to ensure that the change created by the Reset Plan is sustained”.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
