Larry Williams Drive

Right, I'm going to tell you a story that makes me incredibly sad. And I want to know whether you think we’re doing things right in this country. Today, the family of Moana have announced they’re going to give her up because fighting to keep her is too stressful. Moana is a little girl, about seven or eight years old. Authorities took her away from her mum when she was three and placed her with a foster family in Hawke’s Bay. She'd already been taken away from her mum three times. She showed signs of sexual abuse, she flinched at the sight of men, she had rotten teeth and an untreated club foot. The foster family took her and raised her and she was then described as a happy, healthy, stable, young girl living in a loving relationship where for the first time she had a father. But then Oranga Tamariki, aka CYFS tried to take Moana away from her foster family because her foster parents are Pakeha and she is Māori and Oranga Tamariki didn’t think her foster family could provide her ‘cultural needs’. Legally they