What is best for the child?
That is the primary - some say the only - question that needs to be asked when it comes to assessing the wellbeing of a young New Zealander and whether state intervention is required.
It seems like such an easy question to answer. If a child is better off being removed from a home or a family, for any serious welfare concern, so be it. State care does not have a glorious history, it must be acknowledged, but when the alternative is a life of misery or squalor, when a child's life could be significantly endangered, there are sometimes no compelling alternatives.
Realistically, though, this is not an issue with easy answers. It is complicated, with large areas of greyness, despite every adult's desire to see it in black and white.
So it is with the ongoing story of Oranga Tamariki's attempt to remove a week-old baby from a young mother in Hawke's Bay Hospital, and the intensive aftermath of that incident.
Oranga Tamariki says it acted in good faith, and only after working with the mother for several months before the birth. It had serious concerns about domestic violence and drug use in the wider family.
In the other corner, local iwi Ngati Kahungunu has come out swinging, vowing to stop the ministry taking any more of its youngsters, while an activist group called Hands Off Our Tamariki has collected 12,500 signatures on a petition asking the Government to "stop stealing Maori children", illustrating how tense the situation has become.
The incident is now the subject of three reviews: the Ombudsman is looking into the overall process of "uplifting" children from families; Oranga Tamariki is running its own investigation into the Hawke's Bay case; and the Children's Commissioner, Judge Andrew Becroft, has a review focusing on the treatment of Maori newborns following his declaration that "the community as a whole is profoundly uneasy with the way our current care and protection of tamariki Maori is carried out."
It would be easy to jump to the predictable conclusion that a heartless, rigid state department has made a mess of looking after the most vulnerable members of our society.
"Uplifted" is indeed such a cold word, evoking images of stony-faced civil servants marching into homes, ignoring the teary pleas of ordinary New Zealanders and ripping children from their cots, only to plonk them into a series of ill-fitting living arrangements.
Certainly, the scenes of the young mother in the Newsroom footage trying to stop her baby being taken off her are harrowing. And, the disproportionate number of Maori babies being taken into state care is alarming, suggesting an implicit bias in the system.
Beng taken away from their family is a traumatic event for children - even if home life is dangerously unsuitable, it might be the only life they have known - and there are clear links between state care and criminal behaviour, abuse and poverty.
A note of caution, though. It seems like we only hear the bad stories - either the failure of the State to protect children like James Whakaruru and Nia Glassie, or its alleged heavy-handedness in cases where support, understanding and education would have been preferable to a child's removal.
What about the many cases where the State did the right thing? How many hundreds of children have been saved from a miserable life of neglect and pain?
Oranga Tamariki says it has worked hard in recent years to implement a caring, comprehensive system for protecting our youngsters. It has given assurances that decisons to remove children are never made by a single person, and never done without genuine concern for the child.
New Zealand, as we know, has a truly shameful level of child abuse. In-fighting between ministries and iwi and social workers will do little to address that.
It's about the child. All that matters is what is best for the child.
