“There for the grace of God goes I.”

We generally say it when something bad and we know that it could just as easily happen to us, and anyone who is a parent should say that whenever they hear nightmare stories about kids being abused by their parents or caregivers.

I say that not just as a by-stander looking on. I say that as someone with three kids —all grown up now— but someone who has raised three kids and I know just as well as the next parent how much that can drive you to despair at times.

Which is why it is so important to remember that it’s not just the no-hopers who end up with Oranga Tamariki knocking on the door.

The child welfare agency’s clientele runs the full range of society, including those so-called respectable middle-class and upper-class families.

And I’m willing to bet that the reason some of them are in strife with OT is that they just can't cope. Or, more to the point, don’t know how to cope.

And until we realise that just banging-on about OT being useless isn't the only route we should be going down, then nothing’s going to change.

I am not saying we shouldn’t be criticising OT when they get things wrong. Which is what the Chief Ombudsman is doing —again— after what he says was “a series of failures” which meant Oranga Tamariki didn’t do what it should’ve done when it received multiple complaints about pre-school and primary school-aged kids being abused by their mother’s partner.

Peter Boshier is slamming OT, saying it even had photographic evidence of abuse but didn’t do enough to ascertain what was going on and, as a result, left the kids in serious risk.

So it’s only right that the Ombudsman calls them out like this. But, even if OT turned itself into a gold-plated example of a child welfare agency, that still wouldn’t be enough.

Because I’m willing to bet that some of these people who end up being investigated by Oranga Tamariki —not all of them— but I bet some of them, only come to OT’s attention because they just don’t know how to cope. Especially when it comes to coping with a crying baby.

Which is what Dame Lesley Max, who runs the Great Potentials Foundation, is talking about when she says we should be teaching kids about parenthood when they're at school.

Of course, chances are your so-called “family values” people would be dead against teaching kids how to be parents at high school, you know: “Aww, that’ll just encourage them to go out and get pregnant.” All that nonsense.

But I agree with Dame Lesley, why aren’t we teaching kids how to do what is the most important job in the world?

Maths and science isn’t going to help you in the middle of the night, when you’ve got a baby that’s been crying all day and all night and you’re at the end of your tether.

Geography isn’t going to help you then, nor are media studies, yet that’s what we do. And we wonder why most of us are nowhere near ready to be parents.

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John MacDonald was joined by National’s Hamish Campbell and Labour’s Reuben Davidson for Politics Friday.

On the agenda today was yet another case of Oranga Tamariki failing to act on information pertaining to child welfare – is it time to start parenting courses to help with the stress of raising children?

A petition has launched, looking at banning the private sale and use of fireworks. Has their time in the publics' hands come and gone?

And the Government is considering performance-based pay for public sector bosses – does this idea have merit?

LISTEN ABOVE

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I feel really uncomfortable about the idea of public sector bosses getting performance pay.

Not that the Government is going to care too much about that, because it’s confirmed that, from the middle of next year, that’s what’s going to be happening.

It’s unclear to me at this stage whether it’s going to mean the heads of all our government departments are going to have some of their salaries earmarked in a category which is known in the HR game as “at-risk”. Which means some of your pay you’re not guaranteed to get unless you meet certain performance measures.

The big-hitting chief executives in the private sector have these “at-risk” clauses. People like the head of ANZ, Antonia Watson, who fronted up to a parliamentary select committee yesterday and was asked how much she gets paid. And she told them it’s around $2 million a year.

I’m more than happy for her and all her other private sector chief executive colleagues to be getting bonuses and extra pay for doing what’s required of them and doing it well, but I’m certainly not happy for the people in charge of social welfare, education, health —all of the essential public services— getting bonuses.

And the reason for that is that public services can’t be pigeonholed like private operations can.

If a private business is losing money on something, they can pull the pin. Easy. You can’t be so knee jerk when you’re running a public service.

Because, generally, when a private business is losing money on something it’s because there’s less or no demand for what they provide. So you stop doing it.

If you’re running the social welfare department, though, or health, you lose money hand over fist, but you can’t do much about it because —despite the fact you're chewing through the money— demand is always going to be through the roof.

It’s the complete opposite of what happens in the private sector.

The Government’s bringing back performance pay for public sector bosses after the former government got rid of it back in 2018.

Chris Hipkins was the State Services Minister back then, and he got rid of the performance pay and bonuses because he wanted to put a bit of a handbrake on the pay pockets for the heads of government departments, which seemed to just be going up and up and up at the time.

And I remember before then, you had politicians saying that performance pay was needed to make sure the public sector could attract the best people to run all the government departments.

What they meant, of course, was that they needed to compete with the private sector and so they had to offer the same kinds of sweeteners.

But I think we can agree that that hasn't necessarily been the best thing, and that someone who is a brilliant private sector chief executive doesn't necessarily make a brilliant public sector chief executive. And vice versa.

Where I see problems with performance pay in the public sector is it will create tension and division. In fact, it will be worse than that. It will mean we see less genuine leadership in our government departments and more government puppets running the show.

I’m not saying that a government department or agency should be run independently from the wants and expectations of the government of the day, it would be naïve to even suggest that.

But if you’ve got the head of a government department being told that they’ll get a bonus if they do this or do that, or achieve this or achieve that, then their sole focus is going to be on pleasing the Minister.

They’re not going to advocate on behalf of the people who work for them, they're not going to rock the boat. They’re not going to be the type of leader that I think we need in the public sector.

They’ll be even more “yes people” types than they are at the moment because they’ll know that, if they aren’t, the bonus won’t be coming.

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