A foster mum who defrauded the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) of more than $200,000 had a Once Were Warriors-type upbringing that involved her parents being jailed for homicide.

That upbringing, according to an affidavit, had left Bernadette Watene with a “life-long struggle of depression and anxiety” – but it wasn’t enough to stop the 54-year-old from being sent to jail when she appeared in court.

Watene’s deceit began on November 5, 2008, and involved her falsely declaring a multitude of benefits including domestic purposes, sickness, supported living payments, and jobseeker.

After being caught in August 2020, the department discovered she’d fraudulently received $221,103 in payments.

Today she appeared in the Hamilton District Court for sentencing on two charges of obtaining by deception and 44 of dishonestly using a document for pecuniary advantage.

Judge Noel Cocurullo had to decide whether he should send Watene, who currently has seven children, including a 10-week-old baby, in her care, to prison – or if a home detention sentence would suffice.

“It’s often said that benefit fraud is easy to do and difficult to detect,” the judge said.

“It’s also often said that offenders who come before the court with such long-term fraud fall into a trap of how easy it is to do and in the long term simply continue to do it because it’s easy to do or conversely seems difficult to extricate themselves from it.”

In Watene’s case, for part of the payments, just over $140,000, her partner was also charged, but the judge deemed them jointly responsible for the whole amount.

Once Were Warriors upbringing

Watene’s counsel Jared Bell said her client understood “what’s at stake here”.

After double-checking, at the judge’s request, what arrangements were in place for “the littlies” if she was jailed, Bell said Watene had organised for her ex-husband and adult children to care for them.

She had also provided an affidavit to the court, in lieu of a Section 27 cultural report, which is no longer funded, outlining her childhood.

It described a Once Were Warriors-type upbringing, which also involved her parents being jailed for the homicide of a young nephew.

That had left her with a “lifelong struggle of depression and anxiety”.

Despite only pleading guilty on the morning of her trial, Bell asked for a guilty plea discount as it still meant the witnesses didn’t have to give evidence.

He also pushed for a good character discount, as Watene effectively had a “lifetime of taking in children”, initially with her own relatives and then others.

Bell said Watene didn’t want other children to have the upbringing that she did.

“She has wanted to give young people the kind of home environment that she didn’t have,” he said.

Asked by the judge about reparation, Bell said she couldn’t pay a lump sum but was repaying it back, through the MSD, at $40 a week.

‘She is not of good character’

But Crown solicitor Lexie Glaser urged the judge not to issue any discounts for previous good character, given the length of offending, nor for her upbringing as there was no causal nexus, or link, to the benefit fraud.

“She has taken advantage of the benefit system for her own personal gain, which plainly demonstrates she is not of good character,” she said.

Glaser said Watene had also sold a business, and asked whether any lump sum payment would be made today, but Bell said that couldn’t happen.

Offending ‘wasn’t particularly sophisticated’

Judge Cocurullo said while her offending had stretched over a long time, he couldn’t look past the good she had done by taking on the care of many children over the years, “albeit with significant assistance from MSD”.

Her offending “wasn’t particularly sophisticated”, and after taking a starting point of 40 months, he agreed to give her a 5% discount for her late guilty plea.

He also agreed to a further 15% for her background, and another 15% for previous good character.

The judge came to an end point of 26 months’ jail, outside the two-year threshold for home detention consideration.

Watene was jailed for 26 months, but Judge Cocurullo told her that even if he did get to two years or below, her offending was so serious, he would have still sent her to jail.

Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for nine years and has been a journalist for 20.