The lack of a new redress system for survivors proves the royal commission of inquiry’s recommendations were pointless, argues Steve Goodlass.

It is a cruel irony that on the very day a US cardinal – implicated in covering up abuse – was elevated to Pope, the New Zealand state chose to entrench the status quo for children abused in its own care, while casting faith-abused survivors aside.

In appeals to the New Zealand Catholic clerics, I’ve often used the parable of the Good Samaritan to appeal to their supposed Christianity. It will not be lost on anyone that Jesus used it to illustrate an issue of his time where the religious (the priest), the Levite (in our case, the state) ignored the robbed and beaten traveller lying in the ditch by walking on by. The good Samaritan comes and assists the traveller. In the New Zealand context the Samaritan is whānau, other survivors, and the gangs that formed directly out of the abuse rendered by the state and faith-based institutions. The message of a 2,000-year-old parable plays out again today.

I’ve been critical of the Abuse in Care Inquiry in the past and still am as we experience the fallout of its failings. Last week, the government’s lead minister Erica Stanford announced that there would be no new compensation scheme for survivors, despite it being a recommendation from the inquiry and the prime minister hinting at it in his national apology in November.

In a wider context, this is just another example of how inquiries roll in New Zealand. A symbolic action for public appeasement, set up to fail by virtue of scope, commissioner selection, budget and in-process meddling because our inquiries are not independent at all.

If you haven’t watched the “The Stolen Children of Aotearoa” then you need to. Yes, it deals with the concept of colonisation for Māori, and in doing so it draws out the manipulation of the New Zealand public by our leaders.

Stanford continues to roll out her “no amount of redress could make up for what people experienced” talking point. It’s just a way of saying “we’ll give you the minimum we think we can get away with, we hold all the power, and we know that most of you are desperate for any assistance you can get”. Her talking point really is the most disgusting attempt at a justification for not doing the right thing.

Earlier in the week, Malcom Richards, a Lake Alice torture survivor, took another brave stand against the state by seeking a judicial review of the redress offered by the state. The United Nations is crystal clear on what redress for torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is.  What the state is offering is in absolute breach of its obligations to the convention. Similarly, the state continues to pigeonhole its torture redress to cover only survivors of the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit.

Ask a member of the public if $30k, $50k, $75k, or $150k is sufficient to put someone’s life back on track from the sexual abuse and beatings they suffered as a child. They’ll say no. Stanford says the government doesn’t have a model to follow so they’re making it up as they go and leading the world, apparently. That’s nothing but a diversionary statement.

The state could go to an actuary like the inquiry did, but they choose not to. They could apply the wrongful imprisonment model because at the end of the day, many survivors were taken from their family and “imprisoned”. This then firmly set them on the path to spend a lifetime in and out of the justice system. The justice statistics clearly illustrate this. The state chooses not to, but why? Do they think they’re protecting the public by denying abused children the right to fair redress while peppering cabinet papers with statements of “fiscal risk”? Can we not draw a direct line from our broad social problems back to the abuse of our children?

It comes down to reputations and reputation protection. How weak to risk a nation based on someone’s reputation. It’s again, ironic that in a the recent podcast “Keeping politicians honest” by Alexia Russell we hear that Helen Clarke, Anne Tolley and Chris Finlayson are all raising questions about state corruption. Yet their actions from 1999 to present day were conveniently “scoped out” of the inquiry and left to journalists like Aaron Smale to expose their part in this abuse crisis.

We could pull apart the redress package and the many ways in which it misses the intent of the inquiry’s recommendations and fails to deliver on Luxon’s promise at the public apology. However, the most deeply concerning actions are buried in some work recently completed by the Public Service Commission. Laura Walters wrote an important piece on it recently for Newsroom titled “State lets itself off the hook over public servants implicated in cover-up”. The Public Service Commission was tasked with delivering its verdict on the question of “personal accountability for public and state servants”. In the final, redacted report the Public Service Commission says the state is currently squeaky clean and has done all it can do regarding historical abuse in case. It’s a perfect example of the state’s use of “sleight of hand”.

Using the same old playbook, the report restricts the scope to the period of the inquiry (1950 to 1999) and excludes any ministers of the crown. It’s full of statements like “Where it has been possible to identify individuals whose adverse conduct is described in the report, most are either deceased or no longer working as public or state servants. These individuals are outside of the scope of this work.”

The Commission used the inquiries lack of detail (failing to name officials in their sparse final report despite having the source documents in front of them) to justify the impossibility of their task to uncover who was involved in cover up x, y, z. I guess they didn’t want to read Joel McManus “A long list of ministers and leaders found at fault for allowing abuse in care” where he meticulously teases out the names that the inquiry decided not to publish.

Instead, the report limply concludes: “We committed to report back to you on the feasibility of identifying any current public or state servants for accountability purposes from allegations of cover-ups referenced in the final RCOI report. Our view is that proactive work in this space is not feasible.”

Criminal actions that would fall into the realms of “accessory after the fact” and “perverting the course of justice” are referred to as if they would be employment matters. The report notes that the abuse in care inquiry made 110 referrals to the police, 86 of which have been closed due to insufficient evidence. Three resulted in prosecutions and none of those were state employees. The police “cannot advise how many referrals they have received from other agencies or how those issues were resolved as this is not recorded centrally”.

This illustrates a common theme of the document which is “we don’t have the information to hand”, “we don’t have the systems to collect that, see that, do that etc”. Yet they were provided the mountains of documentation upon which the inquiry made its findings. The conclusion is peppered with assurances that all systems, going forward, are fit for purpose and monitoring is in place etc, etc, etc.

As a survivor, this report and the actions of the government around redress are soul destroying. There has been no accountability, there is not a system for accountability and all the work and trauma we’ve experienced over the last many years seems to count for nought.