Jo Moir
Political editor
Analysis:
“How on earth can this happen in New Zealand?”
Anyone
who read Tuesday’s final report into the almost four-year
disappearance of Tom Phillips and his children would have
been asking just that while “shaking their head”, according
to the minister in charge of the inquiry Louise
Upston.
Police Commissioner Richard Chambers and
Oranga Tamariki (OT) chief executive Amanda Malu repeatedly
referred to the failures and mistakes rife in the report as
“missed opportunities” and both confessed they had not
offered their resignation, nor had anyone in their
respective agencies been held accountable for the harm’s way
Phillips’ three children were put in.
The report did
not hold back on those agencies the public naturally looks
to keep some of our youngest and most vulnerable
safe.
Not only did it say the concerns of maternal
whanau of the children were “minimised or overlooked by
agencies for significant periods” but it even went as far as
to say a more collaborative approach from OT and NZ Police
“could have prevented the children’s disappearance and
brought them back sooner”.
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Some
of the specific findings and events are a grim and bleak
read, such as the woman who had Phillips in her car in May
2023, took a photograph of him, sighted his children, and
called police – but they never came.
Despite police
being dispatched, they were diverted to a family harm
incident before they got there and later recorded the
initial callout as ‘no further action required’.
To
this day, police have been unable to explain to the inquiry
why the callout was designated as not needing any
follow-up.
Then in November 2023, a decision was made
to downsize the core investigation team to just three
people, despite the children still being unaccounted
for.
On
Tuesday, Chambers said at that point more resources could
have been put into the search, but in the same breath he
said, “there’s no doubt over the course of the four years we
threw everything at this”.
Both of those things can
not be true.
Chambers was appointed into the top job
about 10 months before Phillips died in a shootout with
police, after they were called to reports of a burglary in
the early hours of 8 September 2025.
Both he and
Police Minister Mark Mitchell had spoken publicly on many
occasions about the need to find the children safely, and
arrest Phillips.
Many meetings were had over that
period, and decisions were being made all the time about how
to conduct the search.
Yet an Independent
Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) report in August was
critical of the communication between police leadership and
the officers on the ground in the lead-up to Phillips being
shot.
It found one of the local officers making
judgement calls about how to pursue Phillips and one of his
children – who had been spotted breaking into a warehouse
before taking off on a quad bike – had to ask the senior
commander on shift what the plan was three times before
getting a response.
Separate to that, despite a
communications plan being prepared about how to arrest
Phillips if he was sighted, it was never communicated to
police comms staff or passed onto officers on the ground who
were most likely to encounter Phillips.
Those failures
were on Chambers’ watch and don’t marry with assurances from
the commissioner and the minister they were prioritising
finding Phillips and getting the children out of the bush
safely.
Oranga Tamariki also came up short on many
occasions over the years with one of the most damning
findings in Tuesday’s report being the agency’s failure to
pass on warnings from the children’s mother and older
siblings.
Indeed, it did not even read an affidavit
from one of the sisters that outlined serious
concerns.
On Tuesday, Upston told RNZ the ministry had
already done significant work ahead of the report’s release
to “improve the safety and wellbeing of children” and
insisted change was already underway.
If that was the
case, it seems unbelievable Malu oversees a ministry that as
recently as March this year had staff watch
as a teenager was hit and slapped by his peers as he left a
youth residence under OT’s care.
Even worse, staff
not only watched and seemingly condoned the physical assault
ritual known as ‘walking the line’, but failed to even
report it.
This is the same agency that just hours
later its boss was insisting was doing everything it could
to protect children in its care.
What is clear from
Tuesday’s events is that both NZ Police and Oranga Tamariki
have systemic issues that still need to be resolved and
people in positions of power who are prepared to tell the
public one thing while doing another.
For all the
mistakes however, Chambers and Malu should be credited for
fronting up when it mattered.
The same can’t be said
for the prime minister, who didn’t attend the press
conference following the report’s release and didn’t make
himself available to reporters afterwards to show leadership
on such a bleak
day.
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