First Reading: Redress System for Abuse in Care Bill

The following contribution was made in the first reading of the bill.

This bill is a betrayal of survivors, plain and simple. It weaponises redress and turns what should have been healing into another form of punishment. It says that some survivors deserve compassion and others do not. That is not justice; that is control. The abuser has no grounds to criminalise the survivors for their abuse—the State’s abuse—and deny them redress. Those who survived the violence of State- and faith-based care know this truth. The system broke them long before any laws were broken. Many of those convictions were born out of the trauma inflicted by the very institutions this bill now seeks to protect. To deny redress on that basis is to deny responsibility for the harm that the Crown and the Church caused in the first place.

The Government says it wants to prevent the redress system from being brought into disrepute, but it was the State and its agents who shamed this country; not the survivors. The disrepute lies in decades of silence, denial, and delay by consecutive Governments and their agencies. Let’s be clear: this bill breaches the most basic principles of human rights and natural justice. It discriminates against a class of survivor based on their criminal record, punishing them twice for a system that failed them first. It undermines Aotearoa’s obligation under international human rights law, including the convention against torture and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which require the State to provide redress to all victims of institutional abuse, without discrimination.

Survivors have spent years fighting for truth, for acknowledgment, for redress that restores dignity; this bill strips that away. It is not what survivors have fought for. It’s not what was promised. It is not justice; it is re-traumatisation sanctioned by legislation. The path to healing does not come from exclusion or moral judgment; it comes from accountability, compassion, and courage. The bill lacks all three. Parliament must reject it and, instead, return to a redress model designed with and for survivors, one grounded in equity, dignity, and justice. Instead of confronting that history, this Government has chosen to re-write it, to draw a line through the names of the very people it failed first. One in three children placed in residential care by the State ends up in prison later in life. That number is 42 percent for mokopuna Māori. Māori account for 67 percent of the children in State care and 81 percent of those who were abused in those institutions. These are the people who are now being excluded by this bill.

Te Pāti Māori affirm our commitment to the survivors, ki ngā mōrehu, and to our mokopuna who are currently incarcerated by the State. We will implement the 81 of the 183 recommendations from the Whanaketia report. We will end the State care of mokopuna Māori. We will establish an independent mokopuna Māori authority, co-designed by survivors. We will empower the rights of mokopuna. The right to care for, love, and grow mokopuna Māori must be reclaimed by whānau Māori to enable genuine healing to begin.