Source: ACT Party
The Haps
Parliament returns from a three-week recess, to sit for three weeks. ACT’s MPs went on tour to hear from real New Zealanders, travelling from Southland to the Bay of Plenty over two weeks. The Māori wards legislation also returns to Parliament, set to be debated after select committee. However, the week will be dominated by the release of the Royal Commission into Abuse in State Care report.
Industrial Scale Abuse and the God that Failed
New Zealanders face enough problems, between the economy, ongoing crime, broken health and education systems, and a choppy geopolitical environment. This week will add another issue at the worst possible time, but one that’s difficult to ignore.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care will release its report to Parliament after six years. There were false starts and sleeping commissioners while traumatised people gave their testimony.
New Zealand needs this report. Too much went on for too long, and no country can go forward while industrial scale abuse is swept under the rug. ACT supported calls to have the inquiry before the 2017 election, even while other parties wanted to let sleeping dogs lie.
Now the report will be released on Wednesday. Free Press hasn’t seen it, but there are some things we can safely predict from media reports of survivors’ stories over the years.
It will be grotesque. Most New Zealanders have not lived in a closed society. When a small group live out of view of the wider society, things don’t have to go wrong but it can easily happen. If the small group are put there precisely because they have some sort of vulnerability, William Golding’s dystopian Lord of the Flies comes easily to mind.
The numbers will be staggering. Former Government Statistician Len Cook says in today’s Herald that, at one point, seven per cent of Māori boys were in state care. Altogether hundreds of thousands of people were wards of the state, in a country where sixty thousand were born each year at peak birth rates.
It will lead to a major, and necessary, self-reflection as a nation. We believe that Kiwis are inherently good people, incapable of the evils and corruption that are normal in much of the world. We’ve been on the right side of history at various times, and punched well above our weight in everything from rowing to nuclear physics. We believe six years of gathering evidence coming out on one day will shatter illusions.
It was the era of the Holland, Holyoake, and Muldoon Governments that industrial scale state care and abuse was in full swing. In this era of rugby, racing, and beer, politicians were happy to give enormous powers to Government officials, but were hopeless at holding them accountable.
It was a time Michael Bassett described as too many people believing in ‘the essential goodness of state action.’ The state was given enormous powers to intervene in every aspect of life. In reality the state was a God that failed, leaving much destruction in its wake.
The abuse occurred on such a scale that only one institution was capable of being responsible for it, that being the state. It had the power to change the law, the trust of the people, and the resources to operate such a massive operation.
The state actually failed in two ways. It ran incompetent institutions that became havens for predators. It also failed to uphold basic human rights across all institutions including its own and private ones where similar abuse took place. There was very little grasp of the proper role of government and survivors paid the cost.
This week will rightly be a time for the survivors of the abuse. They deserve official recognition of what has occurred, finally. Then there is an equally important task that makes the recognition sincere. The country has to learn from it.
We must never again trust the state with such unbridled power. There is no essential goodness in state action, if anything its concentration of power makes it dangerous. That power should instead be focused on upholding the essential dignity and freedoms of every single New Zealander.
