By David Cohen*
File photo Photo: 123RF
The final report from the long-running Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry was set to be produced this week, but has now been delayed until late June.
Announcing the latest timetable extension, Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden said the additional period was required to complete the natural justice processes related to the commission's findings and recommendations.
"I have made clear my position to the Royal Commission that this is the final extension request that will be considered," van Velden said.
"It is simply not tenable to prolong the delivery of the findings and recommendations any further." She said she wants something on her desk by the end of May.
The minister's note of exasperation is probably understandable. Not only is this postponement the third to date for what is already the costliest inquiry in the country's history, the reasons for it could also be seen at least partly being of the commission's own making.
Established in 2018 to look at historical abuse involving kids who were in care during the last half of the 20th century, the inquiry has now been at it for considerably longer than Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The landmark Australian inquiry was wrapped up in just four years.
On the other hand, a similar exercise in Ireland, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse stretched out for nine years, although the periods it considered were lengthier and the cultural setting somewhat more complex in terms of the religious landscape.
At least part of the New Zealand story behind the delays is to do with the inquiry significantly expanding its own terms of reference from just the historical state-run institutions for young people to include church-run ones as well.
Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden said there would not be any more extensions considered for the final report. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
The inquiry also somewhat made a rod for its own back in gathering testimony from people whose experiences dated beyond the ostensible cut-off year of 1999.
A potentially bigger problem has been in the way the inquiry has moved beyond simply investigating historical abuse as it happened, why it occurred and how best to avoid a repeat.
Complex theories having to do with race and colonial history have also since been mapped into the process, which if nothing else chew up lots more time to digest.
Not only has this presented challenges in terms of producing a relatively simple report, it has also created an impression that the inquiry has to do with hundreds of thousands of kids and young people belonging almost exclusively to marginalised minority groups that must now be accounted for in the final summary.
In the case of state-run institutions, however, this isn't the case.
According to The Care to Custody, an incarceration rates research report commissioned by the inquiry, the known number of youngsters in state-care at least over a 50-year period may have averaged out at only around 700 a year.
What's more, a majority of these wards were Pākehā (with Māori disproportionately represented both among admissions and those who remained in the system), although with the caveat that many individuals were admitted many times over different years.
Whatever the ultimate numeric reality, all this presents an obvious problem in trying to weave together actual facts with a narrative that at times has seemed to move away from the known facts into something that has possibly become unnecessarily academic in many places.
And academic could yet be the word for how the final report and its all-important financial recommendations will be received at a time when the government is in full-bore cost-cutting mode and can also plausibly argue that the inquiry was never its idea in the first place.
Even if the imminent recommendations for redress use the relatively modest formula of the Australian exercise (which separated payments into three broad categories depending on the historical harm experienced), it's likely to receive short shrift from a prime minister who recently warned that the days "of taxpayers being treated like a bottomless ATM are over".
That is, assuming the final report even gets produced.
*David Cohen is a Wellington journalist and the author of Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home. He supplies regular analyses of the Abuse in Care inquiry.