The Attorney General says the inquiry into the disappearance of Tom Phillips will focus on the welfare of the children, because they “deserve to know who did what to try and save them”.
The government inquiry was announced yesterday and will investigate whether government agencies took all practicable steps to protect the safety and welfare of the three Phillips children.
Tom Phillips vanished in December 2021 with his three young children from Marokopa, on the Waikato coast. After years of searching for the family, police killed Phillips in a shootout on September 8 this year, during which an officer was also critically injured.
While speaking to Ryan Bridge on Herald NOW this morning, Attorney-General Judith Collins said the Phillips children are entitled to answers.
“The Phillips children deserve to know who did what to try and save them, because actually they were [gone] almost four years in the bush with their father, and what they would have gone through would have been a very awful sort of hell, frankly.”
Collins said she didn’t ask police whether or not she should open an inquiry, and that it would analyse all the government agencies involved.
“I think we need to have everybody just come forward. They’ll be asked to give submissions.
“I think, too, the big thing of this is not only those lessons that need to be learned, and understand that there would have been individuals and people in those agencies involved who really tried their very best, but that needs to come out too, because this is actually about these kids.”
Bridge asked Collins about whether the Phillips kids should have been uplifted, and the debate that continues around the ethics of Oranga Tamariki uplifting children from families.
“We’ll let the inquiry get on with its job. I’m not going to interfere in that.
“But I think about those poor social workers at Oranga Tamariki, whatever they do, someone’s going to have a go at them. Right? So, you saw what I saw as frankly almost hysteria around kids being uplifted from homes that they shouldn’t have been with, essentially, because of what’s happened.”
Collins said “kids are not uplifted for the fun of it” and that there needed to be support for those decisions made by Oranga Tamariki.
“It is really important that we back those decisions. In this particular case, we’ve had four years of not being able to find these kids, four years of and before that, of course, it’s for these kids, it’s almost their entire lifetime.”
The inquiry will be led by Justice Simon Moore KC, who served as a judge of the High Court for 11 years and is currently the chairman of the Electoral Commission.
The Government is expecting a final report with recommendations by July 21 next year
The terms of reference for the inquiry have also been announced, with the Government saying they were developed with “the privacy and welfare of these especially vulnerable children in mind”.
“We do need to know what’s happened, and was there a resourcing issue? Did people make decisions based on fear of, I don’t know, media, or politicians, or something else? We don’t know, and we’re only speculating. So, let’s find out,” Collins said.
Within the scope of the inquiry is the nature and extent of government agencies’ involvement with Phillips and the children before and after their disappearance.
This includes:
The inquiry can also look into how Phillips obtained and maintained a gun licence, weapons and ammunition.
For the purpose of the inquiry, a government agency includes police, Oranga Tamariki and any other public sector agency that:
Outside the scope of the inquiry is any government agency involvement after the children were found.
Jaime Lyth is a multimedia journalist for the New Zealand Herald, focusing on crime and breaking news. Lyth began working under the NZ Herald masthead in 2021 as a reporter for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei.