Dame Noeline Taurua faced a flawed process and biased narrative from Netball NZ.
The cultural review involved only seven players, leading to questions about its validity.
Taurua’s reputation was harmed without due process, highlighting issues in New Zealand’s sports governance.
Louisa Wall for LockerRoom
When history looks back on this period of New Zealand netball, it will not remember a difficult coach or a combative standoff. It will remember how a decorated Māori woman leader, Dame Noeline Taurua, was subjected to a flawed process and a one-sided publicnarrative that breached the most basic principles of fairness and natural justice.
The recent RNZ In Depth feature “Tears and fears: Inside the uneasy truce between Dame Noeline Taurua and Netball NZ” reads like a case study in institutional bias and gendered framing. Behind the emotive headlines lies a simple truth: the process used to stand down and reinstate one of Aotearoa’s most successful coaches was deeply flawed, inconsistent, and unjust.
The cultural review that triggered the crisis was commissioned by Netball NZ on the recommendation of High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ), which also paid for it. That review involved interviews with just seven players out of a potential 30 athletes and staff. Its limited scope alone should have rendered the process invalid. How can a partial and selective consultation justify sidelining a national coach and her entire staff?
Even Netball NZ insiders now admit the review was incomplete, yet its findings were treated as fact. When Taurua challenged the process, her insistence on fairness was interpreted as defensiveness. When she asked to see the evidence, she was accused of being unco-operative. That is not accountability; it is institutional gaslighting.
Natural justice demands the right to know the case against you, the right to be heard, and the right to fair process. Each of these basic tenets of natural justice was disregarded.
Former Silver Fern and Labour MP Louisa Wall has written about the handling of Dame Noeline Taurua's situation. Photo / Dean Purcell
Then, as her suspension dragged on, her reputation was publicly debated and dissected while she was contractually gagged from defending herself. That is reputational harm before due process, a textbook breach of natural justice.
The RNZ article presents Netball NZ as calm, rational and procedural, and Taurua as emotional, contradictory, and unyielding. This imbalance of tone is subtle but powerful. It plays into gendered tropes about women in leadership, particularly Māori women, being too emotional or too hard.
The article also contains clear contradictions. It insists the stand-down was not because of player complaints, yet those very complaints triggered the review that led to the stand-down. It concedes the review was never formal, yet justifies a formal employment action on the back of it. It claims Netball NZ protected her reputation by keeping the report secret, while publicly implying she breached her reinstatement terms through media interviews. When inconsistencies pile up like this, one has to ask whose truth is being protected.
The irony is that Taurua built her reputation on the very qualities being weaponised against her now: care, connection, and cultural authenticity. Her leadership of the Silver Ferns after the 2018 disaster restored not only trophies but trust. She re-centred values of whanaungatanga and accountability, insisting that culture was inseparable from performance. Yet when she questioned a murky and incomplete review, an act any responsible leader would take, she was portrayed as the problem rather than as a guardian of standards. A process that should have been restorative became punitive.
If this episode shows anything, it is that governance and high-performance systems in New Zealand sport remain opaque, defensive and inconsistent in their application of accountability. HPSNZ’s involvement makes this not just a Netball NZ issue but a sector-wide failure.
In this instance, when a coach challenges process, she is labelled difficult. When an athlete challenges culture, she is hailed as courageous. When an organisation fails both, it hides behind confidentiality. Reviews must be robust and inclusive. Participants must have the right to respond. Media narratives must not be used as a substitute for due process.
Dame Noeline Taurua deserves more than temporary fixes or uneasy truces. She has consistently demonstrated fairness, integrity, and care for generations of athletes and fans, and she should expect the same in return.
True accountability in sport requires institutions to be transparent, consistent, and willing to confront uncomfortable truths about their own processes.
Until these standards are applied equally to those who govern, lead and report on sport, Aotearoa will continue to mistake reactive damage control for genuine leadership, and the lessons of this crisis will remain unheeded.
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.
