The prime minister promised the government would listen and change in response to abuse in care. But the loudest words were the ones he wouldn’t say.

Prime minister Chris Luxon was pitch perfect as he received and acknowledged the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in parliament on Wednesday. He said all the rights things with all the right expressions on his face, maintaining a sensitive, remorseful tone of voice. He was a prime minister rising to the occasion, bearing the weight of history, shouldering a sacred responsibility that is bigger than any one person.

“I cannot take away your pain, but I can tell you this: you are heard, and you are believed,” he said, acknowledging the state’s dark, bloodstained history of harm. “I say to the survivors, the burden is no longer yours to carry alone. The state is now standing here beside you, accountable and ready to take action.”

But the loudest words were those not said. The promises not made. The decisions punted for another day. In every speech, every comment, every emotion-laden moment, there was a herd of elephants in the room, an inescapable shadow over the entire proceedings – the government’s own rhetoric, policies and campaign promises.

There was a deep sense of respect from government ministers, who knew Wednesday was not about them, it was about the survivors. Every political leader who spoke in parliament on Wednesday had been personally affected by reading the report. They showed on their faces and in their croaking voices that they had seen, heard and understood the horrific stories in the 3,000-page document.

Erica Stanford, the minister in charge of the government response, spoke of the unwed mothers who were deliberately underfed so they would have small babies and easy births. “They drugged them up and they took their babies without giving them a chance to hold them. That is confronting.” New Zealand First’s Jenny Marcroft revealed she is the daughter of a survivor. “My mother was strapped to electrodes and delivered electric shock therapy as a young university student. She was locked up, without her consent or consent of her parents, and subjected to inhumane, barbaric treatment in the late 1950s. One of thousands of stories just like yours.” Fellow NZ First MP Casey Costello recalled meeting young victims when she was a police officer. “The experiences have never left me. I can still see the pattern of a pair of pyjamas. I can still see the colour of their eyes that had lost the ability to shed tears.”

The survivors and whānau in parliament’s public gallery applauded every time an MP acknowledged that abuse was still continuing to this day. Labour leader Chris Hipkins cited a few changes his previous government made, but admitted they fell short. “Prime minister, we didn’t do enough and the ball now falls to you and your government,” he said.

The audience also made it known when they weren’t impressed. And there were two words that stung more than any other: boot camps.

A 110-page section of the report is dedicated to a case study of Te Whakapakari, a boot camp on Aotea, Great Barrier Island, where young offenders were subjected to extreme psychological, physical and sexual abuse – including being made to dig their own graves while being held at gunpoint.

It’s an uncomfortable parallel for a government which just four days prior had launched its pilot of a military-style academy for young offenders at Te Au rere a te Tonga Youth Justice residence in Palmerston North. Some survivors think it is effectively impossible to run this kind of boot camp without relying on abusive tactics to scare young offenders and keep them in line.

Luxon was asked about the risks of boot camps becoming abusive at the post-cabinet press conference on Monday. He weakly insisted it would be different this time. There will be safeguards and protections in place. There will be community groups involved, he promised. It wasn’t particularly convincing.

When minister for children Karen Chhour spoke in the house, she promised to be “a strong advocate and a leader of change”. She was interrupted by a survivor yelling “No boot camps”. Other people in the crowd repeated the line.

Stanford was heckled too. “The Crown owed you all a duty of care and protection and we have utterly failed you,” she said. An audience member interjected “still failing”. Someone else echoed the same words, “still failing”. Then, a third voice: “No boot camps.”

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer picked up the theme in her speech. “The government is saying how sorry it is, but it continues to create mega-prisons… and experiment with our rangatahi in boot camps.”

Chlöe Swarbrick, in the most forceful speech of the day, also hit on boot camps. “This apology must transcend into ensuring that no people are ever subjected to this at the hand of the state ever again. To get really real and frank, what that means, and what survivors this morning told us, is NO MILITARY-STYLE BOOT CAMPS.” That line earned a standing ovation from the survivors, several of whom held their fists in the air.

Act leader David Seymour chided Swarbrick and Ngarewa-Packer for trying to bring politics into a day that was meant to be about something bigger. But the complaint fell slightly flat, given it was the survivors themselves who were making most of the noise.

Many of the survivors at parliament on Wednesday were patched gang members. It was an unavoidable reality. There was no violence, or even any sense of aggression. Stanford had lengthy one-on-ones with Black Power members on the parliament forecourt.

The Royal Commission report found that abusive state care institutions had effectively acted as a pipeline for gangs. The state’s actions actively drove young people towards gangs, where they found love and support for the first time in their lives. It was another uncomfortable reality for Luxon, who has (successfully) made a lot of political hay with his tough-on-gangs rhetoric. He’s referred to gang members as “thugs”. Seymour has called them “scum”. The government has introduced policies to make gang membership an aggravating factor for sentencing – without acknowledging the state’s role in that membership.

In a press conference ahead of the release of the report in parliament, Luxon was challenged on whether the report would cause him to rethink his policies and rhetoric towards gangs. He grew defensive and cut the press conference short. “Well look, I understand many gang members come from very dysfunctional upbringings, and I get that, but also we can’t have gang members causing pain and suffering,” he said. But was he at least willing to admit that he made judgments about gang members without knowing their full history, and understanding how the state’s abuse had affected them? “No, I disagree. I understand what drives gang membership, I understand that well.”

Throughout the day, government ministers pledged to change, to listen, and to respond to what survivors were telling them. But there were repeated moments when they exposed themselves as out of touch. Without even realising it, they were still instinctively speaking to the middle-class Pākehā watching at home, rather than the actual survivors in the room.

David Seymour: “All of us have to look at the country that we thought was above these bad things, that it could never happen on such a scale, so grotesquely, that we were good people and bad things happened elsewhere. Actually, it did happen here.”

Erica Stanford: “I think we believed that these sorts of unimaginable horrors and atrocities never happened here, but they happened in other places, to other people.”

Christopher Luxon: “We like to think that abuse like this doesn’t happen here in Aotearoa New Zealand, but it did.”

None of those lines seemed to connect with the survivors in the audience. Ta Pāti Māori’s Mariameno Kapa-Kingi picked up on it. “When I hear comments like, ‘We thought this was a great country. We never could possibly do that’, it’s such a privileged statement. Māori, for way too long, have absolutely felt the despise, the distaste, and the horror of what Pākehā systemic racism hands to us. It is not a shock to us. It is not a surprise to Māori at all that these things occurred then and that they occur right now as I’m standing here giving this speech.”

The last time a government received a royal commission report was in December 2020, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch masjidain. Then prime minister Jacinda Ardern immediately agreed, in principle, to implement all 44 of the royal commission’s recommendations. Not so much this time. The official government line on Wednesday, repeated with slight variation by several ministers, was “the content needs to be considered with respect and care and cannot be rushed”.

There is a good reason for that. The royal commission report has 138 recommendations (plus 95 recommendations from an interim report in 2021), some of which are immensely complex and financially significant. The government says it will prioritise redress for the Lake Alice victims, because many are older and dying. It won’t announce its response until the official national apology on November 12.

The recommendations are not the only way the government can respond. There are other, simpler, things it can do to show it is listening to survivors. In the context of the entire government work programme, the military-style boot camp is a relatively minor policy. It’s really just red meat for the base, performative rather than reforming. The survivors at parliament on Wednesday made it clear they saw the boot camps as a continuation of the abuse they faced. Government ministers repeatedly praised the survivors for their courage and bravery – but are they in turn brave enough to listen to the survivors and change their actions, even if it means abandoning a campaign promise?

Some survivors are hopeful for change. Most are resigned to cynicism. As much as they celebrated the acknowledgement on Wednesday, they’re hardened by a belief that the government will never truly listen to them.

As David Seymour spoke, there was a moment which demonstrated that attitude perfectly. “It is on all of us,” he said, “to be more caring, to listen to people when we think that they’re being ignored.” There was another disruption from the public gallery. A loud, blatant, faux-sneeze, as a survivor spluttered into their hands: “Bullshit.”