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Sorrow and substance
The prime minister stood in the House of Representatives shortly before noon yesterday on what he called a “significant, sorrowful but important day”. Christopher Luxon issued a “formal and unreserved apology” on behalf of his and preceding governments to victims of decades of abuse in state and faith-based care. “It was horrific,” he said. “It was heartbreaking. It was wrong. And it should never have happened. For many of you it changed the course of your life, and for that, the Government must take responsibility.”
His address – disrupted early on from the public gallery by serial interruptor Karl Mokaraka – marked a historic day, but not a completion. While there are pledges of improvement to redress and compensation schemes, there is little detail, and we are unlikely to know just how much the state intends to spend until the budget next year. The words of one survivor, as reported by the Herald, strike to the core: “An apology without redress is meaningless.”
“As much as an apology is an important step in acknowledging what happened and accepting the Crown’s responsibility for what occurred over decades, apologising on behalf of an institution (and therefore the decisions and oversight of others) is the relatively easy part of the process,” writes Luke Malpass for the Post. “The difficult bit will be what the government is now embarking on. That is the hard work of reforming public information, safety systems and processes and, above all else, what redress might be made in the form of monetary compensation. At the base of that issue is the morally impossible question of, how much money is enough – or at least sufficient – to make up for a life that has been ruined?”
Hugs, heckles and hollowness
Luxon’s was not the only apology. Chris Hipkins added his on behalf of the Labour Party. And seven public sector leaders took their turn at the parliamentary banquet hall podium earlier yesterday. (You can watch all of yesterday’s proceedings here.) Their speeches, which uniformly addressed past failures, formally apologised and committed to avoid repetition, prompted a mixed response. There were hugs and high-fives; other survivors declared the apologies “hollow” and heckled the speakers, questioning their authenticity and demanding, for example, that the revived boot camp scheme be binned.
The audience became most fired up during the address by Una Jagose, the solicitor general. She and Crown Law were criticised by the Royal Commission for resisting legal challenges. Jagose, as Laura Walters has detailed for Newsroom, has faced resignation demands from survivors. Jagose’s apology was heartfelt, no doubt, but she repeatedly prefaced her examples of errors made with “at times” or “sometimes”. In my view, the speakers who landed more compellingly yesterday avoided any hint of qualification.
Survivor Tu Chapman, also speaking early in the day, noted the absurdity of being asked to “respond to a prime minister’s apology we haven’t even heard”, and observed Luxon’s absence from the room. Any true contrition, Tu added, would manifest in the closure of Oranga Tamariki.
The view that matters
The most important part of this apology, needless to say, is not in its making but its receipt. Survivors attended in Wellington but at other gatherings around the country, where the livestream was aired. I strongly recommend you read the accounts from parliament, from Auckland and from Christchurch, by my colleagues Joel MacManus, Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Alex Casey. They collect and share visceral responses from survivors and affectingly capture the wairua of those rooms.