‘We had a right to expect much better today’: Survivors get pay but no power

Seven hundred and seventy-four million dollars will be put towards redress for abuse in state care, but the redress system that survivors called for won’t materialise.

Friday’s announcement by the Government’s lead co-ordinator Erica Stanford saw increased payments for survivors, a more streamlined approach for lodging a claim and a commitment to equal compensation regardless of where the abuse occurred. 

But it omitted all abuses in faith-based institutions and preserved a top-down, government-driven process. Multiple recommendations from the interim and final Royal Commission reports, as well as requests made by survivors of the abuse, had called for a survivor-led redress system: a path Stanford opted against in the name of certainty and timeliness.

Throughout the process of acknowledging, documenting and – most recently – apologising for abuse in state- and faith-based care, survivors have doubted the sincerity of the Government’s promises.

Initially, the abuse they suffered was said not to have happened. Once it was proven, it was deemed not torture. Once it was admitted to be torture, and extensive documentation produced, the investigation of said torture was overseen by people involved in its obfuscation.

Now, with a national apology completed and Treasury’s books open to the idea of financial compensation, survivors have been given another reason to remain apprehensive.

The Royal Commission’s final report on the abuse included 138 recommendations for the Government. The first was to return to the 2021 interim report and implement its 95 redress recommendations as an “immediate priority”.

These 95 recommendations described a survivor-led, survivor-driven redress scheme. Instead of setting this up, the Government committed $774 million towards bolstering the existing scheme while simplifying its mechanisms.

In Stanford’s announcement, she recalled meeting with the Redress Design Group soon after assuming her position. She said she was honest with the group when she told them their call for a survivor-led scheme was “more ambitious and more unique than I think that we will be able to do”.

Stanford said the group expected that answer, and told her “Yes minister, we know, but we went for ‘What does, in an ideal world, perfect look like? We know you’re not going to be able to do everything’.”

The choice to focus on the existing scheme in lieu of designing a new one offered more certainty and clarity, and allowed more victims to receive payments as soon as possible, she said. 

But Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins said the decision to continue with a Government-led redress system showed promises made by the Government were “hollow words” and the Royal Commission’s recommendations “completely ignored”.

Keith Wiffin has been involved with the abuse justice movement for more than two decades, and most recently was involved with the redesign group Stanford mentioned. He told Newsroom, “What should have been a day of celebration turned into a day of disappointment for me and I’m sure many others.”

Wiffin said the survivor-led redress scheme was recommended “on the basis they recognise that officials have been a big part of the problem, not the solution”.

“That investment is wasted. It’s a major slap in the face for the Royal Commission of Inquiry and their recommendation. It’s a slap in the face for the previous government.”

When Stanford first came into the role, Wiffin was encouraged by her rating of the redesign group’s “first-class proposal”. But as the months passed, he said he saw her stance start to change. “She would have been under pressure from other MPs, other cabinet ministers, officials and government agencies, and it’s produced what we had today.”

Wiffin said Friday felt like “another backward step after we were given the opportunity to do something, you know, really good, and make a difference – that’s been ripped away from us”.

Without any power to administer the process, higher payments did not mean much to Wiffin, who said the Crown’s core priority has always been “retaining power and control and doing things in the name of their agenda”, rather than putting victims first.

He said the announcement “in no way matches the severity and the seriousness and the scale of the catastrophe that’s happened”.

Of the 105 recommendations in the Royal Commission report, Stanford said only 12 had been accepted in full. A total of 46 had been accepted: 12 in full, 14 in part, and 20 accepted on their intent. Twenty had been declined, and 39 were in active consideration.

Stanford announced the formation of a Ministerial Advisory Group of survivors and advocates, which would be formed in the coming months to advise top officials. But Wiffin doubted its efficacy given the Government’s track record of listening to its own commissioned advice.

“That’s just them saying, ‘Oh yes, we’ve done that. We’ve consulted. I mean, we haven’t listened to you, and nothing’s changed, but we have consulted’,” Wiffin said.

The new announcement brought more money to the table for survivors, raising the average payment from $19,180 to $30,000. Of the 4900 survivors nationwide, any who have already settled their claims would be eligible for a 50 percent ‘top-up’ payment to match the increase. 

Higher payments were to be expected for those who experienced the “most egregious abuse”: a threshold with parameters yet unknown. 

Previously, the four organisations involved in the redress process defined this threshold independently. The ministries of health, education and social development, alongside Oranga Tamariki, would now be merging efforts to simplify the redress application process.

But one player was missing from the announcement. The Royal Commission’s report was titled ‘Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-based Institutions’, but faith-based institutions were absent from the redress scheme. 

Stanford said she knew the omission would “be disappointing for those survivors of abuse in faith-based institutions”. 

“At this stage, we wanted to prioritise this work,” she said of the state-based abuse.

She worried that including faith-based abuse could delay or complicate payments that could otherwise be processed sooner, though Cabinet “has to turn its mind now to faith-based institutions”.

If faith- and state-based abuses had been handled in tandem, “it would have taken many years and huge cost, and I’m not convinced at this point in time that it would have been any more responsive,” Stanford said. “The risk is that it wouldn’t have been.”

Wiffin said any omission of faith-based abuse was “dreadful, diabolical”. 

“Yet again, in this process, they will feel alienated. And I think one of the things that needs to be understood around faith-based abuse is the state’s tentacles go everywhere, including into faith-based institutions.”