If you haven’t yet read Aaron Smale’s series on abuse in care, you really should. New Zealand doesn’t have a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, but the series would rightly be up for nomination.

But it’s grim.

Reading each story as it came out was bad enough.

Reading them again, all at once, is like binge-watching a horrific true-crime series.

You know the criminals will never be punished.

In successive episodes, as Smale explains, Crown Law worked to protect offenders who had tortured and molested children that had been put under the dubious protection of the state.

They blocked victims and withheld evidence long enough for the statute of limitations to kick in. Police investigations were sufficiently flawed that police had to apologise to victims.

Successive governments did their best to minimise it, including at best misleading and at worst lying to the United Nations about torture.

Avoiding Crown liability seemed to be the imperative, as Smale reports from the Royal Commission’s final report:

“Political and public service leaders spent time, energy and taxpayer resources to hide, cover up and then legally fight survivors to protect the potential perceived costs to the Crown, and their own reputations.”

There have been occasional apologies.

No one has been held accountable, and many of those involved went on to or continue to serve in the highest levels of the bureaucracy.

It is hard for anyone to be held accountable when, as Elizabeth Stanley and coauthors report in the Journal of Criminology, and as Stanley described in Newsroom, ‘performing ignorance’ was the order of the day.

“In recent work on how state officials approached the commission, it became clear that, even during commission hearings, offending institutions claimed to have not known about their offences. They remarked that they didn’t actually ask about or look for the violence and sometimes they had evidence but they destroyed or ignored it. But what else could they do? After disparaging their victims as non-credible for decades, they just couldn’t bring themselves to believe them. It was easier to tell the world they were all liars.”

Smale reports that the Crown knew that the cook at Hokio Beach School, Michael Ansell, had prior convictions for sexually abusing children. The Crown “didn’t provide this information to [the victim’s lawyer]. One of the Crown lawyers involved was Una Jagose, who would later be appointed Solicitor-General.”

It gets worse. As Smale reports:

“An inquiry in 2018 into the use of private investigators exposed the fact that MSD and Crown Law had spent $90,000 on them during the White case. This almost wasn’t exposed – I had asked about the use of private investigators in 2016 and received a point-blank denial. Three times. When agencies were asked to provide information to that inquiry, Crown Law and MSD initially weren’t forthcoming about what had happened during the White case. It was only when the lead investigator was tipped off that they were asked again and disclosed what should have been provided immediately. Una Jagose was Solicitor-General at the time. Peter Hughes, who was the Public Service Commissioner, had been the head of MSD during the period in question.”

Hughes went from heading the Ministry for Social Development during that period to heading the entire public service. He was also made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to the State in 2012.

Hughes recently retired, but his imprint on the public sector will be long-lasting. He appointed many of his MSD colleagues to head other agencies. He has also served as Director and as Chair of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, which helps to train public servants.

Auckland University economist Robert MacCulloch has raised reasonable questions about the actual number of victims. But surely that makes everything worse rather than better.

Lying on the part of the Crown might be understandable, although still hardly justifiable, if the liabilities consequent to truth-telling would bankrupt the government.  (More likely, such liabilities would lead to a legislated cap on compensation.)

If the true number of victims is smaller, albeit still horrific, then the government of New Zealand has been prepared to do all of this to avoid a much smaller potential liability. We might worry that it would be willing to do it more frequently.

And if the immorality of it isn’t enough, consider what a proper accounting, using an investment-style approach, would have found. Covering up child abuse to avoid early liability to the state only leaves the state on the hook for the greater consequences of the misery it defended and enabled: through the justice system, the benefit system, and later generations of encounters with child protection services.

So, back to my opening question.

Where do we go from here?

There are plenty of honest and competent officials across the country’s ministries and agencies who have had no connection to this mess.

But think about how conspiracy theories get started and fester. Like PizzaGate in the US, where people came to believe that Democratic Party officials were part of a ring of paedophiles abusing children in the non-existent basement of a real pizza parlour.

It was always stupid to believe that theory, but the world has no shortage of stupid people. One of them was sentenced to four years in prison for shooting up that pizza parlour with an AR-15; he had hoped to find the non-existent basement.

Imagine a similar spurious and false theory emerging here about a paedophile ring in Wellington serving senior officials and politicians. The Abuse in Care Inquiry found “deeply suspicious” evidence of there having been one in the 1980s.

What would happen if someone claimed that one were currently operating and had been operating since the 1980s? To be absolutely clear: I have zero reason to even suspect it is true. I am simply constructing the kind of false story that could be difficult to disprove.

We now know that governments led by both main parties, senior public servants, Crown Law, and the police, have previously sought to protect the Crown from financial risk by protecting offenders whose crimes would bring Crown liability. Perhaps the momentum of a cover-up becomes self-sustaining; perhaps public sector CEs worry that victim compensation might ultimately come from their sector’s own future budgets.

They have worked to prevent evidence from being disclosed, either through incompetence in finding documents, or by deliberate and illegal withholding.

If the Crown denied other allegations that, if true, would have substantial financial implications for the Crown, would we have any reason to believe the dismissals?

Or should we expect that those protecting the Crown against true claims by citizens will be awarded promotions and honours?

The first rule of government club seems to be that the state protects the state.

Consider the contrast between the state’s prosecution of child abusers in the Abuse in Care incidents and the state’s prosecution of helicopter pilots who broke health and safety guidelines to rescue victims at White Island.

To paraphrase Peruvian General Óscar Benavides: “For the state, anything; for everyone else, the law.”

It would hardly be ideal at the best of times.

But when misinformation is rife and often sponsored by hostile adversaries, it is toxic.

I have no good answers, only dismay.

Minister Stanford is tasked with the Government’s response.

Part of the response has to be rebuilding confidence in the civil service. There is rot. Those involved in this incident, or appointed and trained by them, are everywhere. And there is a culture of managing political perceptions, rather than addressing problems.

It may be time to devolve child services away from centralised agencies that have repeatedly failed.

And demonstrating that criminal activity leads to criminal prosecution and appropriate punishment could be helpful.

To read the full article on the Newsroom website, click here.