‘The phone call was an interrogation, with an underlying current that I was fraudulent’

Comment: What is an apology worth? I would say it depends who you are: a politician seeking absolution and votes; the public wanting everything to be nicely tidied up; the perpetrator of the wrong fearing for legal ramifications; or the survivor of state abuse in care who hopes for change, redress and compensation.
I write this a week after Whanaketia – the final report from the Royal Commission into Abuse in State Care – was received by the Government to tell you that though we survivors are being publicly apologised to and promised respect and redress, the Historic Claims process continues to do harm to us. This is an account of my claim for financial compensation, in the month between the Government receiving and releasing the report.
The 2020 Royal Commission interim report, Tāwharautia, was tabled so the redress to prevent further abuse in care was prioritised and started, to solve the legacy of harm to survivors – all 200,000 of us and our whānau. Last week, the final report expressed concern about the lack of significant progress to meet their recommendations from 2020. Royal Commissions on child removal in the settler colonial countries of Canada and Australia can provide some insights and precedence to government reluctance to make recommendations and change.
Both nations’ Royal Commissions have found unimaginable harm and torture to their Indigenous children and families, all with recommendations, promises and apologies.
Both countries have since had escalating numbers of Indigenous children and young people entering state-controlled foster systems, reflecting postulation and politicking more than activating change that repairs Indigenous communities and provides redress to survivors (Blackstock et al, 2023; Krakouer, 2023).
Part of repair is about financial redress, the cost estimated in the Whanaketia report as $857,000 across a lifetime of a survivor. Financial compensation, like Te Tiriti settlements, is a drop in the water of what we are entitled to and never represents this true figure but mitigates some of the costs we carry as survivors. The Historic Claims system that manages these individual claims is renown for its poor performance, creating a triggering, harmful process for survivors who are not perpetrators but claimants deserving respect and care. The governmental pattern of refusing to treat survivors as claimants with mana can be traced back to the horrors of Lake Alice claimants in the late 1990s and early 2000s and more recent survivor accounts through the Royal Commission reports (The Lake).
I spent the last five years interacting with the Royal Commission in various roles, as survivor, as advocate, as Māori and as professional. I put together the Office of the Children’s Commissioner response on Lake Alice where the evil of government was truly evidenced in aggressions towards survivors and acts of harm to elude financial cost. I presented my own personal account of my abuse in care, and alongside local Māori experts we shared with the Royal Commission our aspirations. It was through these processes I felt safe to finally put in my claim to the Ministry of Social Development-managed Historic Claims in mid-June this year.
How wrong I was to trust that the state process had changed.
A week after Whanaketia was tabled, I received a call from Historic Claims. I had chosen the rapid claim process because I didn’t want interactions with the state litigating my personal harm and trauma in state-determined dollars and cents. I had resolved that a one-off scheduled payment would cause the least amount of frustration and anger, still holding firmly to those accounts of survivors from Lake Alice.
The phone call ended up being an interrogation, with an underlying current that I was fraudulent, accusations that I had previously put in a claim (untrue) while questions were fired off at me with expectations that I would either cave or prove my identity.
It didn’t stop there.
I was given another survivor’s name and personal details and asked multiple times if I was that person. Remembering a little slowly my rights, survivor rights and that I was not on trial, I addressed the breach of privacy of another survivor’s details and ended the conversation once I had established there was not a manager to talk to then and there.
Another phone call the next day and three email requests later, a month has passed and I am yet to receive a response to my complaint. I asked for contact, confirmation the worker would no longer be on my claim, and that the survivor breach would be disclosed to the other survivor. Not too much to ask really, but while the Government was busy reading the 14kg of Royal Commission evidence ahead of last week’s public release, I have remained ignored.
As survivors of the foster system, we carry a lot of societal assumptions and judgments on us and our whānau but we also mainly remain invisible, because drawing attention means seeing paternalistic “poor you” responses, judgments and conversations that cross over into your privacy rights. That is just if you were in the foster system, so imagine how that compounds when you were abused in state care. The month of stone-cold silence has led me to analyse that Historic Claims generally works on the premise that survivors are reluctant to out ourselves when having our human rights breached. Amplified by a serious power imbalance where the state is determining if a survivor gets a payment, how much and how fast or slow the process will be. That’s some big systemic imbalance going on.
For me, I will not stand in the shadows. I have nothing to be ashamed of. As a young person who experienced abuse in the foster system, I am not to blame, and I am not on trial when seeking compensation. I speak out because the upcoming months will decide what path we are going on. Will we be a nation that actions the recommendations – system redress, supporting whānau, hapū and iwi and financial compensation – or will we be like Canada and Australia, slow and resistant to do what is right, willing to sacrifice more generations of Indigenous children to state abuse. A starting point to really demonstrate the Government is sorry and does want to do better.
I would just like someone to respond to my legitimate complaint as requested.