Danyl McLauchlan: The one govt action on abuse in state care that could trigger seismic shockwaves
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Minister for the Crown Response Unit of the Royal Commission Inquiry into Abuse in Care, Erica Stanford, during the release of The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care report. Photo / Getty Images
Almost as soon as the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care was convened in 2018, rumours began circulating about former politicians implicated in the abuse of children. In its final report, the inquiry confirmed that it “received allegations about organised child sexual abuse or a ‘paedophile ring’ by former central government politicians in social welfare settings”.
The allegations included, “The transportation of children and young people from social welfare residences and institutions and other state care residences and institutions in the Horowhenua area to private locations in the Horowhenua and Te Whanganui-ā-Tara Wellington regions. It is alleged at the private locations they were sexually abused by former central government politicians and prominent public servants … Groups of men being brought into the Kimberley Centre [a psychopaedic hospital near Levin] to sexually abuse non-speaking girls in care” and “abuse of young people in care working as underage sex workers in Te Whanganui-ā-Tara Wellington and Ōtepoti Dunedin by prominent public servants”.
It concluded, “None of the allegations of organised group abuse in state care settings described above were able to be substantiated by direct evidence.”
Two months after the publication of the report, former National MP “Aussie” Malcolm – a minister of health and immigration in the Muldoon government – died after a short illness at the age of 83. Shortly afterwards, police revealed he had been under investigation for the sexual abuse of children as a result of allegations raised by the abuse in care inquiry, and that three previous complaints had been made – two in 1992 and another in 2012 – but the guidelines for prosecution had not been met.
The royal commission looked at historical abuse but the investigative scope was limited to 1950-99. This was a pragmatic compromise.
To examine more recent claims would have resulted in stonewalling and furious legal resistance from the agencies and individuals under investigation. But it was able to expose the elaborate cover-up that state agencies conducted over several decades to conceal those crimes.
The commission concluded, “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.”
An ordinary person
In 1963, the political theorist Hannah Arendt published a series of articles in the New Yorker about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. One of the key logistical organisers of the Holocaust, Eichmann fled to Argentina after the war. Israel’s intelligence agents hunted him down and smuggled him back to Jerusalem.
Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann is controversial. She concluded that he wasn’t a Nazi in any ideological sense, or a sadist, or a psychopath. He facilitated the mass murder of millions of people because he thought it would make his superiors in the SS happy and thus advance his career. He was hard-working, diligent, a member of the intellectual class, but he lacked the capacity to think for himself.
Government can empower monsters, who find willing hosts of intelligent yet unthinking administrators eager to court their favour.
The bureaucratic nature of the system – the breakdown of the work into small, technical tasks, the abstract administrative language, the adherence to authority and total absence of moral accountability – made it possible for ordinary people to facilitate horrific crimes.