{"id":18518,"date":"2026-09-16T06:03:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=18518"},"modified":"2026-09-16T06:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:03:12","slug":"pieces-still-missing-from-tom-phillips-inquiry-academic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=18518","title":{"rendered":"Pieces still missing from Tom Phillips inquiry – academic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

An expert on family violence says it is indefensible Family Court proceedings were excluded from the government’s inquiry into the Tom Phillips case.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

She says the government should be looking at reinstating protective mechanisms that were stripped out of the Care of Children Act in 2014, and she is “a little sympathetic” to police, with a caveat that she doesn’t usually say that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“It’s just really hard for me to know whether we should be stringing them up by their toenails or not when we just don’t know what came out of the Family Court.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Phillips was shot dead by police a year ago, after nearly four years on the run with his children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Government ministers apologised on Tuesday<\/a> after the damning inquiry found multiple failings by authorities including information sharing and following up certain leads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Oranga Tamariki and police have admitted errors, although police dispute the inquiry’s finding<\/a> that agencies working together could have prevented the children’s disappearance or brought them back sooner.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

University of Auckland associate law professor Carrie Leonetti told RNZ the principal judge of the Family Court court could have opened its files to the inquiry, and although such files would be sensitive they could have been redacted from public view.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“The inquiry starts four years too late,” she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“Tom Phillips had court ordered care of the children from 2019 at least, and was given court ordered care of the children back, it appears, in October 2021 after the first abduction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“The inquiry makes very clear that Oranga Tamariki had… very limited involvement with Tom Phillips and the children before 2021… we’re starting the movie half-way through.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Leonetti said the children’s mother’s concerns were not taken seriously partly because of her Family Court dispute with Phillips.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“It’s pretty clear that these agencies brushed her concerns off … It’s well established in the social science literature that there’s just this pervasive societal myth that women fabricate claims of domestic violence for some kind of tactical purpose in custody proceedings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“And I think it’s even worse for the Phillips kids’ mother because she’s M\u0101ori… a M\u0101ori woman trying to get the police and Oranga Tamariki to take her P\u0101keh\u0101 ex-husband’s threat to their children seriously.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“He made threats to her at the time of their separation in 2017 that he was going to take the kids and not let her see them again, and he he made those threats to third parties that he was going to take off with the kids and go bush.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

She said there was a “weird sort of hot potato problem”, where police, Oranga Tamariki and the Family Court would defer responsibility for a case to whichever of the three was approached first.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“If people go first to the Family Court and they award care to the person, then I think Oranga Tamariki and the police say to themselves, ‘well, how dangerous can he be?'”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

She said the report seemed to indicate police and Oranga Tamariki had made errors in the investigation or passing on information, but without the details from the Family Court “it’s like we’re looking at this mosaic with half of it blacked out”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Phillips may never have had unsupervised care of the children in 2019 and 2021 had the “Bristol clauses” that required courts to ensure a child’s safety before granting custody in domestic violence-related cases not been scrapped under the John Key government in 2014<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“You go to Family Court, you lose custody of your kids to the perpetrator. You go to the police, they seem to write a lot of reports but not take a lot of action. You go to Oranga Tamariki and they roll your eyes and think you’re a disgrunted ex-wife.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

However, she said police may be right to say the situation may not have ended differently “if they had done everything right, but the Family Court and Oranga Tamariki still failed”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“We actually need all of these agencies to get it right as often as possible to have an appropriate safety net.”<\/p>\n

rnz<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An expert on family violence says it is indefensible Family Court proceedings were excluded from the government’s inquiry into the Tom Phillips case. She says the government should be looking at reinstating protective mechanisms that were stripped out of the Care of Children Act in 2014, and she is “a little sympathetic” to police, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":18519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18520,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18518\/revisions\/18520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}