Coral Shaw had no idea of the scale of what she was undertaking when she agreed to join the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, or that it would consume six years of her life. Becoming chair after one year was, again, not something she’d anticipated, but she felt a strong obligation to accept the role that others had decided she was capable of.
A mother of two with three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Shaw is quick to find humour, warmth and empathy, which enabled her to engage with witnesses at the inquiry. The former United Nations Dispute Tribunal and district and employment court judge also has the mind and ability to encompass wide-ranging legal and systemic issues. With the help of other commissioners and a large team of experts, researchers and analysts, the inquiry’s report provides a detailed roadmap for how to legislate, organise and monitor care in New Zealand.
When the first nondescript box of the commission’s final report was couriered to Shaw’s rural Waikato home, she cried. “I’m very prone to bursting into tears.”
The report details abuse, neglect and torture in care – 13 volumes of material – and the stories were affecting. Did she cry at the hearings? “Constantly. Of course I did. I’m a terrible crier. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved to tears.”
She worked out that if she sat up straight enough and leaned gently, tears dropped straight onto her blotter, “instead of running down with your eye makeup or pouring down your face. They are very important techniques for crying in court.”
Shaw was appointed commission chair in November 2019 when its first head, former governor-general Sir Anand Satyanand, stepped down after a year and a half, citing the increasing workload. He was told he would be working three days a week, three weeks of the month, for three years.
“As we delved into the terms of reference and came to a deep understanding of what the implications were, that’s when it really hit us,” says Shaw, who was at that point one of five commissioners, including Satyanand.
There was criticism when she became chair. Some survivors felt they had not been consulted and been pushed aside, and that Shaw had been dismissive towards them.
Was the appointment a judicial honour or a hospital pass? “Becoming chair was not something I had planned for … My main motivation was to ensure the inquiry’s progress was not unduly interrupted.
“Like other commissioners, I had already been the subject of some criticism and even calls for my resignation from survivors who were understandably distrustful of this new organisation in its first year or so. This made me more determined to see that we did all we could to gain their trust by taking a trauma-informed approach and strengthening our engagement with Māori.”
Ever-growing evidence
One million documents, 16 public hearings, a year of writing and nearly 3000 pages later, the commission’s report was tabled as a complete document in Parliament in July (interim reports were released from the end of 2020).
The inquiry heard evidence from survivors (privately), advocates, academic and legal experts, government officials, individuals and representatives from faith-based institutions. Public hearings were in Auckland, the testimony streamed live online.
Shaw worked six days a week, sometimes seven. The inquiry had up to 300 staff, including lawyers, researchers and wellbeing teams. Its terms of reference were the widest of any royal commission in New Zealand, says Shaw, and included looking at systemic reasons for abuse.
The inquiry covered educational institutions, hospitals (including psychiatric), residences for disabled people, foster care, social welfare and church-run care and schools. “That’s every school, every hospital, every state residence, every form of state care, every youth justice facility. It just got wider and wider.”
It did not include abuse in prisons or elder care, but commissioners went into prisons and spoke to elderly people in care to get stories of their historical abuse.
“The central issue was, had they been abused, had they been neglected, had they suffered from the impacts of this? And the answer, in virtually every case, was, ‘Of course.’”
Although many survivors had advocated for years or even decades for a public inquiry, it was no surprise that it took time to engage them. They did not trust the state or a state-based inquiry. “We couldn’t do the work without them. We couldn’t rush that.”
As public hearings were starting, along came Covid lockdowns, causing further delays, although hearings continued via Zoom.
Jehovah’s Witnesses brought legal proceedings to challenge the way the terms of reference were interpreted. “They did not consider that they had anybody in their care. They believed that we were not able to investigate them.” That took time and several court hearings.
The commission continued, but the parallel court hearings took senior lawyers out of action and diverted resources. “It was a very important matter for us, and so we had to engage with it seriously.”
In the last year of its sitting, more than 300 gang members decided they wanted to give their stories, so there was a whole new wave of important information. “We had to give them time and energy and all the rest of it, which I’m very glad we did.”
Shaw heard a large part of the survivor testimony, including stories of what amounted to torture by shock treatment and use of the paralysing drug paraldehyde as punishments in the child and adolescent unit at the Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital in Manawatū.
“The whole thing, the whole inquiry, was gruelling,” she says. “The breadth, the width, the depth, the dynamics, the complexity of it and all the things that kept coming in, that kept sort of pushing us off track, and then bringing it back, that was gruelling.
“But I wouldn’t call survivor testimony gruelling. I would call it moving. Traumatising, exhausting, all of those things. And cumulatively, of course, you absorbed it. I think all the commissioners felt this.
“It was exhausting because you were feeling the weight of their agony and pain and experiences. And it was moving because many of them had never told their stories before. Or they had spoken about it and not been believed before, and this was the first time that they were being believed. And so that brought its own emotional weight.
“But at the same time, and I can’t emphasise this too much, it’s uplifting and it’s inspiring. On one hand, it’s challenging and on the other hand, it’s affirming of the process that we were following; that’s what I felt.”
There was no cross-examination. It was, “We hear you and we accept your truth.”
The commission requested documents from all agencies being investigated, such as the ministries of health, education, social development, Oranga Tamariki and faith-based agencies. Documents had to be read by teams of lawyers, checked for relevance, authenticity, grouped. “The weight and the volume of the material was something that took us a long time.”
The carelessness with which data was held and lost is a major feature of the report. It talks about records destroyed, further disadvantaging survivors trying to piece together what had happened. When they asked for their files, the files could not be found. “Whether they’d been destroyed deliberately, whether, as we were told, there were floods and fires and plagues of locusts, I don’t know.”
Truthfulness was borne out by the weight of evidence, she says. “Because it wasn’t just one person saying one thing. The stories were repeated by other people over and over again.”
Liberal mentors
Shaw grew up in Lyttelton, the family living above her parents’ drapery store. She thinks her drive for justice came from school. “I got a very good liberal education from Christchurch Girls’ High School.” The ideal of service was powerful enough for the 17-year-old school leaver to do Volunteer Service Abroad in the Solomon Islands.
She and husband Peter Shaw initially trained as teachers. He supported her return to university to study law, then pursuing his own career in writing, journalism and art curation.
As a young lawyer, she credits liberal lawyer and social activist Frank Haigh as a mentor. She became a partner at the Haigh Lyon Auckland law practice, which attracted many aspirants with similar politics and outlook: one was future prime minister David Lange. “[Frank] had a strong sense of social justice, which I think I learned to absorb into my legal practice.”
Shaw became a district court judge in West Auckland, where it was impossible to ignore the social context of the cases before her. Trying to make the court easier to navigate, she introduced the first fast-track system for family violence cases with advocates for domestic abuse victims. She was also on the bench for the beginning of restorative justice in the 1990s, which made her recognise a need for a deeper understanding of te ao Māori and a working knowledge of te reo.
“It was completely wrong for me to be involved [at court] and sitting there not understanding what was going on. It was frustrating and annoying to me that I didn’t.”
She became involved with West Auckland’s Hoani Waititi Marae and, for five years, had weekly te reo lessons with educator Paora Sharples, “which I just loved and adored and gained so much knowledge and interest from that”. Shaw continues te reo lessons today. The knowledge, along with a close whānau “of more Māori members than Pākehā”, gave her more resources for the inquiry, with its disproportionate number of Māori children in care and ways they were affected. “The Māori dimension was vital, and I was glad to have had that background to bring to it.”
Digging deep
At the public hearings, the chief executives of Oranga Tamariki, the ministries of health, and education and the Education Review Office, the commissioner of police, the head of corrections, bishops, archbishops, a cardinal and leaders of faith-based institutions were called.
The inquiry delved deeply into the care systems in place when abuses were happening. “So, having identified all the reasons why things had gone wrong, we then made recommendations as to how to make them right and into the future as well,” says Shaw.
She emphasises this was a massive team effort, working towards a common goal. The wellbeing of survivors and staff was monitored. Shaw herself accepted help.
“Although, for the first couple of years, I thought I was fine and I didn’t need it but the strain began to take its toll. And I needed to talk to somebody about it.”
There were six commissioners in all: Shaw; Satyanand from February 2018 until November 2019; former disability rights commissioner Paul Gibson from November 2019; law academic Andrew Erueti (Ngā Ruahinerangi, Ngāti Ruanui, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, also from 2019); district court judge Ali’imuamua Sandra Alofivae from November 2018 to August 2023; and director Julia Steenson (Ngāti Whātua, Waikato/Tainui) from June 2020 to February 2023.
Commissioners would meet in Wellington for four-day blocks; other times they would travel to talk to survivors or groups. Shaw found Covid lockdowns actually helped her to manage stress. “I could sit in my room, look out the window, walk around my garden, feed the chooks, talk to a family member. Take a breath, and then go back into my office.”
The downside was bringing home work. One of her colleagues recently said of photos on the inquiry website, “We all look exhausted.” Said Shaw: “Those were taken just before we finished, and we were just, you know, out on our feet, basically.”
Coming forward
Survivors with memorial ribbons travelled to Parliament for the presentation of the report, and Shaw sounds proud that she saw them speaking with confidence. “We did our level best. It will never have been enough. I know that. But we did what we could.”
Many people had been campaigning for an inquiry, and a group of them became the Royal Commission Forum, critical friends of the commission. One member was scientist and activist Oliver Sutherland, who had been advocating for children in care since the 1970s. “It’s immensely satisfying because I’m thinking back to the 1970s particularly, when every time we exposed what was happening to the children in the various institutions and the abuses they were suffering, we were just told that it wasn’t true,” says Sutherland, who was a witness in two hearings. He gives credit to the commission for travelling to hear from witnesses, and for encouraging survivors to come forward and open up, “and very largely, that’s what they did. That, I think, is a major mark of the success of the inquiry.
He found Shaw to be “a very open and encouraging chair of what was a major, major inquiry”.
Following through
What happens next is a huge question. Sutherland is critical of the government’s pledge of an urgent $20,000 payment to eligible survivors of Lake Alice who are terminally ill to help provide end-of-life care and assist with funeral expenses. “It doesn’t make me hold out much hope for the future, given that no compensation can really make up for what these people have lost throughout their lives since they were abused in the 70s and 80s. But $20,000 is just an insult.”
The royal commission’s report, though, is a vindication, final proof that the stories were listened to and commented on in a sympathetic way that could never be undone. “The commissioners have done a marvellous job in that regard, and their staff and the lawyers who work for them. It was a collective effort but Coral led it and she did it magnificently,” says Sutherland.
Karl Tauri is founder and manager of the New Zealand Collective of Abused in State Care charitable trust and was an adviser to the commission. At Shaw’s welcoming pōwhiri, he challenged the new chair to put things right. Recently, they met again at Government House. “I said to Coral, ‘I just want to say thank you for getting it across the line.’
“I’d say the report was well done. Credit for the job that they’ve done.”
But Tauri is concerned that most of the 138 recommendations will not be acted on. “While the report looked fantastic and there were 3000 pages and the apologies all sounded nice, the very next day the government [confirmed young offender] boot camps.”
But the inquiry’s report remains. “It’s our PhD, isn’t it?” he says. Among its recommendations (see below) is a call for wide-ranging apologies. Says Shaw: “We wrote about what we found happened, who we thought was accountable, and the steps that needed to be taken to remedy that. And yes, if it was hard-hitting, then it’s hard-hitting. It has to be. It’s a hard subject. It’s something that’s affected our entire nation.”
Shaw is watching on with great interest, but she and the other commissioners can have no part in how their findings are implemented. “It would be disappointing, to say the least, if we found that this report was not acted on in a way that made things better for past survivors and stopped abuse in the future.”
It may be now that Shaw can finally retire. Before the commission, she worked internationally and at home. Ten years of commuting between Auckland and Wellington for the Employment Court were followed by a seven-year term with the UN, working six months of the year variously in Nairobi, New York and Geneva.
“New Zealand has a fine reputation in the UN for being fair minded and sensible.”
After that role, she had really thought retirement was an option. “I’d had enough of roaming the world. Every time, it got harder and harder to leave home rather than easier.” Then came the royal commission.
Even now, she has not stopped working, though her new role is voluntary. People coming into the Te Awamutu Citizens Advice Bureau may not know who is behind the desk, but her colleagues do.
She does not want another full-time job. “I’m always open to do mediations and things like that. I’m not going to just stop completely; I can’t.”
But she’s at home with Peter, meeting friends, going to the opera and an occasional trip to Sydney for a concert. “My family and friends are all commenting. I keep saying I’ve become a real person again.”
Key findings
The inquiry report recommends:
■ Immediate priority to redress and compensate survivors.
■ An independent, holistic redress (puretumu torowhānui) scheme for survivors to replace current claims processes against state and faith-based institutions.
■ A Care Safety Authority to oversee registered care providers.
■ A new Care Safety Act, standards and Care Safety Principles.
■ Amend Charities Act to ensure alignment with Care Safety Act.
■ Charities must comply with care standards; deregistration an option for non-compliance.
■ Key leaders to make public apologies include the Prime Minister, the Pope, church leaders, government agencies, and bodies representing doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers and teachers.
■ Independent investigation of unmarked graves and urupā.
■ Government to accelerate work to close residences that perpetuate practices associated with abuse.
■ Invest in development of disability, mental health, educational and youth justice models of care that do not perpetuate abuse.
■ Ban pain compliance techniques.
■ Minimise and eliminate solitary confinement as soon as practicable.
■ Amend building design features (such as offices and confessional boxes) to minimise risks.
