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6:00 am, September 21st, 2026 - 42 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Ok, so we may have found someone to blame but who is responsible?
In my limited contact with social workers and those charged with care for youth, I find them to be dedicated, involved and professional.
Is OT yet another example of underfunding? What is the client load of yr average social worker? Another example of neo-liberalism's market focus failing in its objectives.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/crime-and-justice/1463055/a-very-capable-and-loving-father-oranga-tamariki-s-litany-of-failures-in-the-tom-phillips-case
Like the health system, failings that i've seen are in funding support and management.
The workers we have encountered have, almost without exception, been caring and dedicated.
I don't mind the structural mea culpa's, but the person to blame is the guy who kidnapped his children for years, separated them from social services, security, health services, relatives, friends, education, and any human contact, controlled them in fear and kept them in squalor, for years.
He was the parent throughout. He had the gun. He is to blame. He is responsible.
There are folk like Philips throughout society. Someone who has lost their reason is not fully culpable.
But for the systemic 'mea culpas' that you "don't mind", Philip's offending could well have been lessened or not occured at all.
The underfunding is not because of a lack of money, it is a lack of will. There are more important priorities eg delivering on election
bribedonations and giving billions to landlords and easing the bright line threshold.Just stop with that nonsense.
The kidnapping into the forest occurred because Phillips wanted to spite the childrens' mother and avoid the Family Court custody proceedings and deny her all access. Who knows in some couterfactual world about some other thing. This is what happened and this is who did it.
Ministers Upston and Luxon have done their apologies, but they are wrong-headed as well: Mr Philipps was a savage and a kidnapper and thief who shot Police, and also had the skill to control his own children for nearly four years and ensured not a single public agency got near them.
That is where this spotlight should be.
agree. But given he was what he was, how could society have protected those children?
The police, OT etc exist for that purpose, and they failed, badly.
I think the best reasonable comparator is to NZ mass murder: Ratima, Schlaepfer, Bain, Raurimu. When you look at the mass murders of families that have taken place in this country, they are mostly guys who were nearly insane and filled with rage. It sure ain't fair to the mother because she couldn't have done more. There's not much stopping these guys beforehand because they know it's the one big thing they will do and they are not likely to live through it.
What will likely come out in a year is the book that describes how he descended. That's where the useful truth is now.
Part of the problem here is the court suppression, so we don't know the full details (rightfully, and we can't talk about it on TS). But even given that, it's clear there were issues with both police and OT, that might have made a difference.
eg the sisters apparently approached the authorities after the first bush abduction and said he is a serious thread, and were ignored.
I see Belladonna explained in depth below.
What will possibly come out in a year is a Netflix programme. Again, the childrens' mother was told by the police about their 'hooking up' with the Netflix crew. She argued that she did not agree to her children being part of any documentary. They said 'tough titty, you have no power to affect this'.
I have to say, she was extraordinarily strong under the very worst of circumstances.
I agree. OT in particular, appear to have very badly misjudged the situation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/17/tom-phillips-nz-inquiry-who-why-how-fugitive-father-kids-new-zealand-police
Given that Phillips had gone bush with the children, and OT staff had had no interaction with either Phillips or the children, it is difficult to see what they were basing their judgement on.
As professional social workers, we do expect them to exercise professional judgement – which you can only do if you've actually had some interaction with the family concerned.
Not only had they no interaction with Phillips or the children concerned, they neglected to meet with the step-daughters – who had valid concerns from lived experience.
Really, this is inexcusable. Yes, you might theoretically discount some of what they had to say (messy break-up situations rarely have complete truth on either side) – but to neglect to meet them at all is utterly inexplicable.
The only conclusion is that they had entirely bought the KoolAid from Phillips' parents – and believed them unconditionally. Which should trigger a professional conduct review of the social workers concerned – at work (if they are still employed by OT), or through their professional body (if they have moved on). Not for the outcome (which they couldn't have predicted), but for their biased conduct in handing the case.
And, while police and OT didn't communicate at all (AFAICS) – it's entirely probable that the complacency in both organizations wouldn't have resulted in a changed outcome. Nor do I have confidence, from the anodyne responses from the OT head and the police commissioner, that anything is going to change materially in either organization.
I can't get my head around the police and OT not talking to each other.
My speculation here: the geography plays a big part. This all happened in a rural area, where everybody knows each other's business, especially the local cops, who are perhaps more matey with some than with others.
While OT, I'm guessing, was some distance away in the nearest big town, hard to get to. It may not be a failing of The Police, rather of the specific police involved.
What a dipshit idea the Netflix doco was, for example. How intrusive on the kids' future to allow an international real-crime doco to 'shadow the police'? Yes, make the family suffering live for ever on the web.
Yet now I get the feeling 'protecting the childrens' privacy' is being used as cover for the cock-ups, the kids' suffering for years, and that of their other parent and sibs, the death of one person, and the severe damage of another.
Ad I didn't realise that you had such a simple, tunnel-visioned mind. We are all under pressure in this modern age, so much is shown as being possible, when viewing the visual media, but for the individual so many doors closed. We have to learn to live with half-truths or half-lies and know when to tell the difference. People's minds get twisted.
Those who take charge of any entity these days are often quite uninterested in its kaupapa, they just want to manage it to a standard recipe. People hope for and expect certain individual outcomes, and then standard doesn't match their way or even close. Phillips was headstrong and needed to work with a mediator and family counsellor to find a way to father his children and teach them the basics also not to cut them off from their mother even if he didn't agree with her. If everyone who is a parent had a parenting allowance paid them, which was dependent upon going to classes talking about child and family psychology, developmental needs, good food and sleep and emotional requirements, that would go far in changing young parents' outcomes and eventually improve society by a noticeable degree.
We had mediation etc going strong at one time. But pragmatism now rules the day, blame and lack of understanding about human needs especially those of children now rule at social welfare level anyway; (this also applies to people who send their young to boarding schools).
Instead of people being given knowledge and experience to make their own way in life they get authoritarian edicts. Phillips rebelled. Authority said he was bad for his children. They shot him in his children's presence, a lifelong traumatic event. Good government, bad father. Neither of those views is totally correct, or sensible.
"Authority said he was bad for his children."
He was bad for his children. I'm sure not even you dispute that.
"They shot him in his childrens presence."
One child. He drew first, shot a Policeman in the head twice with a hunting rifle that he had loaded. Then he was shot in return by the other attending Policeman.
Philipps is responsible for this shooting event.
Authority was 100% correct about that, as demonstrated by events.
More to the point, he started a firefight with police while one of his own children was close to him in what would be the line of their inevitable return fire. If anything, Authority woefully underestimated how bad he was for his children.
This wouldn't have affected Phillips one iota. Nor any of the other abusive parents (usually fathers) who kill their kids in a murder-suicide – simply to inflict the greatest possible mental harm on their partner.
Not just 'authority' saying Phillips was a bad father – his actions condemned him.
The fact that you appear to be validating him, says an awful lot about you, and where you stand in protecting children.
I strongly get the feeling that private-school educated Phillips, from a well-known, well-respected local Pakeha farming family, appeared more credible to OT and the police than his Maori partner, who seems to be struggling to see her children post-rescue. They appear to be under guardianship by their paternal grandparents, with Family Court proceedings underway. They very clearly enabled Phillips presenting as sane and coherent after his first run-off.
The mother was not seen by police as a victim in the abduction of her children. The police denied her and her two older children victim support when she reached out for psychological help. They also omitted to tell her that they were dropping charges against aiders and abettors (reading between the lines, likely including Phillips’s family).
Mahirangi Forbes (fired from RNZ the other day) interviewed her in Aug, it's harrowing.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/crime-and-justice/847951/he-was-a-dictator-mother-of-marokopa-children-speaks-out-about-her-relationship-with-tom-phillips
this is my guess too. That agencies thought him more credible than the children's mother and step sisters. Institutional sexism and racism. But it's a guess.
This substack from Forbes is essential reading on the women and their fight to get the state to protect the children.
https://mihiforbes.substack.com/p/marokopa-they-were-telling-the-truth
I agree that we don't know the reasons that the various state agencies involved felt that Phillips was a more credible parent to have day-to-day care.
My suggestion is that in custody cases, unless both parents are in agreement – home-schooling is not an option. Because school provides a valuable set of eyes on children who may be undergoing coercion or abuse.
I'd also be very concerned (in this case) over assigning guardianship to the grandparents (Phillips' parents) who historically failed to protect the children from their father.
In the late 60's early 70's I worked as a social worker for the forerunner of OT – Child Welfare. My case load was consistently over 100 boys ranging from 10 – 17 years old.
Even the it was recognised that the optimal social work case load was less than 40.
I have no idea how heavy the current case load for social workers is now.
I'm disgusted by the police and OT statements since the report came out. Talking up their staff is all well and good, but they needed to just stand up and say 'we failed these children'.
So while I think underfunding is likely to be an issue especially with OT, I think there are institutional culture issues at play. See the comments in this thread about who trusted Philips and his family over the women, and why.
My understanding is that a big part of the issue is co-operation and coordination between agencies. With an overwhelming concern over the privacy of the information. In cases of child-welfare, the actual welfare of the children must over-ride any privacy concerns.
From the privacy commissioner
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/marokopa-children-inquiry-agencies-feared-sharing-information-upston-says/VE2GZ5YO2NFO3J7OQ4Y47Q4MIE/
I think there's a broader systemic problem here than simply asking whether individual social workers, or even OT, did their jobs properly.
I should probably declare that I have rather more personal experience of this system than I would like. I've spent much of the last decade caught in a very difficult Family Court situation involving my wife's former husband. It has been expensive, painful and exhausting. I've been investigated by OT, had my professional standing threatened, faced repeated attempts to exclude me from my stepchildren's lives, and had nasty allegations made about me publicly.
And despite all of that, I still basically trust the system.
I've seen social workers and other professionals trying to make extraordinarily difficult decisions with incomplete and contradictory information. I've also been on the receiving end of investigations I didn't particularly enjoy, but I understand why allegations involving children have to be investigated rather than dismissed because the person accused says they aren't true.
The problem, in my experience, is that we have a process which looks quite reasonable on paper but can exacerbate the harm in practice.
Every individual safeguard makes sense. Investigate allegations. Hear both sides. Give people procedural fairness. Be cautious about separating children from parents. Allow decisions to be challenged. Don't make life-changing decisions on the basis of untested accusations.
But when a dispute continues for years, those same safeguards can create a system that is painfully slow, extraordinarily expensive and vulnerable to manipulation by someone sufficiently determined to keep using it.
And there's a genuine dilemma here. We want the system to recognise abuse, coercion and manipulation quickly. But we also want it to be fair, impartial and based on evidence. Those objectives aren't always easy to reconcile. A system empowered to act much faster will sometimes act on incomplete information and get things badly wrong.
As for Phillips himself, I don't think there's much ambiguity about where responsibility for his own actions lies. Whatever grievances he believed he had with the Family Court, OT, his former partner or anyone else, he made his own choices and ultimately paid an enormous price for them.
But recognising his responsibility doesn't tell us how the situation was allowed to continue for so long.
That's where I think the harder questions begin. What could the agencies realistically have done differently, given the information and powers available to them at the time? What changes would have allowed them to act earlier without creating a system in which the state can intervene in families on the basis of allegations that haven't been properly tested?
And I'm particularly interested in the people outside the system who rallied around Phillips and helped turn him into some sort of folk hero: the good father standing up against an unreasonable mother, the Family Court and the state.
Having experienced how messy these disputes can actually be, that certainty worries me. Sometimes the person telling you that the system is persecuting them may genuinely have been treated badly. Sometimes there's considerably more to the story.
So yes, we should scrutinise OT, the Police and the Family Court and ask what they could have done differently. Resources and caseloads may well be part of that.
But I don't think "underfunding" or "neoliberalism" alone gets us very far. These institutions are being asked to make extraordinarily consequential decisions about families using imperfect information, while people outside those institutions can actively make the situation harder.
Sometimes there simply aren't good options. The question shouldn't just be who we can blame, but how we design a system that does less harm while still being fair to everyone caught inside it.
The Family Court could start, as happens in many US states, with 'enacted or introduced legislation promoting equal or near-equal parenting time' as the default. It's messy and more expensive to organise, and from personal experience, it pays to have neutral 3rd-party handover to minimise friction.
'Landmark research by Linda Nielsen (Wake Forest University, 2018) analyzing 60 studies found that children in shared physical custody had better outcomes on virtually every measure compared to children in sole custody — regardless of the initial level of parental conflict.'
https://brillemos.org/en/blog/shared-custody-us-guide
And we do have legislation reining in vexacious litigation.
https://www.justice.govt.nz/family/litigant-abuse-orders/
But an awful lot depends on the quality of the lawyer you end up with. My first was a horror who made my case worse and refused to listen to me: I fired her, at great cost.
Sure. I think shared care is, in most cases, a perfectly sensible starting point.
But it's not a cure-all, nor is it appropriate in every situation. The overriding consideration still has to be the welfare and best interests of the individual child.
What happens when you have nominally equal shared care but one parent simply won't cooperate? What happens when changeovers themselves become opportunities for harassment, control or further abuse? What happens when one parent continually breaches the parenting arrangement?
You can mitigate some of that with neutral third-party changeovers, supervised contact, detailed Parenting Orders and enforcement. But at some point the particular circumstances of the family have to matter more than maintaining a predetermined 50/50 split.
So I'd be quite comfortable starting from the proposition that children generally benefit from meaningful relationships with both parents. I'm much less comfortable turning that into a legal presumption that equal parenting time is necessarily in the best interests of every child.
Supermarkets were never really on the menu – can I interest you in some other NZ assets?
Richard Dale cartoon (19 Sept 2026), in the New Zealand Herald, 21 Sept 2026
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mark-stephens-cbe-1446539_genius-satirist-morten-morland-2025-depicting-activity-7283158042215383040-61bZ
Daniel Vernon, 26 June 2026
https://yeehawtheboys.substack.com/p/the-fight-against-the-conservation
Divide…and Rule. Case in point : NACT1 divide…We on the Left Rule Nov '26 !
Seymour….a veritable Master of Minimisation, "at one point" ? (and baiting : (
A bigger issue than the policy is the continuing price paid by Luxon and National for brazenly lying about the leadership challenge. Pretending that it was only ever Penk and there was no issue … the resulting loss of credibility now affects everything they say. In short, it's classic "Boy who cried wolf".
From that RNZ link above:
Luxon pleaded ignorance of National MPs calling for Seymour to stop the policy.
"I'm not aware of that. I'm just saying to you, caucus backs the policies."
So obviously National MPs are talking to Seymour, who happily tells the media about it and gets the win. (And even if Luxon is telling the truth, it doesn't matter any more. Wolf!).
"Reflection on a coup attempt." – Sharon Murdoch, 14 August 2026
https://x.com/domesticanimal/status/2087985665673936928
There is only one party in Parliament in the last 20 years that has successfully separated a wholesaler from a retailer.
And it's not National.
The Telecom solution.
Exactly. It was a true liberation moment for the telecomms market, for industry, and for consumers.
Here's some good news, especially considering the cost of fuel.
Food prices rise 1.9% annually as restaurant meals lead increases – NZ Herald
And mince is $24.99/kg but we don't know how lucky we are.
/
Jimmy-you do realise that this means that food costs that were already exorbitant have gone up a further 2%?
In what universe is this good news?
There must be some world where the national industry protection instincts of NZFirst, the local food resilience intent of the Greens, and the supermarket duopoly breakup plans of National and Labour, all intersect, somewhere in the real world … somewhere like Hastings, where New Zealand's main vegetable growers …
… some time like now now … when the growers are just facing ruin as the big buyer-processor-distributor factories just decide to all pack up and leave us:
https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/09/18/growers-fighting-to-save-local-vege-processing-ask-govt-to-look-at-bigger-picture/
Yes. You'd think it was a no brainer for at least one of the parties to jump on in election year. And that there would be enough buy in to start putting in place the processes to keep it viable till after the election.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/1493408/new-zealand-and-australia-deepen-naval-partnership
Worker Safety rules weakened.
NACT policy NZF admits this is bad.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/health/1483113/his-life-was-worth-nothing-to-them-heartbroken-families-speak-out-against-work-safety-rule-changes
This is why the CoC will be voted out on November 7.
They see only profits and costs, not lives. People have had enough.
Surgeons used to 'tap' patients and bleed them – supposed to be good and help in recovery from injury etc. NZ is being bled perhaps? Hastings left without its heritage industry started by Wattie; Kaitaia with its loss of Juken making board for NZ and Japan. Both would have been viable businesses one would expect. Why was power so expensive in sunny Northland? Hawkes Bay processing was nearly on site which would have been efficient and effective you'd think.
We can't let foreigners come in and exploit and then leave the country at will, for short-term advantage (to someone in government and the business owners). Think Cook Islands Sheraton Resort project – the story.
The sad story – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheraton_Resort_Rarotonga
2026 – Apr.23/26 The Grand Resort : Now dream and illusion apparently. (Note at end of listing – 'All renders are artist impressions only'.) https://www.grandrarotonga.com/resort
Should have been great but … https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/125410148/the-derelict-cook-islands-hotel-where-goats-are-the-only-guests
[The Cook Islands government remained liable for the interest on the loan, and it grew to $120 million, almost bankrupting the country. The resulting government austerity was a major driver in a wave of emigration to New Zealand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheraton_Resort_Rarotonga]
Some photos – https://www.reddit.com/r/AbandonedPorn/comments/axdlbb/sheraton_resort_rarotonga_cook_islands_abandoned/
We need to keep stable so we can be a place of last resort in the Pacific! Let us live within our own sphere, not a western luxury soap bubble.