Apology hour brings the Solicitor-General into focus

The government’s apology for its role in decades of child abuse was received by a crowd that had heard it all before. 

A similar report landed six years ago, and although this apology was a landmark moment for the country, many of the recommendations are the same: redesign the care framework, grant survivors financial redress, and remove those still in office who played a hand in either the perpetration or the obfuscation of the abuse.

The role of the Solicitor-General

While many of the survivors welcomed the commitments made and the apologies given on November 12, one issue dominated the early stages of the event: the presence of Una Jagose, current Solicitor-General, who directly worked on behalf of the Crown to ward off survivors’ legal claims, and who then went on to lead the very body future survivors could have to deal with legally – Crown Law.

The only legal officer for the state more senior than Jagose is Attorney-General Judith Collins, who re-appointed Jagose in May for a further two years.

Jagose has a history of working on abuse cases at Crown Law, which was found by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care’s report to have aggressively fought claims by survivors. These efforts included the withholding of documents from the Police, waiting out and attempting to psych out claimants and a reliance on the statute of limitations to avoid state agencies having to front up to past wrongs.

“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 reputations,” said the report.

Jagose was involved in these efforts and was explicitly named in the redress report.

She was also personally involved in several individual cases, which Newsroom has previously documented in detail. In one of these cases, that of the first Lake Alice survivor to make a civil complaint in the ‘90s, Jagose withheld information that would have documented the use of torture at the care facility.

So, with hundreds of survivors in Parliament on Tuesday (November 12), Jagose was a constant point of discussion and a constant target of, to use a legal term, contempt.

Public Servants apologetic

Chief Executives from Oranga Tamariki, Police, Education, Health, Welfare and the Public Service Commission gave formal apologies to a crowd of survivors and politicians to begin the day. All received some degree of interruption from the crowd, but the volume and voracity of those directed at Jagose from Crown Law, alone, far outweighed the rest.

Jagose was the only speaker to pause during her remarks and wait for the crowd to quiet — such was the level of outburst. The crowd called for her to “stand down, resign,” and called her a liar on multiple occasions. “You wanted us dead,” shouted one.

The crowd did not give her a period of silence.

In what proved to be a fitting moment, the only official moment of silence from the morning session was filled with the wail of a passing police siren.

On Monday, the lead Coordination Minister for the government’s response to the Commission report Erica Stanford, told reporters she was nervous in the lead-up to the big day, and that she wanted the apology to “go really well.” She said that her team had been poring over “every little detail” to make sure it went right.

After the apology, she told reporters it “went as well as it possibly could have.”

She said that organisers expected the reaction to chief executives, “which is why we let it play out. Because actually, it was part of what was to happen today because they have such strong emotions. And yeah, it was raw.”

Luxon leads the parade

In his formal apology to the House, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said, “Clearly, words must be accompanied by actions.” This was what the survivors had been calling for throughout the day, with one interrupting the chief executives’ morning remarks to say, “Without change, it is  abuse.”

But two of the leading calls, for financial redress and the removal of Jagose, went loudly unanswered.

On Jagose, Luxon told reporters that he had “heard those concerns really clearly” and yet remained in her corner. He would not directly answer the question of whether it was appropriate that Jagose, and her superior Collins, remained in place given their roles in the wider governmental actions the Royal Commission report called a “cover-up.”

Collins, for her part, later told reporters, “There is no point going after people when they’ve already learned the problem and they’re going to fix it,” and reiterated her confidence in Jagose.

Survivors’ Complaints

Jagose, when questioned directly about survivor’s complaints, countered that she had “heard that wero before,” and believed that her commitment to the role and to taking on lessons “means that I am the right person to lead lawyers for the Government into the future.”

When asked in what other profession someone could keep their job after making a mistake like not believing survivors of abuse, Jagose answered simply, “My mistake was not to see the person behind the claim, to see the law in the file and not to see the person’s life in their hands.”

When pressed about Crown Law’s 2020 decision not to hand over medical advice relating to abuse at the Lake Alice facility to police investigators, Jagose directly answered: “What we did was work with the Police to make sure they had the information they needed.”

However, the Commission report was clear in its finding that key information was not given to investigators in that case.

But the question at the forefront of most survivors’ minds was not about Jagose’s role in suppressing past claims, those details were familiar, it was about what the government would do to right the wrongs.

For many, removing Jagose seemed to be a priority.

But beyond that, financial compensation has been a decades-long call.

This was recommended as well in the redress report, supplied to the then government two years ago by the Commission. But Luxon and Stanford were both unwilling to put a dollar value on what the sum total available to survivors will be or other details about how their newly-announced redress scheme, set to start next year, will work.

Payout of $30,000

Currently, some survivors are eligible for a $30,000 payout. Luxon was quick to say, “There is just no amount of money that makes any of this right or acceptable whatsoever,” but hastened to follow that with any description of an amount of money that could theoretically make things a bit better than they are.

When asked at the end of the press conference if $30,000 was fair, given the suffering, Luxon deflected to an answer about the complexity of the redress-redesign issue. When asked a second time, he thanked reporters and left the room.

That sum of $30,000 is less than a month of the Prime Minister’s salary, for reference.

In comparison, if a child was held at the Lake Alice facility for a full year (and many spent several three-month stints totalling several years) that same $30,000 breaks down to a payment of $82 per day, a repayment rate below the hourly minimum wage.

Survivors were not asking for a payout to “make any of this right.”

They wanted redress, but they also wanted actions to be taken to prevent children from ending up in state care in the first place.

Hipkins takes responsibility

That call was echoed by an emotional Labour Party Leader Chris Hipkins in his apology speech. He received a standing ovation from the public gallery.

Luxon had received modest applause.

Hipkins’ speech directly took responsibility not just for past government inaction, but specifically for mistakes made by his own Labour Party, as recently as the past six years.

“The last Labour government did not act more quickly to put in place an independent redress system,” said Hipkins.

He said that representatives of Labour had played a role in ignoring and shaming survivors, “drowning them out.”

“We, the government and representatives of the Crown owe a huge debt to you. Redress has taken far, far too long, to the point where many have already died or fear they might do so before getting any compensation,” he said.

Both the Labour and National Parties have been, and one currently, is in a position to answer the calls of survivors. Both parties expressed a firm commitment to putting things right above politics and to seek redress options as a priority. But redress was far from the only thing called for.

In the words of Tu Chapman, a morehu (survivors) speaker from the morning’s remarks, “You owe us, right now.” She called for the Prime Minister to “put his money where his mouth is.”

Fox Meyer is a Political Reporter based in Wellington. The above article, which appeared on the Newsroom website, has been reproduced here under a Special Agreement.