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| You Don’t Want To Know: In the end, our collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. Loyalty and obedience are guaranteed not by what the state reveals to us, but by what its servants keep hidden. |
AMONG THE MANY QUESTIONS raised by the Abuse in Care inquiry is the cruel nature of the state’s responses. Among the worst examples of this official cruelty is the way in which, over many years, Crown Law impeded the timely compensation of victims. There is something deeply troubling about the state’s legal division, with its effectively inexhaustible resources (at least when compared to those available to the victims of abuse and their legal representatives) waging a war of financial attrition against these extraordinarily vulnerable citizens. What is it that makes public servants so determined to prevent the state from acknowledging liability for even its most egregious sins? Why is the state so vicious in its own defence?
The best place to start looking for answers is in the psychological realm of human solidarity and institutional pride. One has only to think of military units and the esprit de corps so crucial to their effectiveness. In a social environment where loyalty is identified as the supreme virtue, anything threatening that loyalty must be confronted and destroyed. All other virtues, such as justice, accountability and truth-telling, are deemed to be of secondary importance. Indeed, if the choice is between defending the unit and responding to one or more of these secondary considerations, then loyalty to the unit will always win.
Since almost every state traces its origins to bodies of armed men, it is hardly to be wondered at that state institutions place a similar premium on institutional loyalty. No less than an effective military unit, or army, the state is acutely vulnerable to anything likely to undermine its servants’ morale. Admitting to error, or, worse still, to criminal behaviour, raises fears that the loyalty of the state’s subjects/citizens will be undermined.
A state that admits to making one mistake raises instantly the possibility that it has made others. Its decisions, formerly absolute and unchallengeable, come to be seen as tentative, subject to revision, or even reversal. Such a state will find it increasingly difficult to impose its will. Certainly, it will lose the ability to inspire fear. And a state that is not feared runs a palpable risk of not being obeyed.
Paradoxically, it is the state’s power to enforce decisions that are in clear violation of both reason and morality that inspires the most fear in the minds of its subjects/citizens. The message conveyed is one of savagery and unresponsiveness. Like James Cameron’s Terminator: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop” – until it has utterly crushed its challenger/s.
That this is how the New Zealand state sees itself, or, at least, used to see itself, is revealed with particular clarity in the Arthur Allan Thomas case. No matter how much new evidence was presented; no matter how compelling the arguments in favour of Thomas’s acquittal, the Court of Appeal repeatedly upheld his convictions. Undaunted by the public’s outrage at the Court’s apparent willingness to uphold an obvious injustice, the Judiciary’s most senior representatives made it clear that they would not be persuaded to set Thomas free. The Court of Appeal simply could not be seen to have got it wrong.
To free Thomas, one part of the state was ultimately required to wage war upon another. The Executive, in the form of New Zealand’s pugnacious Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, simply outmanoeuvred the Judiciary by convening a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Thomas conviction. Significantly, this was not headed by a member of the New Zealand Judiciary, but by an Australian judge known for his independence of mind.
No longer protected by the courts, furious members of the New Zealand Police (which did not emerge well from the Inquiry) would regularly turn up to the Royal Commission’s hearings and hurl abuse at the Aussie interloper. The cops never did accept their culpability in the false conviction and imprisonment of Thomas, and the Court of Appeal never forgave Muldoon for effectively over-ruling its judgements. Second-guessing the New Zealand state is not a game for the faint-hearted!
But, if the injustices meted out to Arthur Allan Thomas (as well as, twenty years later, Peter Ellis) left an abiding unease in the public’s mind about the trustworthiness of its justice system, then its response to any confirmation that thousands of young New Zealanders had been terribly abused whilst in the custody and under the supervision of the New Zealand state would presumably be several orders of magnitude greater than simple “unease”. No rational citizen could ever again repose the slightest trust in the wisdom and benevolence of state institutions.
Small wonder then that so much was done for so long to prevent the awful truth about abuse in care from penetrating the public’s consciousness. The resistance of Crown Law, no matter how outrageous, was, in purely legal terms, entirely understandable. To acknowledge the state’s responsibility for decades of abusive behaviour would carry the not insignificant risk of leaving taxpayers liable for compensation amounting to billions of dollars. Drawing out the process to the maximum extent possible may not have been in the least bit compassionate – or just – but it did present itself as the most effective way of reducing the state’s liability. While the victims of its failings are all-too-mortal, the state is not. Barring bloody revolution and/or defeat in war, the state is immortal.
The other factor which the state can count on in matters such as the Abuse in Care inquiry is the degree to which so many of its citizens identify themselves with its interests. Imperfect though it may be, New Zealand’s democratic system of government makes it relatively easy for the state to present itself as the servant of the people it purportedly serves.
Like the soldiers of a regiment, many New Zealand citizens offer their country an inexhaustible quantum of loyalty. Like the regimental colours, New Zealand’s flag is seen by patriots as quasi-sacred. Whistle-blowers seeking to besmirch the honour of the nation for which it stands should expect no mercy.
Those dumfounded by the quietude of the New Zealand public’s response to the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care shouldn’t be. Quite apart from the fact that the Inquiry’s most disturbing evidence is buried away in the millions of words printed in the Report’s sixteen volumes, the half-century inquired into (1950-1999) is now at least a quarter-of-a-century removed from the New Zealand of today. That said, at some place, buried deep in the Kiwi Collective Conscience, lies the realisation that abuse on such a scale couldn’t have happened had generations of New Zealanders not quietly decided to look the other way.
In the end, this collective aversion to disreputable realities is what all states rely upon. It is not what the state reveals to us that guarantees our loyalty and obedience, it is what its servants keep hidden.
This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Thursday, 8 August 2024.
8 comments:
It still boggles my mind that Dr Selwyn Leeks - New Zealand's Dr Mengele - was able to live openly in Melbourne from 1978 until his death in 2022.
I've no idea what the motivations of the bureaucracy were in delaying justice. But then bureaucrats have very little compunction about spending other people's money in order to defend themselves and their predecessors.
But just about every Christian denomination has by now been credibly accused of allowing, or rather covering up cases of abuse by church leaders. These are not bureaucrats, but people whose religion allegedly forbids them to tell lies, or to engage in sex outside of marriage, or to engage in same-sex relations. All of which seem to have been observed more in the breach than the observance, and almost all of which were covered up to the detriment of the victims, not to mention transferring some of the offenders to other jurisdictions where they continued to offend. And they are not nearly as accountable as government bureaucrats given their circumstances as private organisations. I think what pisses me off the most is that these abuses were criminal. We don't seem have any legal obligation to report criminal behaviour but there should be a moral obligation the very least. Churches are meant to be moral institutions are they not?
And although many of these claims are historical, these church abuses continued well into the 21st century and are still happening today. As the meme goes "We only claim to speak for God but somehow we are held to a higher standard." (No true Scotsman defences not accepted.)
I am reminded of the recent conviction of Lucy Letby in the UK. Scientists and statisticians say the evidence against her is deeply flawed. The hospital has now admitted it covered up a bacterial infection in the neonatal unit's water supply. Staff were told they would lose their jobs if they provided evidence on behalf of Letby. The Crown Prosecution have admitted 'mistakes' in the evidence submitted on who was in the room. Vital theories on natural causes of death have been suppressed in the UK. Yet still the judicial system will not budge.
Any virtue, taken to excess, is a vice. Loyalty to one's - let's call it 'peer unit', be it organisation, enterprise, community, family or nation - is all too apt to become 'my unit is always right' - a moronic stance; or 'my unit, right or wrong', which led many people to the scaffold at Nuremberg.
No government - or any other 'peer unit' - ought ever to make that demand of its members. That is the road to totalitarianism - a road towards which destination the US, UK and many NATO members have already travelled far; and this country seems bid to follow along.
It has been said that a measure of a country is to be found in its treatment of its weakest members. This country has continually been wanting, perhaps mollified from self-realisation by the soothing pats it bestows upon its own back.
That I have good reason to feel gratitude for the country I was born in, does not persuade me to give it more loyalty than I believe it to be due. Much less is loyalty due from the people it abandoned or mistreated
Cheers,
Ion A. Dowman
There is a lot to unpack here Chris. Having said that, Your disturbing analysis of the abuse our state has either metered out itself or just condoned is hard to criticise. Some examples you have used however have, for me, a simple explanation. The state takes decades to address its wrong doing simply to blunt the impact of the redress needed. Those in question who have suffered are less in number, those responsible at the time are not directly involved anymore for the most part. Time has diluted the wrong doing. It’s wrong and corrupt but that’s why these things are dragged out. With the Thomas case and many others I believe the need for the police to show competence and results corrupts them to, on some occasions, manufacture evidence to cover up their own mishandled investigation. More often than not those responsible don’t face the laws they have broken and expect the public to uphold. The Ellis case was different because it was similar to a puritan witch hunt. Not just the authorities were at fault but large numbers of NZrs were caught up in the mob condemnation of Ellis because at the time our small minds saw any male as a potential child abuser. For me all of NZ should take responsibility for that one. One example of how our legal system holds the ultimate power over an individual and doubles down on that power whether right or wrong, is when a prisoner has served the required sentence but denied parole because they still maintain innocence. I’ve never understood how that is good law. The State is guilty of plenty but the state and its institutions are made up of people who like the rest of us sometimes look the other way or are simply complicit to things we know are wrong. It’s human nature warts and all
The litany of governments not addressing culpability and ignoring suffering perpetrated upon its own citizens (particularly by a state agency) makes one acutely cynical about the integrity of democracy. To this day, I still seethe how our Vietnam veterans who were subjected to Agent Orange, suffered slow, early cancer deaths. Many of their offspring were born with congenital defects. Yet, successive governments waited for them to die one by one carefully avoiding any responsibility. A shameful blight on New Zealand democratic history.
One of the key problems is we remain bedded in the Anglo-Saxon adversarial model. We tend to forget there are other models of truth and justice. Inquisitorial justice models are found throughout Europe and and historical to Celtic cultures. Most noticeably, it is in line with traditional Polynesia systems, and is most obvious in the Waitangi Tribunal model, which in itself has influenced international truth and reconciliation tribunals. Narrative mediation can be used in family court issues and our youth justice model was world leading.
So why are we still invested in the adversarial model? It is a legal system that suits those with resources and disadvantages those without.
Chris your thoughtful and scholarly think pieces earn their genuine creds ... whereas with "others" their contributions would/ could be seen as cynical self serving and probably ill informed. Your consistent high quality column is compulsory reading for students of our country's public policies.
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