New Zealand accepts Phillips inquiry after agencies missed a four-year concealment

The New Zealand government on 15 September released the final report of the Public Inquiry into the Disappearance of the Phillips Children and accepted every one of its nine recommendations. Social Development Minister Louise Upston apologised directly to the children. She said agencies did not take all practicable steps to protect them.

Tom Phillips first took the children into the bush near Marokopa for 18 days in September 2021. He took them back in December 2021 and kept them out of sight for nearly four years. Police shot him dead on 8 September 2025. An officer was critically injured. The children had lived, the minister said, in isolation from family, community and wider society, in squalid conditions that stripped them of the ordinary goods of a New Zealand childhood.

What the inquiry was asked to test

Attorney-General instructions set up the inquiry on 24 November 2025. Former High Court justice Simon Moore KC sat as the sole member. He delivered the report to the Governor-General on 21 July 2026. The published version appeared with the government response on Tuesday.

Moore was asked whether agencies took all practicable steps to keep the children safe, including steps that might have stopped the second disappearance; whether they looked for the children in time once they were gone; whether they dealt properly with the Family Court; and how Phillips obtained and kept a firearms licence, weapons and ammunition. He made 41 findings and nine recommendations.

The central finding is blunt. The harm of isolation was underplayed, minimised or overlooked for long periods. Concerns from the maternal whanau were often treated as a parenting dispute. Agencies worked well together at times. A more consistent joint approach, Moore wrote, could have prevented the second disappearance and brought the children back sooner.

Missed turns the report names

RNZ listed several of the failures that sit under that conclusion. Police did not start a search after the first disappearance and again after Phillips's ute was found. They did not pass on details about his drinking or about worries over firearms. Oranga Tamariki dismissed concerns from the children's mother and did not tell the Family Court about those concerns or about the police file.

Police Commissioner Richard Chambers accepted one later miss in public. In May 2023 a woman had Phillips in her car and photographed him. Officers were diverted. Chambers said that if that lead had been handled on time, police might have narrowed the search area then. Deputy Commissioner Jill Rogers pushed back on the larger claim that the case could have been ended earlier. She said the investigation was complex, that the report also records diligence over four years, and that no one can now say when the outcome would have changed. She called the 2023 sighting a golden opportunity that was still not as simple as walking into the bush and bringing the children out.

What the government has already changed

Upston is leading the response. She appeared with Chambers and Oranga Tamariki chief executive Amanda Malu. The family received the report on Tuesday. Chambers said he wants to meet them.

Police have rewritten missing-persons policy so that it covers children who are deliberately concealed or isolated, not only children who wander or are snatched in public. They have also changed the model used for long, complex investigations. Oranga Tamariki, Police and Health NZ have updated the Child Protection Protocol so that deliberate concealment, prolonged isolation and control of access count as harm in their own right. Those are paper changes. The inquiry's point is that the old paper already contained enough power if agencies had used it together.

The firearms chapter is unfinished business in public remarks. The terms of reference required Moore to look at how Phillips kept weapons for years while he was a wanted man with three children. The government accepted the recommendations that flow from that chapter. It has not yet published a timetable for licence reviews that would catch a similar file earlier.

Upston said the findings come with the benefit of hindsight. That sentence does not cancel the apology. The children spent almost four years outside school, outside health records and outside the Family Court. The test for the new protocol is whether the next file that looks like a messy custody fight is treated as concealment before the second disappearance, not after a shooting.