Wellington releases the Phillips inquiry and accepts all nine recommendations

New Zealand published the public inquiry into the disappearance of the Phillips children on 15 September and accepted every recommendation in it. The report, written by former High Court judge Hon Simon Moore KC, had reached the Governor-General on 21 July. It stayed off the public record until Cabinet finished its response.

Tom Phillips first took his three children into the bush around Marokopa, on the west coast of the North Island, for 18 days in September 2021. He took them back in December 2021. They remained hidden until 8 September 2025, when Phillips was fatally shot after he wounded a police officer. The children were found the same day.

The inquiry asked whether agencies took all practicable steps to protect the children before they vanished, whether they engaged properly with the Family Court, and whether they acted in time once the children were gone. It also examined how Phillips obtained and kept a firearms licence, weapons and ammunition.

Moore found that agencies worked together at times, but that a more consistent approach could have stopped the second disappearance and shortened the search. Police Commissioner Richard Chambers said officers had filed a report of concern with Oranga Tamariki, the child-protection agency, and that this was the right move. He also said there were gaps in information-sharing and follow-up. Those gaps, he said, sit with both agencies.

Chambers went further on one missed chance. He accepted that Phillips and the children could have been found in 2023 if police had followed an eyewitness tip with the focus the inquiry now says it required. In the early months, he said, the investigation did not get the staff and attention it needed. More resource arrived later, once it was clear Phillips meant to stay hidden. The inquiry says that shift should have come sooner.

Social Development Minister Louise Upston led the government response at a media conference with Chambers and Oranga Tamariki chief executive Amanda Malu. Upston said the findings benefit from hindsight, and she still accepted the core conclusion: agencies did not take all practicable steps to protect the children. She described almost four years spent away from family, school and ordinary childhood, in conditions she called squalid.

The government has accepted all nine recommendations. Police said work is already under way on the Child Protection Protocol and the Missing Persons policy. Chambers said he will work with Malu on information-sharing. He also said he wants to meet the family. The family received the report on Tuesday. As of the afternoon briefing they had not yet sat down with the agencies.

The Attorney-General had already stretched the inquiry by a month in late July so Moore could clarify one point. A small amount of material remains withheld from the published version under section 11B of the Family Court Act, to protect Family Court proceedings and the administration of justice.

The terms of reference were set on 24 November 2025, two months after the shooting. The search had covered a large stretch of rugged west-coast bush for nearly four years, with help at times from the New Zealand Defence Force. The inquiry does not treat the case as a template for every missing-child file. It does treat it as a test of whether existing protocols work when a parent is determined, armed and familiar with the ground.

What happens next is administrative rather than theatrical. The Child Protection Protocol has to be rewritten so that a report of concern produces a recorded conversation between police and Oranga Tamariki, not only a form. The Missing Persons policy has to say when a disappearance of children with a parent who already has charges pending stops being treated as a difficult family file and becomes a priority search. Firearms licensing will be reviewed against the facts of how Phillips kept access to weapons.

Those are paper changes. The open question left by the report is whether the 2023 tip, if it had been worked hard at the time, would have ended the case two years before the shooting. Chambers has now said yes, it might have. That admission is the part of the 15 September release that will sit on the file longer than the nine accepted recommendations.