If nothing else, we’ve put our pain on the record

Paora Moyle, a survivor of abuse in state care, will shortly receive a King’s Service Order medal for her work with the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

In this conversation with Connie Buchanan, she reflects on the prime minister’s apology, her work with the inquiry, and why she’s still fighting against the system for tamariki Māori.

 

I’m in the fourth generation of our wider whānau who had children taken by the state. I’ve seen the catastrophic impacts of that, after years spent finding my whānau again and getting to know them.

For me, straight up, the state failed in its duty to parent. It took me and my siblings from our home, said it would do a better job than our own parents, and then it did a terrible job. It harmed us as very small children and it didn’t take responsibility for that. If the state had been my parents, or any one of our whānau who were deemed to have failed as parents, it would have been prosecuted.

I was two when I first came to the notice of the state. Five when I went into an institution. And I was 18 when I was released.

I was born to a Ngāti Porou mum and a Pākehā dad, and back in those days, bicultural unions were not the done thing. My parents were breaking the social norms. They didn’t have their families’ support, and so they eloped. Very quickly Mum had a succession of children, four under the age of seven, and that was a lot for a young couple.

It was post-war, everyone was doing their bit, and Māori were being “encouraged,” shall we say, to go to the cities to work and do their duty for post-war recovery. My father went to work in the meatworks, and Mum was at home looking after four of us and missing the support of her mum and whānau. She came from that collective upbringing, where there were aunties and uncles and everyone looking after one another. Mum didn’t have that, and she quickly got very lonely. Mum and Dad started fighting, and my Pākehā grandmother called the authorities.

And when the authorities get involved with Māori children, they really get involved. It wasn’t long before we kids were uplifted into the custody of the state, as it was termed back then.

Later in life, I was able to access my Department of Social Welfare notes. When you look at those notes, in between the big black redacted lines, it’s clear that the decision to take us was built on my mother and father breaking the social norms of the time, and Mum being deemed mentally unstable because she wasn’t handling things at home, supposedly.

Us kids were made wards of the state. We got scattered among foster placements, and I eventually ended up in a faith-based institution. The state gave me to the Presbyterians.

I remember the smell of my father’s leather jacket as we went to this place. He was talking to me, saying: “It’s going to be all right. I know you’ll miss me, but I have to leave you here for a while.” And as he left me, he promised: “I’ll come back and pick you up on Sunday. It’s just for a little while.” He never came back. And here’s this little girl on Sunday waiting with a suitcase packed on the veranda of this institution. And every Sunday after that, she waits for him. Yeah, I remember all that vividly.

That place was where the abuse began. They didn’t look after us and we weren’t checked on enough by the social workers, by the people from a state that had decided to parent us. As well as what happened to me, I witnessed lots of abuse happening to other children, and mainly to Māori children.

The Māori kids were always the ones who were kept in care. The other ones often got to go home. Or they weren’t taken in the first place. But with us, they didn’t let our parents come back. It wasn’t that our parents didn’t want us — they were prevented from coming to get us. You don’t forget that kind of confusion and cutting pain.

It was white saviourism in action. They were saving the little brown children from themselves and from whānau, who the state had decided were unable to do the job properly. Whānau who they weren’t interested in resourcing or supporting.

What sat underneath that approach was a desire by the authorities to make these brown children white. That’s not something we wanted for ourselves. We wanted to stay with the people that we knew and were connected to and loved by. But the reality became that we belonged to nobody, and nobody listened.

It’s still the case today that this is a very racist country that prides itself on white saviourism. The state still gets involved with whānau in ways that are driven by a sense of white supremacy.

So I had a deep feeling of conflict about being recognised for my work with the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. On one hand, I did all the work that I’m being noted for. On the other hand, the recognition is coming from a state which acted as an abusive parent. They’re effectively saying: “Well done for standing up to me. I did a crap job, I’m still doing a crap job, but you’re resilient. You got knocked down, and you got back up again. Good on you, Paora. Here’s a medal.”

But then my whānau said: “Well, we’ve all been through the wringer. This doesn’t just belong to you, Paora. It belongs to us, too.” So they’ve been my motivation to accept it. The ceremony will happen in Auckland at the end of May, which is enough time for some whānau to come over from Australia and be a part of it.

The recognition is also a way to keep the spotlight on a social work system that still, to this day, rips tamariki away from their whānau and whakapapa.

I’ve done social work myself. In my mid to late 20s, I was fresh out of a violent relationship, and I had a newborn. Because of my background, I knew that the state would come after me. A single Māori mother. So I started doing social work in order to hide myself among them. I knew that they wouldn’t take my baby if I got really good at doing social work.

So in the 1990s, I became part of a system that I soon realised was still uplifting children. Very small children. Often babies. Taking them away from their whānau. I ended up doing the same sort of thing to other families, that had happened to me.

It felt wrong and I did a lot of thinking about how harmful it was to be a part of the machinery that was uplifting children. I began to write about it. I went and talked to my own people and found out who I was and where I was from. I learned about my whakapapa, going right back to Ruawaipū, the eponymous ancestress from whom we descend, and the significance of many other wāhine rangatira in our history. I became very caught up in that. The writing became a full-on whakapapa report as part of my social work studies.

In 1997, I finished the report which was not only whakapapa-based, but which challenged the state about the way it took tamariki away from their whakapapa. That turned into a master’s thesis in 2013 and set me on an academic path.

Over the years since, I’ve been constantly battling, confronting, opposing and resisting the white saviourism in our country, which still turns the churning cogs of social work and state care.

Social work in this country remains structurally and fundamentally lazy, because the state doesn’t believe that whānau need to be better resourced or at the decision-making table.

If the state is truly convinced that parents are abusive, then remove the abusive parents. Stop removing children from their whenua, their whakapapa, their sense of who they are, as if the children are to blame. Because that’s the most harmful act of all. So many of the thousands who came forward to tell their story to the Royal Commission told us exactly that. Being taken from whakapapa, land and history, having that connection severed, was the most harmful thing done to them.

I worked on the inquiry for six years, on and off, doing some research work, writing, advising on the final report edits, and being part of Te Ara Takatū, a key Māori advisory group. I led on a really good research report. One of our most powerful recommendations effectively said: “If you don’t love a child, you shouldn’t be making decisions about their care and wellbeing. People who love the child must do that.”

Did I grapple with working with the state on this inquiry? Absolutely. The state is the perpetrator of harm in my whānau. But in the end, it was one of the best things I’ve done, because of the survivors who fed into the knowledge base. The central, powerful thing about the inquiry is that our stories are now documented forever.

I’m looking at the survivors’ kōrero now, you know, because I’ve got boxes and boxes of documentation in my room. It’s evidence. Unrefutable evidence. If nothing else, we have that evidence on the record.

But if I had a critique of the final report, it would be that it doesn’t put enough emphasis on social work bodies in this country. It doesn’t make the point often enough that they must take responsibility for enacting the harmful status quo. Where were they all when we marched to Parliament in 2019, or when we gathered there again to hear the national apology last year?

Social workers still have the power to just go in, willy nilly, and take children away, largely based on whānau not being able to afford to feed their kids — not abuse. There’s still not enough investigation into a family’s circumstances, and actual evidence-based practice. They keep on doing the same thing. If anything, the situation is getting worse, particularly under this government.

We now have kids on the street, really young kids. The bootcamps are back, and everybody in power goes: “Oh yeah, but this time it’s different.” Even when a boy from that bootcamp got killed while he was supposed to be in the care of the state, somehow there was something wrong with that boy, not the system. It still came back on the young person. He got blamed.

In the same way, Māori are blamed for being bad parents, when what we’re really talking about is poverty, systemic racism, generations of alienation from land and whakapapa, and persistent disadvantage. They keep on blaming the ones who are harmed, as if they’ve chosen their own demise. Our kids are uplifted for reasons that are, at root, about poverty, and whānau are still being blamed for those circumstances.

I think this government is trying to clean house. They’re trying to remove any barriers — by taking away Section 7AA, by taking the teeth out of the Children’s Commission — to pave the way for private entrepreneurs. I get the feeling they want social work off their books. To sell Oranga Tamariki to people who will make mincemeat out of it, for profit.

It’s mining our babies — not minding them.

The proof of this is in the limp-dick apology we received at the end of the Royal Commission. I was right there. When I looked around, I didn’t see 273 adult survivors. I saw 273 very harmed children. People with broken hearts still carrying their suffering.

But Christopher Luxon had his paint-by-numbers key messages. He used the same lines, the same markers in his speech that were in everybody else’s too, including in the apology from Una Jagose. She should not have been there. She abused survivors who were trying to get some justice through legal processes. Then she got to stand there and try to absolve herself, instead of resigning. And the prime minister, who talked about taking responsibility, has kept her there in her job. There’s no bigger middle-digit flip to survivors than that.

The apology means nothing. Not until they back it up with no longer doing what they’ve always done. We provided the evidence and poured our hearts out. It’s their job to implement the changes we put forward.

Of course, if they were truly committed to the apology, we would already have seen a decent response come out of the very expensive Crown Response Unit. They’ve got a lot of people in there earning a lot of money, and they’re buzzing around, talking to survivors all the time, sounding very busy. But nothing of any real substance has been presented by them in the four or five years since it was set up.

Nothing substantial has been forthcoming. Yet state abuse is the biggest catastrophe, the most shameful mass act, to have occurred in this country over the last century.

Let’s talk about the layers. There are real layers to this. One of the biggest layers is the government’s disdain for us. For being poor. Being brown. Their almost hatred of us. But, I think, underneath that disdain and hatred is fear. Their fear of Māori doing well. And what’s the layer behind that? That Māori will do well enough one day to be in a position to treat them the way that they’ve treated us.

At the apology, I saw so much love and connection between survivors. And I felt a powerful sense: “You can’t harm us anymore. We’re still standing. We’re here.” That apology may not have meant anything real, but we were still there. We showed up, and we showed up in force.

What I took from Christopher Luxon’s speech was that the apology was it. The apology was the end of everything. To me, he was saying: “I’ve done my job. I’ve said sorry. You guys wanted an apology. I gave you an apology, and that’s it.”

And then the “little bit-ism” that his government might give us will happen over a very long time. Most of us are going to die before anything tangible happens. It’s complete fuckery. Systems of power that are flagrantly elusive.

The final report was a meaningful thing to be involved in. Then the curtain came down and it was over. There was nothing more to participate in. I had to leave those people, this important work that I’d been doing. And I had to start again and do something else. It was hard. I felt bereft.

What do you do in the face of that feeling? You exemplify getting off your ass and doing something for your own people. So I came home to them. These days, I work for an organisation called Te Whāriki Manawāhine O Hauraki. I’m the director of research and data sovereignty here.

We help people tell their own stories and we record them, in a way that they want it to happen. We’re developing a Hauraki whānau voices research programme to build our own pūrākau evidence. It’s largely what the Royal Commission did, but we’re doing it here at home so that our stories inform our pathways forward at a local level. It’s good, rewarding mahi.

We’re building resources that will help whānau who still have to interact with racist violent agencies that don’t have their best interests at heart. We’re reminding whānau that it’s possible to see your babies grow up and laugh and go fishing and play with one another. That you can find your own joy. Find out what makes your heart sing.

There’s no doubt in my mind that we should be deciding for ourselves, at a local level, what happens to our tamariki who are struggling. We should be resourced locally to enable them to stay on their whenua, within their whakapapa.

My work now is to keep pouring my heart into protecting tamariki from the harm caused by being uprooted from everything they know and love. I may not have been able to choose my own path as a child, but at least I’m in a position to reflect back to people in power, their lack of humanity.

As survivors, we keep on getting up every morning and doing the best we can with what we have. You focus on what’s important. What are the simple things you can carry which make a difference? I call this the paper bag approach because, as a kid, that’s all I had to carry my stuff around in. But everything that was precious to me was in that paper bag. It’s a return to simplicity. You come home to what you know, and you contribute what you can.

 

Paora Moyle (Ngāti Porou) works as director of a small research and data sovereignty unit in Hauraki. With a 30-year career in social work, Paora has completed several comprehensive research projects in Hauraki covering whānau experiences of family violence, housing poverty, agency violence, and disaster response. Known for unwavering advocacy for whānau Māori and mokopuna who are most often forcibly drafted by the New Zealand state through systemically abusive child protection processes.

Paora believes that if research about violence does not include continuing colonial violence on whānau Māori, then it’s not research. She is a staunch advocate for takatāpui and trans whānau visibility and, not least, a proud grandparent of four very loved mokopuna.

As told to Connie Buchanan, and made possible by the Public Interest Journalism Fund through NZ On Air.

E-Tangata, 2025