A retired High Court judge has been handed one of the more uncomfortable jobs in the state redress system, deciding whether survivors of abuse in state care who have serious criminal convictions of their own will be paid anything at all.
Paul Davison KC has been appointed Independent Redress Officer for a five year term starting today, 1 August 2026. The appointment was announced by Erica Stanford, the Lead Coordination Minister for the Government’s response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, and it brings into force the first working piece of the redress law Parliament passed at the end of June.
The role exists because of a decision the Government made about a small group of survivors. Under the new system, a person who was abused in state care but who has since been convicted of a serious violent or sexual offence, and sentenced to five years or more in prison, is presumed to be ineligible for a financial redress payment. They are not shut out completely. They can apply to the Independent Redress Officer, who can set the presumption aside.
The test the officer has to apply is whether paying that person would bring the redress system into disrepute. If satisfied it would not, the officer can approve the payment. If not, the application fails. There is no equivalent hurdle for any other survivor. The officer will also consider exemption applications from survivors who have an advanced terminal illness, a group the system is meant to move quickly for.
The law sets out who is allowed to hold the position. The officer must be independent of the agencies that pay redress, and must be a retired judge, a King’s Counsel, or a lawyer with at least seven years of experience. They also have to understand both the criminal justice system and the findings of the royal commission, which is a narrower field than it sounds.
Davison fits it closely. He is a former High Court judge who has sat on a Divisional Court of Appeal, and in 2025 the Government appointed him independent arbiter to determine financial redress for the survivors tortured at the Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital Child and Adolescent Unit, a process that required him to weigh individual accounts of what happened to children in state institutions decades ago.
“This role will require the same attributes and provides an important independent mechanism for considering redress for survivors who are also serious offenders,” Stanford said in the announcement. “I would like to thank Hon Davison for his willingness to undertake this important role.”
Officials have consistently described the group affected as small. Of the survivors who have completed the declaration and criminal record checking process so far, fewer than 2 percent have been identified as falling within the serious offender provision. The Government’s argument during the bill’s passage was that the integrity of the whole system matters, and that a payment to a serious violent or sexual offender risks damaging public confidence in redress for everyone else.
That argument did not persuade the Opposition. Labour voted against the bill when it passed its final reading in late June, and NEWS WIRE reported at the time that the party’s children spokesperson, Willow-Jean Prime, was concerned the legislation did not follow the redress recommendations the royal commission actually made, and that it had not been designed with enough input from survivors themselves.
The sharper version of that criticism, made repeatedly during the committee stages, is that the royal commission said survivors should receive full redress and did not carve out an exception for people who later offended. Critics argue the state is now deciding which of the children it failed have behaved well enough since to deserve acknowledgement. Supporters argue the alternative is writing cheques that many New Zealanders would find indefensible, and that an independent judge is a better filter than a minister or an official.
The scale behind all of this is what makes the argument so difficult. The royal commission’s final report, delivered in 2024, estimated that up to 200,000 children, young people and vulnerable adults were abused in state and faith based care between 1950 and 2019. The system now being built has to deal with the survivors of that who are still alive, many of them elderly.
Other parts of the overhaul are already running. A Common Payment Framework took effect on 27 January 2026, lifting the average payment for new claimants from $19,180 to $30,000, with survivors who settled under the old arrangements offered top ups of 50 percent so earlier settlements sit closer to the new amounts. Processing capacity is meant to rise from 1,350 claims a year to 2,150 by 2027, with a single point of entry for people making a new claim, and an independent review of the changes is scheduled for next year. Details for survivors are on the Redress New Zealand site, and the appointment itself is on the Beehive releases page.
With the general election set for 7 November, the redress system is one of the areas where the parties are plainly divided, and how each of them would treat this group of survivors is a question worth putting to candidates. You can compare party positions using our voting tool.
What do you think, should survivors with serious convictions face a separate test before they are paid, or is that a line the state has no business drawing? Leave a comment below and tell us where you land.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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