A public inquiry has found that government agencies underplayed the harm being done to the three Phillips children, missed the chance to stop their father taking them into the bush a second time, and let a credible sighting of all four sit unexamined for more than three months.
The report of the Public Inquiry into the Disappearance of the Phillips Children, written by retired High Court judge the Honourable Simon Moore KC, was released on Tuesday afternoon. It makes 41 findings and nine recommendations, and the Government has accepted all nine.
Tom Phillips took his three children from the family farm at Marokopa in September 2021 and stayed away 18 days, abandoning his ute below the high tide mark at Kiritehere beach with the keys in it. He took them again on 9 December 2021. They were not found for almost four years. Phillips was fatally shot by police on 8 September 2025 after a burglary at Piopio, and the children were recovered safely that day.
Two themes run through the report. The first is that “the harm caused by Tom Phillips isolating the children from family, friends and society was underplayed, minimised or overlooked by agencies for significant periods”, along with the concerns of the mother’s wider family, “which were often minimised as being part of a parenting dispute”. The second is that “a more consistent and collaborative interagency approach could have prevented the children’s disappearance and brought them back sooner”.
Much of the damage was done in the ten weeks between the two disappearances. Police made a report of concern to Oranga Tamariki after the first one, which the inquiry called commendable and prompt, but they did not pass on that they believed Phillips had staged his own death, or that they feared he would take the children again. Oranga Tamariki visited within days, then told the Family Court on 6 October 2021 that the children were “completely fine”, without mentioning the family’s concerns or the live police investigation. Had the two agencies worked together properly then, the inquiry found, the second taking “could have been prevented or, at least, made more difficult”.
When the children were taken again in December 2021, police did not launch a search and rescue response or a Criminal Investigation Branch inquiry as they had the first time. They deliberately went low key, working the local community instead. The report describes that as resting on “the misconceived view that there were no concerns for the children’s welfare, despite their isolation in dense bush segregated from family and friends”.
The sharpest example of what followed is a phone call made at about 2pm on 28 May 2023. A woman on Te Anga Road, the main road out to Marokopa, rang the police 105 line. Ninety minutes earlier a man had knocked on her door asking for a jump start. She and her mother-in-law drove him to his stranded car on a forestry road and saw a girl beside it and other children inside. The man smelled, she said, like someone who had not showered in a very long time. Her mother-in-law thought it was Phillips. The inquiry, which names no one but Phillips, calls the caller Rhonda.
A unit was dispatched 27 minutes later, then diverted to a family harm callout nearby. At 3.30pm the job was coded K1, meaning no further action required. Nobody visited the house or the forestry road, and the report records that police “have not been able to explain to the Inquiry” why the job was closed off without any follow-up. A senior constable who noticed the call emailed a search and rescue officer that afternoon saying “It doesn’t say why it was K1, but could be worth a look”. That officer was on leave, was not on the investigation team, and nobody from the team was copied in. He read the message nine days later.
Rhonda had photographed the man at her door. The link was only made in September 2023, after she saw news coverage of the warrant for the Te Kūiti bank robbery, recognised the boots and reported the sighting a second time herself. The car she described was found after the children were recovered, pushed down a bank near two of the family’s camps. It had been stolen from Te Kūiti the day before she saw it.
The inquiry found this was “the first credible sighting of the three children since their disappearance nearly 18 months earlier” and that it was never flagged as such. When pig hunters photographed Phillips and the children on farmland in October 2024, an internal police report stated that “this is the first time there has been a sighting of all 4 of them since their disappearance”. Senior officers told the inquiry sightings were coming in “all over the show”. The report says flatly that the explanation “does not withstand scrutiny”, noting there had been only a handful in the previous four months.
Oranga Tamariki closed its report of concern in February 2022, which the inquiry found it should not have done, in the face of what it calls compelling warnings from the children’s older sisters. It kept minimising those warnings, did not keep police informed of the risk it saw, and did not go back to the Family Court. The inquiry also found the Ministry of Education should have asked for more before approving home schooling, and that police did not act on a former partner’s complaints about gun safety in early 2021 or seize weapons once Phillips’ firearms licence was suspended.
Social Development Minister Louise Upston apologised on the Government’s behalf to children who spent almost four years “in squalid conditions which deprived them of the experiences, relationships, and opportunities New Zealanders would regard as fundamental to a happy and healthy childhood”. “To the Phillips children directly, this report has found that our agencies did not take all practical steps to protect you. For that we are deeply sorry,” she said.
Police Commissioner Richard Chambers accepted the recommendations. “As the Inquiry outlines, Police did put significantly more resource into the investigation once it became apparent how determined Tom Phillips was to remain hidden. It is now clear that should have happened earlier,” he said. Oranga Tamariki chief executive Amanda Malu told Q+A her agency had “failed the children and the mother and older sisters”, and has written to them offering a full apology.
Police have been less willing to accept the counterfactual. Deputy Commissioner Jill Rogers told the same programme the May 2023 sighting had been a “golden opportunity”, while disputing the finding that things would have ended differently. “Did we get some things wrong? Yes. Did we miss some opportunities? Yes. Were we slow to react to some things? Yes. But would it have changed the outcome? No,” she said. “We don’t know that there would have been different outcomes. We had an extremely determined father there.”
The nine recommendations are mostly about agencies talking to each other. Police are to overhaul how they write reports of concern so the reasons behind them are explained rather than listed. Oranga Tamariki is to treat deliberate isolation of a child as a recognisable form of harm, take notifications from siblings seriously, and tell the Family Court about unresolved concerns and live police investigations. The Ministry of Education is to gather more on home schooling applications. The Child Protection Protocol and the police missing persons policy have already been updated to cover children who are deliberately concealed.
Moore accepts the case was extraordinary and unlikely to repeat itself, but adds that “lessons must, nonetheless, be learned, particularly how agencies should work and operate together”. Upston asked that the children now be left alone. “They are the most important people in this. Their interests must come first,” she said. The Cabinet paper and agency response have been published alongside the report.
What do you make of the inquiry’s findings, and of the police response to them? Leave a comment below.
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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