What the Tom Phillips Inquiry Missed and Why It Matters

The inquiry into the Tom Phillips children did not see their Family Court file. University of Auckland law teacher Carrie Leonetti says that gap is indefensible.

Leonetti said the top Family Court judge could have shared the file, with private details blacked out before anything was made public. She said the inquiry has come four years too late RNZ.

The file stayed shut. Family Court business is private, so little is known in public about the custody fight between Phillips and the children's mum.

What the inquiry could look at starts earlier. When the parents split in 2017, Phillips said he would take the kids and not let their mum see them again. He told other people he would take them and go bush. From at least 2019, a court order gave him care of the children.

In September 2021 he vanished with his three children for 18 days, even though many people searched. After that first disappearance, a court gave him care again in October 2021. In December 2021 he vanished with them from Marokopa in Waikato. He hid with them for nearly four years. Police later shot him dead.

The Public Inquiry, a formal government check with powers to ask for evidence, found Oranga Tamariki, the agency that looks after children at risk, had very little to do with the family before 2021. It said agencies made mistakes, including sharing information and chasing up leads. Oranga Tamariki and police say they got things wrong RNZ.

Police disagree with one main finding. They say working together better would not have stopped the disappearance or brought the children home sooner.

Ministers said sorry after the report came out. They said the government was deeply sorry to the children. That apology came after months of work in the Beehive.

The government started the inquiry in November 2025. Its Terms of Reference, the written rules for what the inquiry could do, were made with the children's privacy and welfare in mind, the Beehive said Beehive. The top rule was not to put the children at more risk. The government got the final report in July 2026, after giving the inquiry more time Beehive.

Leonetti said the next step should be a change to the law. She said the government should bring back safety rules cut from the Care of Children Act, the law about who looks after children, in 2014.

Those rules are called the Bristol clauses. They said courts had to make sure a child would be safe before giving care to a parent where family violence was an issue. The John Key government cut them in 2014.

The broader context here is about what the inquiry could and could not look at. The court orders that gave Phillips care in 2019 and October 2021 were outside its job. If those decisions cannot be checked against what was known at the time, then findings about shared information and missed leads judge the agencies but not the court decisions behind them. That limits accountability and learning.

Looking at what this means for the next steps, two clashes will shape the politics. The first is between courts acting on their own and government checks on them. Leonetti's idea is that the top judge shares the blacked-out file and the inquiry looks at the court's reasons without telling judges what to do. That is allowed, but it needs careful talks between the two sides. The second is between saying sorry and taking legal blame. Oranga Tamariki and police admit mistakes, which matters in Parliament. But police push back on the idea closer work would have stopped it. A public hearing by MPs, or a minister's work plan on the Care of Children Act, would show if the apology leads to a law change, especially on the 2014 cut.