Tom Phillips Inquiry: The Missing Court File and What Comes Next

The inquiry into the Tom Phillips case did not get the Family Court file, a gap University of Auckland associate law professor Carrie Leonetti calls indefensible.

Leonetti said the principal judge, the senior judge who leads the Family Court, could have shared the file with the inquiry, with sensitive details removed before any public release. She said the inquiry has come four years too late RNZ.

The file stayed closed. Because Family Court cases are confidential, little is publicly known about the custody dispute between Phillips and the children's mother.

The history the inquiry could use starts before the disappearances. At the 2017 separation, Phillips threatened to take the children and not let their mother see them again. That included telling other people he would take the children and go bush. He held court-ordered care of the children from at least 2019.

In September 2021, Phillips disappeared with his three children and stayed away for 18 days despite extensive searches. He was given court-ordered care again in October 2021, after that first disappearance. In December 2021, he disappeared with the children from Marokopa in Waikato. He stayed on the run with them for nearly four years. Police later shot him dead.

The Public Inquiry, a formal government inquiry with powers to seek evidence, found Oranga Tamariki, the agency responsible for child welfare, had very limited involvement with Phillips and the children before 2021. It said authorities made several failings, including sharing information and following up some leads. Oranga Tamariki and police have admitted errors in how they handled the case RNZ.

Police disagree with one key finding. They dispute that agencies working together better could have stopped the disappearance or brought the children home sooner.

Ministers apologised after the findings were released. They said the government was deeply sorry to the children. The apology followed months of work inside the Beehive.

The government set up the inquiry in November 2025. Its Terms of Reference, the written instructions that set what an inquiry can look at, were written with the privacy and welfare of the children in mind, according to the Beehive release Beehive. The first principle was to ensure the children's welfare was not put at further risk. The government received the final report in July 2026, after it extended the deadline for the inquiry Beehive.

Leonetti said the response should now be put into law. She said the government should look at bringing back protections removed from the Care of Children Act, the main law on parenting and custody orders, in 2014.

The protection she pointed to is known as the Bristol clauses. The clauses required courts to check a child would be safe before granting custody in cases linked to family violence. They were removed in 2014 under the John Key government.

The broader context here is about scope, not just findings. The question for lawyers and others who work in this area is what a Public Inquiry can fairly conclude when the court orders that placed the children with a parent sit outside its terms. If the care decisions from 2019 and October 2021 cannot be checked against what was known at the time, then findings about information sharing and missed leads judge the government agencies without judging the court decisions that shaped their role. That limits both accountability and lesson-learning.

Looking at what this means for the next steps, two tensions will shape the politics. The first is between judicial independence, the idea that courts decide free from government pressure, and executive review. Leonetti's argument assumes a cooperative model, where the principal judge shares the file with parts blacked out and the inquiry studies the court's reasoning without directing it. That is possible in procedure, but it needs careful negotiation between the different parts of government. The second is between apology and liability. Admissions of error by Oranga Tamariki and police carry weight in Parliament, but the police pushback on whether closer work could have prevented the disappearance shows where agencies will draw a line. A select committee hearing, where MPs question officials in public, or a ministerial work programme on the Care of Children Act would test whether the apology turns into law change, particularly around the 2014 repeal.