The Government has received the final report of the inquiry into the handling of the Tom Phillips case, Attorney-General Chris Bishop has confirmed (RNZ).

The inquiry, carried out by Justice Simon Moore KC, looked at whether government agencies took all reasonable steps to keep Phillips' children safe. Then Attorney-General Judith Collins announced it in November 2025, with a deadline of 21 July 2026 for the final report and its recommendations (RNZ).

The report met that deadline. Bishop said it is "highly likely to require redactions" — meaning parts will be blacked out or removed — before it can be released to the public, and that he aimed to publish it by around mid-August. He could not say whether the inquiry's findings would require new laws. If they did, Bishop said, it would be "highly unlikely" Parliament could pass them before the election (RNZ).

The inquiry's terms of reference — the rules setting out what it could and could not examine — explicitly excluded any findings on judicial decisions, meaning the courts' handling of the case was off-limits. The inquiry also held no public hearings; it conducted all its work in private (RNZ).

Tom Phillips died in a shootout with police on 8 September 2025, after 1,358 days in the bush with his children. During that shootout, Phillips shot a police officer several times (RNZ).

The path to the inquiry was signalled early. At the Post-Cabinet press conference on 15 September 2025, roughly a week after the fatal shootout, the Prime Minister indicated there would be scope for a Government inquiry into the case (Beehive). By 13 October, the Prime Minister told the same format that the Government had been taking advice on a potential inquiry and expected to be able to discuss it soon (Beehive). On 3 November, the Government was still in the process of setting it up (Beehive). Later that month, Phillips' family welcomed the announcement of the inquiry (RNZ).

The redactions Bishop referred to are standard practice for reports involving children and operational police matters. The open question is how much substance survives that process, and whether the public version will be enough to satisfy the scrutiny the case has attracted. Bishop's mid-August target allows roughly three to four weeks for that work, which is tight but not unusual for an inquiry of this scope.

Bishop's frankness about the legislative timeline is worth noting. By signalling that any law change would almost certainly not clear Parliament before the election, he is managing expectations early. That leaves the inquiry's recommendations in a holding pattern if they require statutory change; a future government, not this one, would carry them forward.

The exclusion of judicial decisions from the terms of reference is also significant. Much of the public focus during the 1,358 days Phillips spent in the bush with his children was on whether the Family Court and other judicial actors could or should have acted differently to remove the children from his care. Moore's inquiry was not tasked with answering that question. What it could examine is the conduct of the government agencies operating around those decisions: Police, Oranga Tamariki, and any others with welfare or safety obligations.

With no public hearings and a report that will arrive redacted, the inquiry was always going to face questions about how much daylight it lets in. The report's recommendations, once released, will be the measure of whether the Government treats this as a case closed or a case that exposed systemic gaps requiring a response. Bishop's inability to say whether legislation is needed suggests he has not yet settled that question himself, or is not prepared to pre-empt the report's publication.