Danyl McLauchlan: The troubling questions about Tom Phillips saga that may never be answered

One of Phillips’ makeshift campsites in the dense Marokopa bush. Photo / NZ Police

The figure of the outlaw who takes to the bush and lives off his wits while evading the state seems to resonate with something deep in the New Zealand psyche. It’s the story of John Mulgan’s Man Alone – sometimes celebrated as our nation’s first literary novel – whose
protagonist shoots his boss and flees the law across the North Island’s Central Plateau.

In 1941, West Coast dairy farmer Stanley Graham became an anti-hero when he killed seven men, evading a gigantic hunt from police and the army until he was shot trying to steal food from a farmhouse. Man alone shows up again in CK Stead’s Smith’s Dream, defying a police state, and the book was the basis for the film Sleeping Dogs, Sam Neill’s big break.

The 1980s finds this character defending his family: in Smash Palace, Bruno Lawrence defies a court order, kidnaps his daughter and takes to the bush; in Barry Crump’s Wild Pork and Watercress, Ricky and Uncle Hec hide out in Te Urewera to escape the clutches of Social Welfare. The book’s ending is bleaker than the film adaptation, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Things usually end badly for the man alone.

Now, the Waikato has its own dark incarnation of this myth. Perhaps its persistence helps explain the apparent reluctance of the police to capture Tom Phillips for much of the three years and nine months he spent living in the bush around Marokopa: the man was living out a national fantasy.

Even his near-fatal shooting of a police officer rapidly followed by his own violent death is part of the anti-heroic legend, which was shattered only by subsequent revelations that were quickly made the subject of a High Court injunction. These cannot be discussed, but proliferated widely on social media and seemed to prompt the Police Minister to describe Phillips as a monster.

Profound questions

The suppressed details raise profound questions about the unhurried, easygoing nature of the police operation to capture Phillips and rescue his children. For nearly three years after he breached a court order for a second time and vanished with his son and two daughters, their extended family circulated petitions and fundraisers while pleading with the police to take action.

In mid-2022, the authorities theorised – vaguely – that Phillips and his children might have changed their names and moved somewhere else. They had not, and the subsequent streak, which included a car theft and a bank robbery with shots fired at a supermarket worker, were met with flurries of activity that seemed to die down when the media coverage ended.

Although newsrooms observed the court’s suppression order, social-media platforms did not. Members of the public didn’t even need to hit “enter” on a search engine: autocomplete algorithms cheerfully disclosed the censored information. Paul Goldsmith holds the justice and media portfolios, but appears bewildered by the meaninglessness of the current legal framework.

Caught out

Whenever this happens, politicians always affect to be overwhelmed by these dazzling new communication technologies – they just can’t keep up with the speed of innovation! But Facebook is more than 20 years old. These are mature forms of media. The reality is the government has quietly decided the global technology companies – like Tom Phillips – operate outside the law.

But local media do not. When Stuff broadcast audio of police radio communications around Phillips’s shooting, the police immediately announced their intention to take legal action. A day later, it was revealed the police investigative team had been exclusively collaborating with a TV crew shooting a documentary. It’s not clear whether New Zealand’s police are functioning as a law-enforcement agency or a media and communications outlet protecting its intellectual property from commercial rivals.

Inquiries aplenty

Every national tragedy leads – inevitably – to a lengthy and highly lucrative sequence of inquiries. There will be a coroner’s report and an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Authority.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon expects an independent commission will look into the actions of government agencies. He named the police and Oranga Tamariki as relevant agencies; the latter has been the subject of dozens of investigations, inquiries and reports, all of which have been scathing about its performance, none of which have led to any improvement.

In 2024, the UK House of Lord conducted a public inquiry into the British government’s use of public inquiries, and found they take too long, cost too much, are over-lawyered and inefficient, and that recommendations are routinely ignored by politicians. They are widely perceived as mechanisms for agencies to avoid accountability, and they undermine the public’s trust in government and its institutions.

All of these are equally true of our own system. Politicians relish the ability to dismiss awkward questions about the basic competency of the state (“It would be inappropriate to comment while the inquiry is under way”); public service mandarins love to attribute their failures to vague, abstract problems: poor processes, obsolete systems, under-resourcing and the ever-popular “lack of communication between agencies”.

In Wellington, the wheels are already in motion to shroud this latest disaster. The lonely country road scattered with shell casings, the clearing littered with dirty tarps and empty whiskey bottles where children shivered in the darkness will be gently buried under drifts of bureaucracy – the evasions and excuses falling like soft snow.

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