Source: Radio New Zealand
Dame Coral Shaw has been recognised for her work, among other things, as a Commissioner on the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Libby Kirkby-McLeod/RNZ
Teacher, lawyer, judge and head of a royal commission – Dame Coral Shaw’s career has always been about giving back to those most vulnerable.
The 78-year-old has been made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and is enjoying her second retirement, volunteering at her local Citizens Advice Bureau.
The first time she tried to retire, she was appointed a commissioner of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Partway through she was made chair.
The findings, released in June 2024, ran to 2500 pages and catalogued a litany of abuse inside state and religious institutions between 1950 and 1999.
She told RNZ she was accepting the honour on behalf of the various organisations she had worked with.
“I hope just by having this honour, I can continue to advocate for the systemic changes needed [that] are vital if we’re not to repeat the errors of the past.”
New Years Honours are shrouded in secrecy with strict embargoes being enforced until the last day of the year.
So, after learning she was being considered for the honour, Dame Coral kept it a secret from family – even from her husband. She said her family’s love and pride would have resulted in the secret getting out.
“I’ve kept it entirely to myself … In a way it has been very difficult, but in another way it has kept it very easy because I haven’t had to explain myself … just a few white lies about where I was going and what I was doing,” she laughed.
Coral Shaw during the Abuse in Care inquiry. Supplied / Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care
From Lyttleton to the big leagues
Dame Coral was born in Lyttelton in 1947 – before it was “the trendy place it is now”.
Her father, a returned soldier, married her mother who worked in the family drapery business on the main street.
“It was a very hard working life. Mum worked in the shop and dad was a carrier.”
The eldest of three children, she loved music and sang in the Lyttelton Main School choir.
“I also learned to be rather resilient because, let’s say, it wasn’t the most genteel of schools and I had to learn to hold my own in that environment. But, of course, I learned about difference and I learned about people who came from different lifestyles.”
After completing her education at Christchurch Girls High School, she spent a year volunteering in the Solomon Islands before returning to New Zealand to study teaching where she met her now husband.
While teaching in Thames, Dame Coral came across a newspaper article about a woman who studied law late in life.
“I thought: ‘Hmm, that’s something I’m interested in.”
She did some law papers by correspondence.
“I realised I really enjoyed that world of analysis, probing. The rigour of the law really appealed to me.”
The family moved to Auckland where her three children went to school and Dame Coral completed her degree.
Her law practice was varied, working with refugees and doing some treaty work with Māori.
In 1992, Dame Coral was made a judge, sitting in the busy, urban West Auckland District Court.
“Nothing really prepared me for the nature and volume of work in West Auckland.”
She soon saw areas in the justice system that needed immediate attention.
“I read once that to be a teacher you had to be an optimist because you stand in front of a group of children and you think, ‘what can I do to make their lives better and fulfilling and help them learn?’ So, you’re always looking for the future, for hope for them. And I think I carry that into my judicial work and my whole life, really.”
Dame Coral was instrumental in the founding of the Waitakere Anti-Violence Essential Services (WAVES) Trust which provided a voice for victims in court.
And with the help of the government and the local community, it raised funds and employed a “victim advocate” who supported victims.
Together, with later chief District Court Judge Russell Johnson, it created a fast-track court list for family violence cases and one of the first anti-violence court programmes.
“We gave balanced justice – with all the rights to the defendant to defend their case if they wished, to provide therapeutic programmes if they needed it but mostly that the victims felt supported through the process.”
The other area was young Māori men coming to court with little support or advocacy.
“They were just being shunted off to prison or periodic detention and it seemed when I spoke to them, it was just going straight over their heads.”
Dame Coral called Pita Sharples at the nearby Hoani Waititi Marae.
The phone call was the first step in hammering out an alternative marae-based justice programme that connected defendants to tikanga and lessons in te reo Māori and challenged them to improve themselves.
From there, Dame Carrol was asked to fill in on the bench of the Employment Court. She was the first woman to be appointed to the role.
“I wasn’t drawn [into it], I was kidnapped … it was a gradual, gentle kidnapping into the world which I was very happy to do.”
She went on to sit on an internal UN tribunal that heard disputes raised by the organisation’s staff of approximately 60,000.
The job took her to Geneva, New York and Nairobi while still being able to live in New Zealand.
After seven years, Dame Coral thought she was retiring.
“I didn’t want to become stale … and that’s when my real work started.”
She was appointed a commissioner of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care and was made chair when Sir Anand Satyanand resigned.
Dame Coral Shaw and others at the unveiling of Validation Park. RNZ / Nate McKinnon
The inquiry heard hundreds of submissions from survivors of physical and sexual abuse in state and religious organisations.
“Many tears were shed, both by the commissioners and by the people, but what really overwhelmed that pain was the privilege of hearing … my wonderment at their courage and determination to finally be heard.”
She said although it was exhausting, it was worth it as the commission built a picture. That picture showed systemic failings of state and religious institutions to protect young people between 1950 and 1999.
“Every time I heard somebody I was thinking ‘what was I doing at that time? Where was I living?’ I was living a comfortable, loving, protected, and fulfilling life with lots of potential…
“And yet just down the road – sometimes in my school or in my church or in my community – there were people who were not having this life that I was having. And in fact they were being subjected to cruelty, violence, degradation, racism and all the rest.”
She said that revelation was a source of great shame.
Those experiences, were born out of post-war New Zealand where if a child was not being cared for at home, the church or state would step in.
“So the context was a rather narrow society that was trying its best to look after children but which was failing terribly because the great lesson was the state was no parent, the state should never be the parent to children.”
The inquiry found that at least 200,000 had been abused and many more neglected in state and religious institutions. It found that both state and faith-based institutions had failed to respond to abuse.
The commission called for widespread law reform and an overhaul of institutions.
A year and-a-half on, Dame Coral said despite some positive changes, many of the same problems remained.
“If you go into the records of the Independent Children’s Monitor, the rates of abuse remain high, that the proportion of Māori children who are still ‘in care’, still being abused and are still in that pipeline of poverty, disentitlement, ‘care’ and into the prison system is still happening,” Dame Coral said.
The inquiry’s report resulted in a formal apology from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in which he told survivors a new independent redress scheme would be created and promised the government would “do the right thing by you”.
However, there was no such scheme in the 2025 budget. Instead, the government increased redress payments for survivors by about $10,000 bringing the average to $30,000 – about a third of what survivors in Australia got.
Dame Coral said the report was “a pathway of hope” for survivors.
“We’ve got to keep momentum on changing the system that led to the abuse in the first place.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand