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It's early in the morning of the 12th of November as I try to write this, and the words don't come easy. But none of this has been easy.
It wasn't easy those mornings when I had been transformed from a gregarious child into a shaking, sobbing kid experiencing panic attacks because I had been abused by a teacher in the swimming pool. It wasn't easy when the teacher denied it, and I was sent to a psychologist to find out why I was making up stories, with only my parents believing that I was telling the truth.
It wasn't easy for my Mum, as someone who generally respected authority, to go out of her comfort zone and fight for her kid.
It felt like a sense of betrayal by blind people who I always thought had integrity when, as Chairman of the Board of the RNZFB over 20 years ago, it was mostly blind people who shut me down and determined that they would not support me when I knew it was long past time the organization fessed up, and faced up, to the abuse it had perpetrated to kids like me who were entrusted into their care. Those blind Board members were more worried about financial liability than the lives the organisation had derailed and in some cases destroyed. And anyway, they said, it was a different time. We shouldn't judge what happened then by today's standards.
It wasn't easy when, just a couple of years later, I heard about a child who had been abused in the same place in very similar circumstances, and for all my so-called powers of persuasion, I hadn't been able to bring the problem out into the open. Not being able to get the Board to face up to the damage the organisation has done is undoubtedly the greatest failure of my professional life.
Powerful forces have sought to block survivors from right across this country, survivors disproportionately made up of minority groups, every step of the way when we sought an inquiry into the extent of abuse by institutions where we were supposed to be safe, but instead were sent to a living hell on earth. Some were tortured. I don't use that term loosely. What they went through met the legal definition of torture. Successive Governments tried to shut those survivors up and shut them down. And now they have finally had to say, yes, it was torture.
There are still people in Government today who actively discouraged holding an inquiry. But thankfully, they failed, and we now know that hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders were abused. The evidence is there for anyone to read in the many volumes of the Royal Commission of Inquiry.
Testifying in public to that inquiry wasn't easy either, as someone with a senior leadership role in the disability sector. But I did it for those people I couldn't help when I was RNZFB Chairman, and it ended up being a liberating, healing, emboldening process. Because those who told us all those years ago to toughen up and suck it up were wrong, and history will rightly judge them as accessories to what had happened by taking the attitude that they did.
So, here we are on 12 November, and today, the Prime Minister of New Zealand will apologise to survivors in Parliament. I will be there in the Gallery to hear it. It is hard to describe the disjointed feelings I have about this. It feels in a way that he is not apologising to me, he is apologising to the kid that was once me, and that I am there somehow representing that frightened child.
Much is at stake. Obviously the specific words matter, but the actions that will be announced matter much more. What does redress look like? How genuinely committed is the Government to all the Commission's recommendations?
In some cases, survivors are also due apologies from the organisations that abused them. Blind Low Vision NZ is one. Based on what communications there have been so far, I have no confidence that this will be handled appropriately or adequately. As is typical of the modern era with that organisation, everyone involved is clearly out of their depth.
I am about to leave New Zealand to relocate to the United States, so I won't be here to see it, but I urge disabled New Zealanders not to lose sight of the Commission's recommendation that disability rights legislation be enacted. As you strive to create a future that is better than our past, that recommendation is critical and it should be nonnegotiable, in terms of disabled New Zealanders assuming their rightful place in society. Please, please do not let this one die. March in the streets in massive numbers if you must.
I also want to pay my respects to the survivors who did not live to see this day, and to those who believed us who didn't see this day either, my own parents included. If they hadn't been on my side, I shudder to think what would have become of me. In that sense, I have been very blessed to have a supportive family, when so many other survivors did not.
I wish all survivors strength and love on what is going to be a profoundly emotional day, and those emotions will be very mixed.
Today is a beginning, not an end. We must not lose our resolve now. We must continue to speak our truth. We must ensure New Zealand does not, and cannot, forget.