Yesterday’s apology by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to the victims of abuse while in state care was a much postponed and long overdue act of contrition to the hundreds, the thousands, of people who suffered incredible brutality from the people who were meant to make sure that their lives were better, not incalculably worse.
This is an apology which had become harder and harder to make: accounts of abuse in state-run institutions have been legion for decades.
Successive governments have shrugged off calls for investigations, and sometimes actively obstructed them, and once the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care finally began it took years to report.
Apologising satisfactorily for the government’s actions, and inactions, in this sphere was always going to be hard; the sheer difficulty in conjuring up inadequate words into a magical formula which would suffice for all may well have been impossible.
But far worse would have been to not try at all.
The royal commission was the largest, longest and most complex such inquiry that has ever been held in this country.
Its massive report found that about 250,000 people may have been subject to abuse while in state care.
Rather, it is the sheer scale of the offending for which the government is now being held to account that remains uncertain.
This abuse happened in dark corners, its evil perpetrators admonishing their innocent and defenceless victims not to tell.
Many did not and have gone to their graves clutching their secret pain close to them.
Others have never been able to articulate the monstrous deeds done to them.
But enough people have now done so for a picture, albeit an incomplete one, to now be available of what happened under the authority of the State: villainy funded by the unwitting taxpayer in the belief that the facilities which fostered rape and torture of the young and vulnerable were doing the "right thing" by their hapless inmates.
Every corner of New Zealand has been affected by this abuse, as the commission’s report distressingly details.
Somehow Mr Luxon, and in his wake Labour leader Chris Hipkins, apologising on behalf of all Labour-led governments, had to find a way to ease the pain of the long-suffering survivors watching from the public gallery and via live stream.
"You knew the truth because you lived it and you have waited and waited for people to start listening to you. Now New Zealand has listened," Mr Luxon said.
"You deserved so much better and I am deeply sorry that New Zealand did not do better by you."
Mr Hipkins affirmed that not just the assembled MPs but the country as a whole had heard from all of the survivors.
"We are sorry we took so long, but we finally hear you," he said.
"You should have been safe, protected, and believed. You were not. And that is the ultimate injustice that we as representatives of the Crown must also bear the burden of."
Mr Hipkins, correctly, acknowledged that Labour should have acted quicker to put in place an independent redress system and apologised for that.
Mr Luxon too had to apologise on this point, in his case for the government having not got that planned new redress system in place before yesterday’s apology.
In the afternoon, Parliament debated an omnibus Bill which included a range of measures to improve safety in state care.
While some political parties have reservations about the methods, all agree that a meaningful attempt to treat this festering wound is needed.
The government also announced that in a year’s time a National Remembrance Day will be held to mark the anniversary of the apology.
It is vital that those now overseeing the machine of the state use those months wisely to meet the needs of compensating the survivors and setting up a framework to try to prevent similar atrocities happening in the future which have stained our past.
