We call on the Government of Aotearoa New Zealand to establish a standalone Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historic Adoption Policies and Practices.

Forced adoption was not simply another form of abuse occurring within institutions. It was a State-sanctioned system, embedded in law and government policy, that permanently separated mothers and children and severed whakapapa, identity, family relationships, culture and history.

For generations, mothers of loss and adoptees were subjected to practices including coerced separation, sealed birth records, altered identities and lifelong barriers to accessing their own origins and medical and genetic histories. The harm was not only the loss of a child or family—it was the legal and systemic erasure of identity and connection.

The Adoption Act 1955 enabled this system and affected generations of New Zealanders across ethnicities. While Māori adoption experiences rightly require specific consideration of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and whakapapa, non-Māori mothers and adoptees must not be excluded from recognition, investigation or redress for experiencing the same State-sanctioned system.

Justice must not create a two-tier system of survivors.

A standalone Royal Commission must independently and comprehensively investigate:

the laws, policies and practices that enabled historic adoption and coerced separation;
the roles of the State, churches and other institutions;
the lifelong impacts on mothers of loss and adoptees, including identity loss, disrupted whakapapa, family separation and loss of medical and genetic history;
the particular Crown breaches affecting Māori, alongside the experiences of non-Māori survivors;
the need for a distinct Crown apology recognising adoption-related harm in its own right;
a separate, comprehensive redress framework, including funded family and whakapapa tracing, record access, reconnection support, counselling and identity-restoration services; and
the urgent replacement of the Adoption Act 1955, including removal of barriers and secrecy provisions that continue to restrict access to identity and origins.
We urge both left- and right-wing political parties to commit to establishing this inquiry upon forming Government.

Aotearoa cannot achieve justice for adoption survivors through an inquiry that was never given the mandate to fully investigate the adoption system itself.

The State created the system. The State must confront its history.

Mothers of loss and adoptees deserve truth, recognition, accountability, apology and redress.

Historic adoption demands its own inquiry, its own findings, its own Crown apology and its own justice.