The 9025 NZers who don’t appear on the birth register

Monday, 6 November 2023

The homicide of Lower Hutt toddler Baby Ru has highlighted a gap in Aotearoa’s record-keeping with figures showing more than 9000 New Zealanders, including adults, are officially nameless.

A total of 9025 people born since January 1999 have no registered birth, Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) records show. Two hundred of that group, if still alive, would now be 24. Numbers from before 1999 were not immediately as they existed only on paper-based registers.

An unregistered birth means people are unable to go to school, get a passport and face hurdles to access social welfare or get married.

Baby Ru - Ruthless-Empire Ahipene-Wall - had no registered birth when he died last month from blunt force trauma in Lower Hutt. Three adults were with the toddler before he died and they are understood to be the three people police say are of “particular interest” in the homicide inquiry.

Principals Federation President Leanne Otene confirmed no 5-year-old could these days enrol in primary school without a birth certificate, which was needed to get a Ministry of Education student number. Many high schools also required a birth certificate, she said.

“There isn’t a possibility of them coming in the back door,” she said.

NZEI president Mark Potter said the number was “staggering”. Schools had to confirm a child was a New Zealand citizen to enrol them.

“I imagine a family would have a few problems if they hadn’t registered a child,” he said.

He had a child who came to the school he was working in the 1980s who was 9 years old and was only just registered. In that case, the mother had mental health issues and the boy had not left the house.

“The biggest body of water he had seen was the bath.”

In a written statement births, deaths, and marriages registrar-general Russell Burnard confirmed that nobody could get a passport without a registered birth, though could without the physical birth certificate.

Marriage was a greyer area: “We do not check that their birth has been registered in Aotearoa or overseas to issue the marriage licence, but both parties may be asked to provide photo evidence of their identity (EOI) to the marriage celebrant.

“To obtain EOI they usually need to provide a birth certificate along with other evidence.”

Burnard said most births were registered quickly and the numbers of unregistered births was “very low”.

The annual average of unregistered births since 1999 was 451. There would be a small number of people with unregistered births prior to 1999.

There were a number of reasons births could be unregistered including parents not filing the paperwork or births being notified twice for a baby.

Every New Zealand birth legally has to be registered but the only law about when is “as soon as is reasonably practical after the birth”. DIA tries to get parents to register a baby within two months.

Each year, DIA releases a list of the names it rejected because they could cause offence or suggest an official title. Names such as King and Justice regularly appear.

The name Ruthless-Empire did not appear on those lists in 2021 or 2022. DIA would not say why.

The Ministry of Social Development said people needed two forms of government-issued identity to get social welfare.