‘I don’t trust government’: Why Kim McGregor says victims need a $14m watchdog
Thursday, 11 December 2025
The Jevon McSkimming scandal has sharpened calls for an independent victims watchdog, with former chief victims’ adviser Dr Kim McGregor warning that victims’ rights can’t rely on shifting political priorities. She tells Amelia Wade why a new Victims Commission is a necessity.
After almost a decade as chief victims’ adviser, Dr Kim McGregor has left the role dispirited and frustrated.
She wrote two reports a year, exposing how victims were failed by the justice system. But she felt no one listened for most of the time she was in the role.
“Seventeen reports - and all the recommendations - were just kind of sitting on a shelf for the first six years I was in the role.”
Now she wants the Government to finally do what was first recommended in 1993 by a “victims’ task force”: create an independent Victims Commission - a national watchdog with the power to force agencies to treat victims’ rights as a core obligation, not an optional extra.
“I don't trust the government to look after victims’ rights, unless they've got a dedicated leadership group across the justice system totally dedicated to improving the justice system for victims,” McGregor says. “And that's why we need this watchdog.”
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McGregor has put together a business case, provided exclusively to The Post, that estimates the annual cost of such a system could be between $8 million and $14m. She argues that’s a modest price for a reform that could prevent the kind of systemic drift exposed by the Jevon McSkimming scandal.
A commission, she says, would investigate systemic failures, require agencies to respond, track outcomes across the justice pathway and provide a dedicated complaints channel for people whose rights are being ignored.
“If the police are not investigating, or there’s not more information going into their case, there’s a watchdog, a witness, an advocate, walking alongside the victim, who can then reach into the system and they know the system - they know where the blockages are.
“They would be able to tell the police to get somebody onto this now, this person’s life is at risk.”
Supporters of the idea include survivor advocate Louise Nicholas, AUT professor and lawyer Khylee Quince, Massey University associate professor Shirley Julich, former Labour MP and family court lawyer Dr Emily Henderson and several NGO agencies. And last week she sent her costed four-page pitch to the Prime Minister, ministers and MPs ahead of launching a campaign.
“I want to get it onto every political party’s manifesto.”
McGregor’s past led her to the path of advocacy. As an 11-year-old she was sexually victimised by her stepfather, which had long-lasting effects on her. It wasn’t until she received counselling much later that she realised the toll it had taken on her.
She began working with the Auckland Sexual Abuse Help Foundation in the mid-1980s, then spent decades supporting adult and child survivors through police statements, forensic medical examinations and the courts. She authored ACC’s first national guidelines for therapists working with child sexual abuse.
In 2005 she was roped into the police’s “porngate” scandal, when 330 officers were investigated for having graphic images in their emails. McGregor toured the country with other experts holding information sessions about the impact of pornography. She is “very disappointed” the McSkimming scandal has uncovered that 20 staff are currently under investigation for misuse and inappropriate content.
In 2015, as part of the then National-led Government’s focus on reducing family violence and sexual violence victimisation, McGregor was appointed as the first ever chief victims’ adviser. But she says the role was not what victim advocates had campaigned for.
“It's all credit to the Honourable Amy Adams [the then Justice Minister] for appointing someone to the role, but it wasn’t what victim advocates wanted at the time. What they wanted was … an independent victims commission. But what the government set up was a chief victims adviser to the minister, which is a much smaller role.”
The role was tiny: just a day and a half per week, two staff (one an intern) and a $500,000 budget that had to cover salaries, travel and research.
McGregor recalls that when she first started the job, she asked her officials basic questions: how many victims there were in the justice system, what they needed, and where and why they were exiting the system.
“And they looked at me blankly. They said, ‘Well, we don’t know’. And I said, ‘Well okay, so what data do you have on victims? What do you collect?’. They looked at me blankly and said, ‘We don't know’. And I went, ‘Well, okay, that's where we have to start’.”
Her first report found agencies couldn’t even match their IT systems. Victims couldn’t be followed through the system, timelines couldn’t be measured, and officials often couldn’t say how long a case had been running or where it had stalled.
The justice system is offender-centric by design. A millennium ago victims exchanged their right to seek “direct vengeance” against those who harmed them, in return for the state taking over the responsibility for the investigation, prosecution and compensation for wrongdoing.
The structure of the system has made the victim a “bystander” to the process - they are witnesses to the crime, McGregor says.
“I'm so grateful to all of these police and justice officials who work so hard for victims, but it’s the system that fails them,” McGregor says. “It fails the workforce, and it fails victims, and it’s not going to change until we get a dedicated team looking at these thousands of gaps for victims.”
As chief victims adviser, McGregor commissioned report after report; including one on child witnesses who are usually complainants in sexual offence cases. They’re usually traumatised, experience long waits for justice - especially compared to their short lives - and because their young brains are still developing are unable to understand complex, adult concepts during cross-examination.
One example sticks in McGregor’s brain.
“The defence lawyer was holding up bloomers that this young girl had been wearing, and called her a ‘stout girl’,” she says.
“What I really wanted was a specialist court for children.”
A later McGregor-authored report, That’s a Lie, examined the cross-examination tactics used on child and adolescent sexual violence complainants. It found, in 13 out of the 15 trial transcripts analysed, that the children were accused of lying.
In one instance a defence lawyer asked a 6-year-old girl, “Did you like Poppa putting his finger in your [vagina]”, before the judge intervened.
Report after report exposed the yawning gaps in the way New Zealand treated its victims. And yet McGregor wasn’t getting the change she was calling for.
“I guess my frustration was it took me six years to build the case, to get trust with the government officials, with the chief executives and the judiciary.”
By 2021 she was working directly with police and the national victims’ managers, who were also trying to persuade the organisation to confront the holes in its practice. They had seen cases where police phoned victims for their views on bail but could not reach them, then recorded “no victims’ views” on file.
“I worked with these national victims’ managers. All of them were bashing their heads against brick walls. They were so frustrated, they left one after the other.”
At one point there were just five victims’ managers across 12 policing regions, she says.
Over nine years she served six ministers of justice. The first major funding shift did not arrive until 2022, under Kris Faafoi, when the Labour-led Government put aside $2.7 billion for a justice cluster. Of that, $45.7m was directed at improving outcomes for victims of crime.
“So I was happy. And then, of course, there was an election going on and as we know, everything stops before an election because we don't know what the new government priorities will be and what they will want.
“And so the new Government came in and I think we'd had a year of the pilots, and then I started working with the new minister but their priorities were different.”
The new Government put speed and youth justice at the top of the agenda - aims McGregor supports - but it meant resources were redeployed and “diluted a little”.
Last December McGregor handed over to her successor, Ruth Money. She’s now been out of the role for a year.
Consecutive Crime and Victims surveys show victims’ trust in the justice system is lower than that of people who have not been victims. The latest results show 38% of victims say they have high trust, compared with 47% of non-victims.
McGregor says a commission could work across agencies - police, courts and corrections - to create coordinated practice, clearer pathways for support and a complaints process that does not rely on victims navigating a maze of disconnected systems.
Her business case estimates costs by applying the per-complaint cost of the Health and Disability Commissioner, which she puts at about $5600, to likely demand from victims who have reported crime. If only a small proportion of those victims used a commission each year, she argues the annual cost would sit in the $8m-$14m range.
“That’s a tiny percentage of the justice budget,” says McGregor.
She says the commission would need Māori partnership and bicultural governance from the outset because Māori - especially wāhine and tamariki - face high victimisation and increased barriers to reporting and support.
After writing 17 reports, she says, it is time to put victims’ rights on a permanent footing.
“Improving victims’ rights does not have to come at the expense of offenders losing any of their rights. It's not a zero-sum game. But we do need to give victims more support.”