In January 2026, Te Aka Matua o te Ture | the NZ Law Commission published its final report on adult decision-making capacity law.
The report (R151) runs to over 600 pages. There are 175 recommendations.
This is the process of good lawmaking, and I have been thinking about it for some months since the report was finalised.
The report grounds a range of human rights in the values of equality, dignity and autonomy:
“these values emphasise that all people have worth and are entitled to exercise their rights on an equal basis. Equality, dignity and autonomy underpin the particularly relevant concept of the ‘dignity of risk’ — the idea that dignity requires people to have the ability to exercise choice, including to make risky choices.”
The Final Report's central concern is that vulnerable adults have, for too long, experienced the law as an instrument of restriction, powerlessness, and voicelessness. These three words reach deep.
The Commission is correct: the law should never produce these effects in any adult.
That is, unless you are adopted. Then, the Adoption Act 1955 and its thirteen associated acts (detailed in footnotes for paid subscribers) produce precisely these effects in another class of adults.
This follows from the 1955 Act's unique status: sovereign in substance if not in name, it constitutes and dissolves legal personhood while subordinating associated acts to its terms. It is the only Act that governs both the persons subject to it and the legislation built around it.
Together, the Adoption Act and associated acts mire the lives of adopted adults in restriction, powerlessness, and voicelessness by design, with outcomes woven into the architecture of every adopted adult's life, regardless of their experience of adoption.
R151 is clear that any restriction placed on a disabled adult’s decision-making must, in turn, be periodically reviewed and lifted the moment capacity is demonstrated.
Adoption is a capacity arrangement in its purest, most unreformed form.
It is imposed at the one moment incapacity is real - infancy - and never reviewed again, taking no notice of the person becoming, within years, an unambiguously capacitated adult, albeit with no legal pathway back to autonomy over their own identity or records.
Here are fourteen ways the New Zealand Law Commission’s R151 grants disabled people rights that adoption law denies over 100,000 adopted people:
R151 preserves the represented person’s legal standing, their entitlement to hold rights and owe duties, throughout. But it does not claim their legal agency is untouched: the report’s own analysis treats decision-making arrangements as measures that restrict legal agency and constitute differential treatment based on disability, which must be justified as necessary and proportionate, not simply assumed to leave the person unaffected.
Adoption exceeds anything R151 contemplates, because it operates on a layer the report never touches. R151 recommends restricting legal agency over discrete matters only where such a restriction can be justified as necessary and proportionate; legal standing remains untouched throughout.
Adoption does not merely restrict agency; under section 16(2)(a), "deemed born to" extinguishes the adopted person's legal standing itself, replacing it permanently with a fabricated one, without ever being subject to the necessity, proportionality, or justification requirements the Commission applies even to the lesser step of restricting agency alone.
Representative decisions should be centred on the person's wishes and values and respect their rights (Rule 1, ch.12), even the Family Court must comply. The phrase 'wishes and values' appears 210 times across the report
An infant is bound forever by a document they had no part in, at a time when they cannot form or express a wish for any court to consider. And however that one-time question is handled for an older child at the time of the order, it is never asked again: at no later point in an adopted person's life, including full adulthood, are their own wishes and values about the adoption itself ever reconsidered.
Te Aka Matua o te Ture | Law Commission recommends that a new Act allow a person to appoint a 'formal supporter,' who — subject to the terms of their appointment — may access confidential information the supported person is already entitled to, where the supporter needs it to fulfil their support role (NZLC R151, ch.10–11, recs 75–76, paras 36–40)
Apart from a copy of the so-called ‘original birth certificate’, endorsed, even then, with the adopters’ details, all other adoption records are sealed and accessible only through the narrow, discretionary route of a section 23 court application. Oranga Tamariki, often the first agency an adopted person approaches, treats some of its own records as falling entirely outside section 23, a legal interpretation that, in practice, restricts access rather than providing it.
Under R151, a welfare or property representative is required to apply for a court review by a date the Family Court sets — no more than three years after the order for the first review, and generally no more than three years after the last review for subsequent ones, though the Court may extend this to five years if satisfied it's appropriate. One of the matters the Court must consider at review is whether there is still a need for the arrangement (recs 302, 303, 310).
Adoption orders have no equivalent review. Discharge exists on one ground only (mistake as to material fact, requiring Attorney-General consent). There is no adult right to choose to become unadopted.
R151 recommends that a new Act require an appropriate public agency (or agencies) to operate a complaints mechanism for complaints about how representatives and formal supporters perform their roles, and separately recommends the Government consolidate these functions into a single agency, though the complaints mechanism itself doesn't depend on that consolidation happening (recs 386–387, 400).
Adopted people have no equivalent body. There is no complaints mechanism. There is nowhere to take complaints about adoptive caregivers unless they abuse the person in their care and it comes to the attention of authorities. While adoption is a care setting arranged and sanctioned by the state, the state is not responsible for the conduct of adopters.
R151 recommends establishing a national, voluntary register for EPOAs that holds minimal information — the donor's identity, whether the EPOA covers property or welfare, and the location of the original document — with optional extras at the donor's choice. Its purpose is to resolve uncertainty about whether an EPOA exists and where it's held, not to store broad personal information; access to the register is restricted to people with a legitimate need (ch.20, recs 363–366).
There is no national register of adopted people as such. Individual status is held within each person’s personal records. Because records are sealed and a falisified birth certificate is created, an adopted person has no intrinsic right to know they are adopted. However numerous people from social workers to court clerks can access the adopted persons entire file without the authority or knowledge of the person the information pertains to.
R151 strips immunity only where a representative acts in bad faith, profits from their position, or fails to disclose their role (recs 374, 378–382, 384) — accountability built into an existing duty of care.
Adoption law never created that duty at all: the doctor, social worker, matrons, religious providers of infants such as the Salvation Army, solicitor and adopters who colluded to coerce consent and falsify records owed no one an enforceable duty to breach, which is why forging a birth certificate remains a live offence under the Crimes Act 1961 that has never once been prosecuted in an adoption case. As I document in ON HUMAN ADOPTION, no one in this “pattern of collusion” has ever faced accountability; forced, coerced and forged consent, falsified records and false representations carry no consequence.
The reform is anchored in article 12 of the UNCRPD — described in the report as "of direct and central relevance" to the whole exercise — and, in the Commission's own words rather than merely a quoted external criticism, it finds the PPPR Act's "best interests" approach "no longer appropriate" and "not compatible" with disabled people's dignity, autonomy, and their rights, will and preferences.
Adoption law still runs on the unreformed, decades-old “best interests of the child” doctrine, without review, treating the adopted adult as the permanent object of a decision made about them in infancy. Best interest of the child was at the centre of the Ministry of Justice adoption reform discussion documents from 2021 and 2022.
Least restrictive intervention is a legal threshold, not an afterthought: an order or representative can only be imposed if it's actually needed, and it isn't needed if a less restrictive intervention could reasonably meet that need instead (ch.14, para 29).
Unlike R151's explicit necessity test, the Adoption Act 1955 requires only that adoption promote the child's "welfare and interests" (s11). It never requires the court to ask whether a less restrictive alternative, such as guardianship or kinship care, could meet that need instead, so permanent legal identity replacement is granted without ever being weighed against a lesser option.
Representatives are vetted before being trusted with someone's life: a statutory ineligibility list excludes people subject to an active restraining or protection order, those serving a prison sentence, and those who themselves lack relevant decision-making capacity (ch.16, recs 228–230), while conflicts of interest are handled separately — through mandatory disclosure to the Court and case-by-case restrictions, rather than automatic disqualification.
The Adoption Act 1955 has no equivalent statutory exclusion list — only the vague, discretionary "fit and proper person" threshold in s11, applied within what you document as a "general climate of approval," (Dr Anne Else) where magistrates would not refuse an order on a social worker's unease "no matter how strong." Where R151 draws bright, specific lines: a restraining order, a prison sentence, incapacity, adoption law leaves the entire question of an adopter's suitability to subjective impression, historically resolved in the applicants' favour almost as a matter of course. My own records (received under court order) show this to be true.
Rule 3 gives the person a say over who's consulted in both directions: representatives must seek information from sources the person identifies, and must generally avoid sources the person objects to, except that the representative can consult an objected-to source anyway if needed to avoid a material risk of significant harm. Prior statements and decisions the person has made must also be weighed as material information (ch.12, paras 168–170)
There is no equivalent standing for adopted people. Applying under section 23 for their own records routes the adopted person's file through a caseworker, a judge, a registrar, none of whom the adopted person chooses or can exclude. The adopted person has no reciprocal right to direct who reviews their file or to access it themselves without meeting a 'special reasons' threshold judges are free to reject.
Certain decisions are too dangerous for any one representative to make alone. R151 retains the PPPR Act's existing bar on a representative deciding on marriage or civil union, adoption of a child, life-saving treatment refusal, ECT, brain surgery to alter behaviour, non-life-saving medical experiments, and assisted dying, and adds four more: sterilisation, abortion, surrogacy participation, and prohibiting contact — all of which can be authorised only by the Family Court itself (ch.17, recs 273–278)
Severing a parent-child bond, permanently falsifying a birth certificate and sealing all evidence was never treated as needing this kind of extraordinary safeguard; a judge’s routine signature sufficed.
Accessibility is designed into the consultation process. Summaries of both the Preliminary Issues Paper (2022) and the Second Issues Paper (2024) were published in Easy Read, New Zealand Sign Language, audio, and Braille formats, as well as in English and te reo Māori (paras 12, and the equivalent for the Second Issues Paper), reflecting the Disability Convention's accessibility obligations
Access to adoption records, even under court order, reveals the opposite: the older Ministry of Justice copies arrive discoloured and foxed but intact, while the later Oranga Tamariki copies arrive roughly photocopied, misaligned, with unrelated material crossed out and records withheld outright; the whole file passed between agencies, each disclaiming responsibility for what the other holds
Remuneration for welfare representatives is prohibited outright, to prevent payment from corrupting the role (ch.17). Conflicts of interest aren't barred by a fixed rule but are managed through the Family Court's discretionary power to impose case-specific restrictions (ch.17, rec 286), backed by a separate duty requiring representatives to account for any personal benefit obtained through their position (ch.22, recs 378–382).
My PhD research and personal records document an institutional, near-commercial machinery: the Salvation Army 'running an actual adoption agency,' doctor, social worker, solicitor and adopters coordinating to procure a child. The 1957 Adoption Amendment Act itself built in the workaround, permitting fees to be paid directly to institutions like the Salvation Army to cover 'confinement costs', and, as Keith Griffith notes, 'private adoption agencies relied mainly on the fees paid by adoptive parents to offset their costs. Therefore, it was in their financial interests to obtain an adoption outcome.' There is no equivalent prohibition on remuneration, no discretionary court power over conflicts of interest, and no duty to account for benefits obtained anywhere in adoption law, the safeguards R151 builds in have simply never existed here.
There’s more in the report (court process reforms, EPOA witnessing safeguards, urgent-order limits).
I challenge you to open the report and substitute "adopted" for "disabled" to see how the world might work if concepts such as equality, dignity and autonomy were extended to all adopted people.
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