Kia ora John — 

Aotearoa could be a country where every child grows up feeling safe, loved and with a sense of belonging in their whānau and community.

But for some of our children, this is far from reality. Instead, they are trapped in a maze of intergenerational harm that they can’t escape on their own. This is what is driving the criminal behaviour causing harm across our communities today.

The National Party ran their campaign on big talk and no evidence. In Government, they’re turning to slow-moving working groups to deal with retail crime, while bringing back failed boot camp experiments to "solve" youth crime.   

That is not the answer. There is a wealth of good evidence showing how pragmatic solutions that deal with a young person’s behaviour, as well as wider issues in the family, can work to stop offending.

In Government, Labour created a circuit-breaker programme to do exactly that. It wrapped the right agencies around a young person within 48 hours of their offending and meant support services could be provided straight away to the child and their family.

This programme works. In a briefing provided to the incoming National Government, it had a 76 percent success rate, meaning over three-quarters of participants were not re-offending. Yet National are still choosing to experiment with military-style boot camps.  

Christopher Luxon’s response? ‘I don’t care.’

He doesn’t care about evidence, or whether his policies are successful or not.

It’s just as worrying to see the Prime Minister and his Ministers contradicting both each other, and the very agencies they’re working with on the programme. Mark Mitchell claimed the New Zealand Defence Force would be heavily involved, while Christopher Luxon said it was a ‘fair characterisation’ to describe their involvement as only at a governance level. 

Mark Mitchell also claimed the programme was similar to the Limited Service Volunteer programmes the military already runs. The Defence Force felt so strongly that he was wrong, that they wrote to the Defence Minister’s office. They warned National that military-style training does not work for young people with complex needs, has caused serious mental harm for staff, and creates an unsafe environment for defence personnel.

There is no evidence to back up boot camps, the agencies don’t want to run them and there are better and more effective programmes they could expand instead.

National has also stripped funding for youth experiencing homelessness, as well as frontline family services, while culling hundreds of jobs at Oranga Tamariki – including jobs in youth justice.

These are the wrong choices that won’t reduce crime, support children and young people, or make our country any safer.

Labour will continue to hold the Government to account and advocate for evidence-based policy over reckless choices that take us backwards.

Willow-Jean Prime,
Labour Spokesperson for Children
Labour.org.nz