Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This bill has benefited, gratefully, from people who have put forward their thoughts on this bill through the select committee process, and I just wanted to, before I started out, really thank people who came forward and presented to the select committee. This enabled us to make some changes that strengthened the bill overall.

Today marks an important step in strengthening New Zealand’s response to serious and persistent youth offending. It brings to a close a thorough parliamentary process aimed at improving our response to a small group of young people whose offending causes serious harm to victims, communities, and themselves.

When I became Minister for Children, I made it clear that the status quo was not good enough. Too many young people were becoming involved in some very violent and serious persistent offending, often causing significant harm to victims and creating fear in our communities, and it was becoming further entrenched in our youth justice system overall. Previous interventions had not worked for this small group of young people, and we needed to do something different, and that’s exactly what this bill does. What I also want to make clear is that my ultimate goal is that no young person actually meets the threshold of becoming a serious youth offender in the future. But this bill is for when, unfortunately, that may happen. This bill strengthens our response to this group of serious persistent youth offenders, and its purpose is to improve public safety, strengthen accountability, and reduce reoffending through timely and more intensive interventions.

At the heart of the legislation is the young serious offender declaration, which enables a stronger and more targeted response to the small group of young people who continue to offend despite previous interventions. The declaration provides the Youth Court with additional tools to intervene earlier and more effectively to reduce the risk of further offending. The new military-style academy order will be the most intensive response available to the Youth Court. The order combines structure, discipline, education, therapeutic support, and transition planning to help eligible young people address the causes of their offending and build more positive futures. This builds on, and locks in, the progress we have made as part of the Government’s wider commitment to reducing serious and persistent child and youth offending by 15 percent by 2030.

I’m pleased to report that the number of serious youth offenders has reduced by 26 percent since June 2023. These results clearly demonstrate that targeted, decisive action can improve outcomes for our young people and communities. The thing that excites me the most about this bill is it’s not just about the young person. For far too long, we forgot that these young people had to go back to the same environment that put them in this situation in the first place. The part that excites me the most is we are now focusing also on the whānau as a whole. The legislation before the House, as I’ve said before, is stronger because of the select committee process, and the Social Services and Community Committee considered the views of submitters and recommended changes that strengthened safeguards, clarified key provisions, and supported the effective implementation of this bill.

Importantly, we added additional safeguards around the use of force. These changes prioritise de-escalation wherever possible, prohibit the use of mechanical restraints by Oranga Tamariki staff and approved workers, and require that every young person be assessed by a healthcare professional following any use of physical force. The bill was also amended to ensure that the qualifying providers who deliver part of the military-style academy programme are subject to the wider oversight system of the Chief Ombudsman. I’m confident that these changes, alongside other amendments adopted by this House, have strengthened the bill and enhanced its ability to improve public safety and reduce offending.

This Government is committed to continuing to improve public safety and reduce serious youth offending. This bill provides an important tool to protect communities, support victims, and improve outcomes for the most at risk young people in our youth justice system. It recognises that accountability and rehabilitation must go hand in hand. It provides stronger responses to serious offending while also creating greater opportunities for young people to address the causes of their behaviour and build a more positive future for themselves.

Ultimately, this legislation will help create less victims and make our communities safer. It provides a stronger response, while creating greater opportunities, and I am pleased to commend the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. What a joke—what a joke. Look at the other side laughing. The issue is that this is not a laughing matter. What it is, is we have a Government who has refused to listen to the evidence and the experts and have continued to push ahead with their failed boot camp experiment. Today, we are now seeing this being put into law.

If we go back to the beginning of this, when this Government came in, what’s really clear to us is they don’t care; this is about politics and rhetoric, a punitive tough-on-crime, tough-on-children approach. I want to quote the Prime Minister when it was put to him that all the evidence shows that military-style academies and boot camps don’t work. What did the Prime Minister say? “Well, I don’t care whether they do or don’t work; I’m going to do it anyway.” That is exactly what has happened.

Then this Government pushed ahead with yet another experiment—a pilot. What did we learn from that pilot? That nothing has changed; that the evidence is still the same; that you have an over 80 percent recidivism rate for those who go through boot camps and military-style academies.

And what did we learn from that pilot? That nothing has changed. That the evidence is still the same. That you have an over 80 percent recidivism rate for those who go through boot camps and military-style academies. But what was the purpose of the pilot? This Government introduced the law before the pilot had even been completed. Was it just a tick-box exercise?

This legislation that we have was introduced in November 2024, and here we are, in the final days, the final hours, of this parliamentary term, sitting under urgency, and this Government is rushing through the final stages of this legislation.

If we go back to November 2024, what also happened in that month? What we had was this House, Parliament, apologise to the survivors of abuse in State care, including those who were abused in boot camps. An entire chapter in the royal commission’s report was dedicated to boot camps. So this Parliament, on a solemn day, acknowledges what has happened historically; says it’s a dark stain on our history; and, surrounded by survivors in this House, outside, and in other places, apologises. And then, days later, it introduces this bill.

This bill is the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill—or what I call “the boot camp bill”. It introduces this bill. The shock and despair of survivors who presented to our select committee—that the Government had just delivered an apology for historic abuse in State care and then introduces legislation replicating the very thing it had just apologised for.

Has this Government learnt nothing from our history? Does this Government just ignore all the evidence and all the experts and continue to push ahead their political agenda?

I am shattered—emotionally because this is wrong, and, physically, because we have been fighting this, because it is wrong, for the entire term of this Government. And to no avail. Here we are, in the last days, and this is going to pass its third reading.

The Minister thanked the submitters and made a few tweaks to improve a bad bill. Well, the Minister should have listened carefully, truly understood the submissions that were being made, and chucked out this bill. But she didn’t.

Some of the areas that are so concerning in the bill that we covered in our committee stage were around the unnecessary labelling of these young people as young serious offenders. This is how ridiculous this is. This is all about politics, because it’s very clear that you do not need to have the term “young serious offender” to identify who these young people are. We know if they’re young by their date of birth, and we know if their offence is serious by what they have been charged and convicted of. They don’t need another label put on top of them. The Government was warned about the implications of labelling our young people.

What we also know is that the pilot programme was a voluntary programme. The Limited Service Volunteer programme, which this was modelled off, is a voluntary programme. Well, this military-style academy is not a voluntary programme. This is a sentencing option. What we know from the pilot—the first version and military-style academies 2.0 (MSA 2.0)—is that young people voluntarily left that programme. How are they going to be able to do that under this sentencing option? It’s going to be very difficult. The Minister couldn’t even tell us what all the compassionate grounds are that might be considered by the court. I’m going to have to attach the Hansard to this bill to give the court some more guidance on it because she wouldn’t accept any of our amendments.

Harm is occurring in our youth justice facilities still to this day. When the Minister was challenged about military-style academies, circumstances were put to her around Korowai Manaaki, and she said at the time that things were fixed—that that had all been sorted. But since then, 2024, we have seen numerous issues at Korowai Manaaki. We have also seen them at Te Maioha. There have also been examples in the military-style academy at Te Au rere. I put to the Minister: is she confident in the management of our youth justice facilities—in particular, Korowai Manaaki? She said absolutely. And then we have a “walk the line” incident that’s been in the media recently. I’m still waiting for a response to the incident at Te Maioha, which I understand left a young person needing to go to hospital. Two young people were assaulted in the military-style academy. It has been difficult to get any answers and accountability out of this Minister, and instead she just turns and attacks us when we ask these questions.

Another concern is the extension of the use of force—the use of force. These are children. These young people are going to be sentenced to military-style academies. There’s going to be an in-residence component. Then there’s going to be an in-community phase. The legislation proposes that third parties can deliver the military-style academy. Well, we saw what happened when third parties delivered boot camps in the past: horrific abuse. The Minister talks about iwi, hapū, Māori organisations possibly delivering these military-style academies. I want to know how they feel about being given the ability to use force on our young people.

And that brings me to the point: the papers tell us that this will disproportionately impact tamariki Māori. Almost 100 percent of the participants so far have been Māori. More than 80 percent of those likely to go into boot camps—military-style academies—are Māori. I didn’t hear any Māori asking for the use of force.

So this Government has not listened to the experts. They have not listened to the evidence. They learnt nothing from the royal commission into abuse in State care. They learnt nothing from the pilot programme, which showed eight out of nine of the young people reoffended, and I understand there’s alleged reoffending for the current MSA 2.0. But, again, we cannot get any answers and accountability from this Minister.

We need a Government that follows evidence; not taking us backwards down punitive approaches that are proven to not work. We know that wraparound, long-term, holistic approaches work to heal these children and their whānau and get them back into a pathway that sees them contributing meaningfully to their communities. That is what is needed; not enshrining boot camps into legislation. Labour opposes this bill.

Back in the 1950s, there was a report that was delivered to every single household in New Zealand called the Mazengarb report. This was a report all about youth delinquency, and it was a report that sensationalised teen crime and teenage pregnancies. It was maybe one of the first instances in New Zealand of a moral panic—a moral panic whipped up about young people who seemingly can’t be brought back under control. But what it actually led to were disastrous outcomes for those young people, which we know so well now that we’ve had the royal commission of inquiry into abuse in State care in front of us. As a result of that moral panic back in the 1950s, kids were picked up off the side of the road and taken into State care and faith-based institutions, where they would endure abuse.

This is a cycle that has continued in New Zealand and has not been broken, because of politicians and the media whipping up frenzies and moral panics about young people, which inevitably leads to those young people being worse off—being used as a rationale to further abuse and punish some of the most marginalised young people in our country.

This is no different. The boot camps and this bill are a result of electioneering and campaigning, primarily by the ACT Party but also in the past by the National Party under John Key, who said we needed boot camps for kids he described as “human ticking time bombs”. When he tried the boot camps it didn’t work, and then we had Government MPs who are now in Government who went around campaigning in 2023 and said that they wanted to punish these kids—these kids who this bill addresses.

Since then, we’ve seen them go back on the harsh words that they used to describe these kids and to try and put fluffy words around these boot camps—that they’re so-called “trauma informed”, the fact that the Children’s Commissioner actually found no evidence of any military components to these military-style academies, which furthers the point that this is about a moral panic. This is a response to a campaign against the most vulnerable young people in New Zealand.

It doesn’t align with what the actual evidence says around youth crime, and that is why it is a moral panic. If you actually look at the data, what you’ll find is that for a long time, youth crime has actually been in decline in this country. But that seems not to matter to the politicians who are happy to win and score points by wanting a system of revenge against these young people, because that is what it’s about. It’s not about rehabilitation; it is about revenge.

There’s been echoes of that sentiment in this campaign in 2026 as well, when I see the same party—the ACT Party—campaigning on teachers being able to use force against “little shits” in their classrooms. That is the contempt that the ACT Party and the Minister for Children have towards children. Karen Chhour should have never been allowed anywhere near this portfolio because she and her party—it’s not even that they don’t care about kids; they hold contempt towards kids. They want to normalise the use of force against children. That is what this bill does. It allows third-party providers and police to use force against children, and they want to expand on that by giving that “right” to teachers as well. That is contempt against children.

If you are trying to say to children who have been violent or committed an offence that they should not use violence, then why would you turn around and legislate the use of violence back against them? Again, this is where those kids learn to use violence from: from adults who are charged with their care who are then legally allowed to use violence against them to get what they want. This is what that bill does.

This bill is about rangatahi who are traumatised, not just because they were born into circumstances outside of their control; not just because they were born into families with drug use problems; not just because they were born into families who beat them, who touch them, who abuse them; not just because they were born into poor communities; not just because they were born with disabilities that don’t come with any funding to stop them from being excluded from their schools. If you had talked to those rangatahi you would understand what circumstances they were born into, but it’s not just the circumstances they were born into; it was the circumstances that their ancestors experienced and the continuation of intergenerational trauma.

I’ve got some new research here: “New words for old harms: the myth of trauma-informed boot camps in the New Zealand youth justice system”. What it says: “Similarly, intergenerational trauma is based on the accumulation of harm but across generations, causing behaviours of defence or adaptation to develop.” Where does that come from? It comes from breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori economic exclusion and segregation, and the challenging lifestyle circumstances of many whānau and rangatahi, which is why rangatahi Māori are overrepresented in the cohort who will be victimised by this bill—even further victimised by this bill.

There is no evidence that these boot camps are military at all in the first place, but they can’t be “trauma-informed”, as the Minister likes to use that word so often. Youth justice residences are rotten. You just heard what the Hon Willow-Jean Prime has said: youth justice residences are kid prisons. There is nothing therapeutic going on in there, and how can we expect young people to engage in any rehabilitation when they are in unsafe environments that do not meet their needs?

On that, this is a bill that legislates and allows for police to use force against young people who escape those unsafe environments. This is something that a submitter said during the submission process which has really sat with me: children do not abscond from places that meet their needs. Moreover, you should not need to use force against a child in any situation, period—period. Never. There is no excuse for it.

You know what? The people involved in this trial, even before, when we knew that this boot camp was coming, have been concerned about it, and that is why the Cabinet paper about these boot camps was leaked to us—it was leaked long before it even got to this House because people were that fundamentally concerned about what it proposes. Even throughout the pilot, people who came forward—whistleblowers who had to expose how deeply concerned they were about these boot camps. That is not a good sign.

When will this Government learn that tough on crime doesn’t work? Has this Government had a look at the most recent New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey? If the Government’s approach to making sentencing harsher, to increasing policing but not increasing the amount of funding into prevention, and if things like military-style boot camps work, then why are there more Māori victims of crime under this Government than under the last? Why has there not been any response by this Government to the most recent crime and victims survey? Because tough on crime policies do not work, but they especially do not work for people who have not known anything except toughness. Few people in this House could ever empathise with the lifestyle and circumstances that these kids were born into.

Actually, to talk about people in this House, there are people in this House who made mistakes when they were kids, when they were teenagers. Did they get sent to a military-style boot camp? No, because the reality is the people in this room, including myself—we are privileged. We can afford to get a lawyer. We can afford to make mistakes when we’re young people. We all make mistakes when we’re young people, but these young people do not have the means or the privilege to overcome that in the same way—in the same way that we do.

If any of us in this room, if our kids made a mistake, they would not be able to overcome it in the same way that these kids do because nobody is in their corner, except we are in their corner, which is why renew our call to close down youth justice residences altogether; to move towards a community in situ evidence-based approach towards young people; to not sweep aside cornerstones of our youth justice system such as the family group conferences in the way that this bill does. These boot camps will not work and they will be repealed under the new Government in a few months’ time.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. There’s nothing like listening to speeches from the other side to really underpin the point that they have no life experience, they have never dealt with people who are either offenders or victims. I have worked in this field for over a decade of my life. This policy is to provide a faster, targeted, stronger, and rehabilitative response to serious and persistent offending for 14- to 17-year-olds with two or more proven offences punishable by 10 or more years of imprisonment, and the court must be satisfied the previous interventions have been unsuccessful and the young person is likely to reoffend. It will be the longest and most intensive order available to the youth court and with a strong focus on rehabilitative, therapeutic, and cultural components for each young person. These are very troubled young people who this will be addressing and seeking to help them break the cycle of offending, which will improve their lives and improve the lives of their families and improve the lives of many. I recommend this bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill. What I would like to do is actually bring some calm back into the conversation. We are not talking about all youth in this bill; we are talking about a group that has largely been given up as too hard to deal with.

I applaud the Minister for stepping forward and taking hold of an issue that has been too long left to just let these kids age out, to let them become adults. This is doing better. This is about putting in a wraparound service, and although that side of the House will write off all of the hard-working, dedicated people working in Oranga Tamariki who provide these interventions, this side of the House believes that these are great people who are skilled and capable of delivering a common-sense solution. This is really about taking what is an issue—this small group of people that the system has let go because it’s too hard. This is a bill that says, “We will not give up on you. We will try things to ensure we break the cycle. We intervene, we protect, we turn things around.”

This is exactly what this bill is doing. This is not changing the system for all young people. This is not undoing all of the systems in place. This is part of a solution that is turning the system to direct an intervention to those that have previously been given up on, and this is about making sure we don’t give up on any of them. New Zealand First recommends this bill to the House.

💬 SPEAKER: Split call—Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Just listening to the previous speaker, that could probably ring true if the fact of the matter was that we weren’t talking about a large proportion of rangatahi Māori, tamariki Māori, and if we were, in fact, having a Government before us that was wanting to address poverty and was wanting to address homelessness and was wanting to address trauma, address injury, address head injuries, address violence, but we don’t. That is not what this Government is doing. If the Government was truly intent, and this Minister was truly intent, on resolving the issues that we have with our rangatahi who have been sorely let down by the State—let’s talk about how they got into this situation in the first place—we would be replacing boot camps with mana mokopuna intensive intervention, we would be making sure we have early intervention and a dedicated team of social workers, of youth workers, of iwi workers, of education and mental health support, of addiction support, of disability support, of FASD expertise, but we’re not talking like that. What we’re talking about is locking them up, labelling them, giving the mandate to physically restrain them, to touch them, and to do the things that we’ve seen done previously by the State to Māori children.

What we have here is a Minister who has lived experience and is using that lived experience as a displaced Māori to place utu on Māori because this Minister does not believe—does not believe—in Māori support and what Māori and whānau ora and iwi ora and hauora could be doing for these rangatahi. We’re hopelessly sitting here—

💬 SPEAKER: Sorry, I’m going to stop the member there. I think you need to reflect very carefully on what you’ve just said. It’s not appropriate for members in this House to make those sorts of allegations, one to the other. It never has been. It might be a term that you’re more familiar with than others, but I don’t think you should accuse anyone else of the House of taking utu on someone else.

On taking utu on te ao Māori, or rangatahi Māori, or utu, the word you don’t like?

💬 SPEAKER: You can’t make that accusation—

Then we have a Minister that is using lived experience—

💬 SPEAKER: Are you listening to me or not?

Yes, I’m not using that word.

💬 SPEAKER: OK.

So we have a Minister that is using lived experience to be able to say this is what should work for all Māori because that Minister was displaced from te ao Māori. That is not something that has come from this member; that is something that has been shared here, because I used to hold this portfolio three years ago. The serious matter isn’t about the kupu we use; it’s actually about the intent and the intent of this Government in what it intends to do with rangatahi. There is support around there. There is expertise. Five thousand three hundred and forty six people opposed this bill—5,346—and only 24 supported it; 5,346 had evidence as Māori to say what should be done, but that’s not what this Government is doing. It’s ignoring 5,346 submitters and listening to 24.

That is the ridiculousness of what we see happening here and applied to Māori all the time by this Government. I refuse to be marginalised or told that we are being overdramatic about what is happening to rangatahi, because we saw in 2024 those tamariki that were made State wards that were abused by the State and who haven’t had anything properly addressed, and what they lost is dignity from a State that refused to acknowledge them, locking our tamariki and our rangatahi away and leaving them unsafe is the best thing for them to do. Absolutely, we care about our victims. Absolutely, they need to heal. But what is happening to the fact of what this bill isn’t doing? It isn’t addressing how those rangatahi got there in the first place. If the Minister lived on the ground and saw the communities that are impacted by this Government’s decisions, she would see why they’re arriving damaged, harmed, having lived in poverty, having been violently offended and not had any intervention. Instead, what we’re doing is just watching another cycle of the ridiculous behaviour that happens when it becomes too hard and our babies become too hard to heal and fix. The best way to do it is to lock them away.

What happens when we see Korowai Manaaki and those babies that are going into that system. And I was one of them that turned up there four or five years ago and saw them and saw the bullying that went on to them, not just from those who were there but from staff. What happens to the fact that these babies are going to be put into the care of the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki—the same role that, a few people ago, had tried to uplift a baby that was a week old. That place has not been fixed. It’s just been fancified. It’s been polished up, and we all been told that this Minister knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t. Our babies are the sacrificial lambs in this ridiculous, revolting bill, and I really hope that those that are standing in this place that supporting this bill are around in 20 years’ time when they have to do another apology to these rangatahi as adults, because every evidence overseas with indigenous peoples, where these camps have failed them, have had to live through that same experience. Shame on this Government.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to speak on the third reading of the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill. I think when we’re looking at this bill where there is an introduction—whether through the pilot of the so-called boot camps or the military-style academies that we have seen—the question we should be all asking ourselves is simple: when a child has caused serious harm, what are we trying to achieve? Are we trying to prove that we are tough, or are we trying to make sure that such harms are not being caused again? Are we trying to address the root causes of what led to that offending in the first place?

Now, I appreciate the engagement that we have received on this bill during the committee stage, and we’ve had an incredibly robust discussion. But I think that one of the things that has continued to gnaw on all of us as we are progressing through this process is that the bill that we’re seeing in front of us and the discussions that we had in the committee stage don’t necessarily reflect the reality of what we’re seeing in the trial, the reality of what we’re seeing in the boot camps that has happened before.

In the pilot that we have seen—even the most recent pilot we have seen—we’ve seen that it is not working for our young people. Our young people do not feel like their mana is being upheld. Do you know what’s even more concerning in the current pilot? The fact that every one of them is Māori; the fact that we’re looking at this disproportionate number of rangatahi Māori that are going through this system. With everything we are seeing, they are not a deficit of our rangatahi Māori; they are the deficit of our system that has put them there.

At the same time we’re seeing the introduction of bills like this, we heard this Government give its apology to the royal inquiry into State abuse in care. Through that process, we have heard the harm they have caused to those who were in Te Whakapakari on Aotea. Those survivors have told this Government, and this Government has said to those survivors, “Never again.” But at the same time, we’re seeing the same thing happening again and again. What outcomes are we trying to achieve through this bill? What outcomes are we trying to achieve through such punitive approaches to our young people, approaches that do not uphold their mana and that do not uphold their dignity?

For anything that we have seen in many of our portfolios, particularly when we’re looking at education and when we’re looking at housing, we know that if our young people have a warm, dry, and safe home, what will that mean for them? If they have access to 24/7 mental health support, what would that mean? What would it mean if they have access to rehabilitation and if we have a rational discussion around our drug law reform? What would happen, as we’ve just seen in the Waitangi Tribunal report on Wai 3553, if we have a curriculum that upholds Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as opposed to imported ideological approaches from Australia? What happens if we trust our experts to be able to teach our children on things like mātauranga Māori using kaupapa Māori methods that allow our young people to express as themselves, as opposed to what other people want out of them? The Green Party will not support this bill.

I am so disappointed at the theatrics from the Opposition, claiming to speak on behalf of children and saying that this is about protecting children. Actually, what about the children, who have died at the hands of other children, that this bill aims to protect, those whose family have lost their loved ones needlessly because we do not have strong enough consequences to prevent them from killing other kids? That is who this bill is for. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is an unfortunate day we’ve got to here, and it’s unfortunate that the Government has waited until the last moment, the dying breaths of this Parliament, to pass this bill. I can’t help but wonder if, in fact, the ACT Party has done this on purpose so that they can go out to their electorate, to the people who like this sort of thing, and say, “We’ve done it. We’ve got boot camps back.” I do worry about this, because it strikes me that there’s a lot of window dressing. It was an interesting committee of the whole House stage, where we were kind of testing Minister Chhour on what was military about military-style academies. In the bill itself, in new section 320S, inserted by clause 40, it says that the chief executive can have them undertake military-style activities. I was concerned about that, because I didn’t want young people to be doing rifle drills or combat training or anything of that type. The irony is that the Minister stood in the chair just over there and said, “No, they won’t be doing anything like that. They’ll just be getting out of bed on time and doing things with routine.” The only other thing I can really pin is that in new section 320U, inserted by clause 40, they may be required to wear a uniform or standard issue clothing. The extent of the military aspect of this appears to be, basically, getting up on time and wearing camo pants. That’s why I worry that this is largely window dressing.

Now, a number of the speeches in this House have identified the seriousness of the issue before us, in various ways and from various perspectives. It’s a pity that we’ve got a bill that’s largely window dressing, when the issue that is before us is one of safety of those who are most vulnerable, not only the young people who’ll be put in these military-style academies but also the young people who are part of their whānau or their networks and who, as has been pointed out, are on the receiving end of their behaviour—so victims as well. It’s really disappointing that we’ve got this framework that has, essentially, been shoved through despite all objections. I think that if we took a genuinely bipartisan approach to this—one of the most serious issues before us—we would make real progress.

The problem now is that we’ve got this thing called a military-style academy, which has been shown not to be successful in its true military sense, so what we’ve now got is a watered-down version, but it’s still conceptually abhorrent to have something which is dressed up as soldiering, and then we’re told, “This is how to fix our kids.” We actually know that’s not true. We know it on this side of the House. You know it on that side of the House. We know that appropriate, therapeutic, trauma-informed care with appropriate supports and education and addressing the health and mental health needs of young people is going to get the best outcomes we can for these young people—we know that. So why don’t we work together on that, rather than dressing something up as military-style academies and saying that we’re going to label young people as “serious young offenders”?

I was serious when I said in committee stage, “Why are we calling it that? Why don’t we just call this an enhanced intervention framework?” If what we really want with the young serious offender order is to have a trigger for the provision of additional measures and resources to address this problem, let’s say that. Let’s say we need enhanced interventions. Let’s not look at a young person who’s been told for many years that they’re worthless and now tell them that they’re the most bad of the worthless, that they’re the most serious of offenders, rather than saying, “We value you, and we want to give you more attention and more care and address your needs in a more intensive way.”

Now, I can understand why there are some members of our community—and I can understand the grief and trauma that they’ve suffered, sometimes at the hands of these young people—who take a different approach. But, here, let’s be grown-ups. Let’s actually look at the problem and say we want it on this side—there is no party in this House that doesn’t want to reduce young serious offending. There is no one in this House who doesn’t want to reduce the number of victims of crimes. We know that young offenders, young people who fall by the wayside, are the ones who later become more serious and senior offenders if we don’t address it now. The costs of not getting this right are not just costs for those young people but are costs for future victims and our wider community.

It is disappointing. As I said, again, in the committee of the whole House, we don’t resile from being fierce when we challenge the Minister on why she is going down this track and why she insists on putting these things in place. We’re going to see this framework put into place. We’re going to see the ministry, Oranga Tamariki, subcontract these military-style academies to private and community institutions. We’re going to allow those private institutions, whatever they be, to exercise the powers of the State, including the use of force in, essentially, incarceration. We’ve been there before.

As the Hon Willow-Jean Prime has pointed out on a number of occasions, the pilots haven’t worked. Of course there’s politics around it.

But, at the end of the day, the facts are clear. The pilots that have been run have led to a number of incidents, which have made the public record, in the news and what have you. What’s more, the analysis of our officials—of your officials—has said we can’t see that this makes any tangible difference.

Compare that to the Circuit Breaker—the Circuit Breaker that we introduced in the last year of the last Labour Government—which you, the Government, to your credit, picked up because it worked. You can now go out to the electorate and claim that the fallen serious offending amongst youth is yours. It’s actually ours, because we worked together on that and we made real progress.

So rather than having this divisive and politicised vehicle, which is using, essentially, memes of boot camps or military academies—rather than having that, so that you can go out to a small part of the electorate who looks to America to see how to do youth justice, to their eternal discredit—we could work together on stuff that will actually stick and make real changes to people’s lives, including young people’s lives.

This will come into force, and the judges, the lawyers, and the social workers—all of those people who work so hard for young people—will try and make it work. It may be that there will be some good that comes of it somewhere, but, at the end of the day, we’ve got a military-style framework which is premised on modelling an institution, the army or the defence force, which is itself a force-based institution. Security is ultimately underpinned by a threat of violence in defence. That’s how it works. And that’s what we’ve got as a model for how we’re going to address youth offending.

This of course will pass this House in the dying breaths of this Parliament, but I hope that when we come to look at how we’re going and what’s going on—and, if we’re in Government, when we look to review this—that we will act cooperatively to say “Let’s do something that works this time which is based on evidence and which will stick and make everybody’s lives better.”

I remember back in 2023, when I was door knocking around Takanini, many people asked me what we are going to do with all the young people that are committing so much crime, which was rampant in Takanini. This addresses the serious, persistent, and repeat youth offending—a big problem in Takanini. I commend it to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): This is a split call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to add my two cents’ worth, I suppose. I think the contribution from the speaker before me probably sums up how I was going to start my contribution, by echoing some of the words of my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb in kind of characterising this bill not only as window dressing but as a bit of a tick-box exercise. As I said, the previous contributor wrapped it up in a nutshell, really. She wanted to be able to go back to the very people that she had door-knocked who were anxious about crime and say “We’ve cracked it. We’ve done it. We’ve solved the problem.” And that’s about the level of thought and consideration that has gone into this bill.

It’s disappointing. I would like to think that, given the problem definition—because the problem of young people committing serious offences is a problem. It’s not only a problem for the people that they offend against; it’s a problem for the trajectory of their own lives. It’s a problem that does require solving. But it’s also a problem that requires people to put their heads together properly, put their egos aside, put those promises that were made on doorsteps aside, put the simple salacious simpering kind of catch phrases and sound bites aside, which can often accompany political discourse, and actually do something that works. I think that that would have been worthwhile.

I would like to have thought, given my own personal, somewhat peripheral experience of offending—I hold the corrections portfolio. Before I was a member of this Parliament, I was very interested for a long period of time and had published papers on why people offend and what other types of factors, sometimes beyond their control, can be involved in making one person experience a childhood or a trauma and end up in the criminal justice system, when other people who experience the same traumas or factors don’t end up in the criminal justice sector. It’s incredibly important and it’s incredibly complicated and it deserves a proper response.

I would like to think that I would have been able to look past the rhetoric and commend some of the intentionality that is clearly behind this. We had the contribution from the member from New Zealand First, almost endearingly trying to convince us that this was about a wraparound service, that this was about intentions and good intentions and, by golly, if we don’t send kids to a military-style academy, we’ll never break this pattern. But it goes against all of the evidence. None of the evidence shows that this type of facility works. None of the evidence shows that the institutionalisation and the punitive institutionalisation works.

And that might be OK, as my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb said, because I don’t think this is even supposed to necessarily be that. I think this is window dressing. I think it is just an attempt to sound tough. It’s not even that military; it’s cosplaying military, which makes me even more cynical about the fact that actual children—where we’ve got an opportunity to intervene in their lives, to change the trajectory of their lives—those young people, we’re using as props so that the National Party and the ACT Party and the New Zealand First Party can somehow masquerade as being tough on crime.

We know that there’s lots of things that this Government have done that are superficial, but when we’re actually talking about young people’s lives, I don’t think they should be the props—the appropriate props—in the Government being able to deliver, so to speak, on a campaign promise.

It doesn’t work. There’s plenty of other things that do work—the Circuit Breaker and all the other fast-track rehabilitation programme mechanisms that could have been. This has also been incredibly expensive. It has cost a huge amount of money to pilot. It doesn’t work. We do not commend this bill to the House. It’s an absolute failure of this Government, and they should actually feel quite ashamed about it.

Serious youth offending deserves a serious response, and that is what military-style academies are all about—protecting victims, holding young offenders accountable and giving them an opportunity to change their lives, and that wraparound care. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

[Authorised reo Māori text to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

[Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

I’m looking through our run sheet for today. In this speech: responding to serious youth offending, or “the boot camp bill”. Next up, we’ve got move-on orders. Thereafter, we’ve got references to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. You know, it doesn’t end, and it’s a very sad end to a three-year Parliament, reflective of a Government that doesn’t have the interests of New Zealanders at heart and, secondly to that, actually isn’t creating solutions for Aotearoa New Zealand that respond to the issues that our country faces. None of the three bills that I talk about actually address the problems that they’re making out they’re trying to solve.

I strongly oppose this bill, the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill. If I reflect back a few years, it was a difficult time where we saw young people participating in negative behaviours and criminal activities that affected the lives of others. But that’s exactly why we worked together on initiatives that actually work. I point to those initiatives like Circuit Breaker, where you actually, through evidence and working with experts, create programmes and initiatives that support young people to address the trauma that they have experienced in their life to change their behaviour. You use informed practices to create initiatives that raise awareness of their behaviour, that engage them better in positive activities, that keep them busy, that actually shift them to a pathway where they can participate in quality education and therefore start to set up a meaningful life that is better for them, better for their family, and better for everyone.

But when we talk about “better”, I say to this Government: do better. Do better than the slogans of the tough talk on crime that this bill was always set up to do. This is a bill that talks about military boot camps as a solution to addressing the behaviour of young offenders. It does not work—doesn’t work. There is no evidence ever from anyone that says punitive action against young people engages them in positive behaviour—not a thing. No one has ever said that.

While I respect the military—my eldest brother is a long-serving army man in Waiōuru. He doesn’t even think this is a good idea for young people, because if they’re forced to do something, they’re more than likely to do the opposite—more than likely to do the opposite. Nor does anyone really, in modern-day society, actually believe that putting force upon our young people is a good thing. We left that type of behaviour back in the 1990s. What sort of country is this Government creating with us?

But my point here is we go back to the fundamentals of how we change behaviour when we find young people in circumstances that are not good for them, where they’re at their most vulnerable, and we look to the evidence of how we build a relationship with them. That is a starting point, because that relationship is about trust. From trust, you gain communication with that young person, and from that communication, you’re able to help them step forward to improve their circumstances in life and to enable them to make better choices.

I go back to a recent event that I attended in my home patch in Northcote with a wonderful organisation called De Paul House. At that event, they hosted Judge Tony Fitzgerald as the guest speaker. While he politely said that he frowned upon boot camps as a solution and a way forward for dealing with youth offenders, most of all—and this is my main message in this speech this afternoon—it’s to go back to stuff that works. He points to Ngā Pāharakeke as an initiative that was about changing the experience of the legal system for people that did offend. They saw way better outcomes. They saw way better engagement with the system. They saw less offending as a result, and certainly not perfect—it’s not a one-size-fits-all, suddenly you go through the system, you engage positively, and it changes your behaviour forever. Not a thing—but there is gradual improvement. That’s not what we see from a military practice. It’s not what we see from punitive practices.

The reality is the young people, the rangatahi in this programme whakapapa Māori—85 percent, largely. I heard one of the speakers from the National Party say that it’s a really good thing it includes cultural practices. This Government doesn’t even acknowledge cultural practices, because in two bills’ time, we’re removing references to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which actually does recognise people in this country. It’s all just la-la from that side. [Interruption] La-la, blah blah, slogans. Then we have the member from Napier. She’s laughing, giggling—I come from that place—mocking this bill. Take a look around in your own community. I challenge you—I challenge the member of Napier today: is this the best that you can do for the young Māori in your community?

💬 Katie Nimon: Look at the newspapers, Shanan, and see about—

Stop being so defensive.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): OK, that’s enough.

This isn’t the best that you can do. Shame on you. Because this isn’t—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Please don’t bring the Speaker into the debate. That was a bit derogatory. Thank you.

Shame on the member for Napier.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That’s better.

This is exactly why, in only a few days and a few months, I hope to see the end of this Government.

💬 Carl Bates: You won’t be here for it.

Well, you might not be here for it, my friend, by the looks of it. Two can play at that game. But let’s focus actually on the issue. Here’s another member of the National Party from Whanganui actually mocking the realities of a bill that doesn’t have any evidence. It’s not a better solution. Its whakapapa is in the slogans of an election campaign that now they’re trying to deliver on. Actually, the system has better examples, people—better examples. What’s important here is actually: take that message away; that young people matter; that, actually, the initiatives that our justice system or our education system are set to do is to rehabilitate people and to put them on a better pathway from where they’ve come from, because punishments, punitive behaviour, do not change the behaviour. It does not create a better outcome.

💬 Hon James Meager: Tell that to Michael Wood.

There we are again. James Meager mocking the reality of this bill—a Minister. This is a serious, serious matter of a Government that has failed another bunch of young people, spending money on an initiative that does not work. How many people are left in the trial boot camp? Not many. How many have reoffended as a result? A number of them. Compare that to the Circuit Breaker initiative with pastoral care, wraparound support, evidenced decision-making. That is the change that we want to see. New Zealand, get rid of this Government in a few months’ time. Better starts now.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand to take this last call on this amendment bill before it becomes law. I’m mindful of the fact that the word “rehabilitation” has been used by many people throughout this third reading. I also acknowledge the emotions that have run high because this is a very serious situation and it is about giving young serious offenders who have endeavoured to get themselves back on track through different initiatives and have not succeeded. These amendments strengthen the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 to provide extra tools, to provide extra opportunities to get them on the right track prior to them entering into adulthood. I commend the bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 67

New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 52

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 12; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill

Legislative Statement