Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. I stand to take a call on the second reading of the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill. Labour opposes this bill. Instead of making sure that all youth justice facilities have intensive wraparound therapeutic interventions that work, this Government resorts to an approach that has failed time and time again, simply because it plays well to their political base—the tough-on-crime rhetoric, the punitive approach to youth offending rhetoric.

I asked questions in the House earlier about the Government’s second military-style academy, and the Minister refuses to answer those questions. The first military-style academy pilot was a failure. As the Government was warned that this would not succeed and that it has a high chance of a failure rate, they ignored expert evidence and pushed ahead regardless. We know that, in that case, eight out of nine of the young people went on to reoffend. Today, I asked the Minister questions in the House about the current military-style academy that is under way and asked why two young people voluntarily left the in-residence component of the latest military-style academy. Once again, the Minister refuses to answer any questions about that.

We are opposed to this bill for many reasons. First and foremost, our approach—Labour’s approach—is to implement policies that are evidence based and shown to work. What is known across the world about military-style approaches to youth offending is that they do not work and they can cause harm. In fact, I want to quote Mana Mokopuna’s submission on this bill, which put it clearly: “International and domestic evidence is clear that military-style approaches to youth justice do not work in the long-term and frequently causes further harm for mokopuna who have already experienced lives of trauma. Nothing that is ‘military-style’ in character should be written into New Zealand law as a sentencing option or be used in the rehabilitation of mokopuna—interventions need to be informed by the evidence base of what works to prevent cycles of offending and give effect to our obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Te Tiriti.”

Harm continues in our youth justice facilities. About the time this bill was introduced to the House, we were acknowledging the apology that the Prime Minister gave on behalf of the Crown for decades of egregious neglect, abuse, and harm of young people in care, including in military-style academies and youth justice programmes. The royal commission into abuse in care included, in their report, an entire chapter on the notorious Te Whakapakari bootcamp, where the most heinous abuse occurred. We know that abuse still occurs today. Young people in youth justice facilities continue to experience abuse and harm, both from their peers and from staff. We need to pay heed to what the royal commission told us, we need to listen to survivors of abuse in care, and we need to learn from what went wrong in the past. Introducing this bill and pushing ahead despite the outcomes of the pilot and what they are seeing in the current military-style academy does none of that.

The learnings from the pilot: the Prime Minister, when this was put to him, said that he didn’t care whether it does or doesn’t work because they were going to do it anyway. The Government justified having the pilot military-style academy as a way to learn about what worked and what didn’t work, and then they would adjust the bill. The pilot tests an approach to learn from it, assesses what was learnt, and decides whether to do it again or not. This isn’t what happened here. The pilot military-style academy was still in progress when the bill was introduced to the Social Services and Community Committee. The pilot itself was not a success, with similar rates of reoffending to what occurred when young people go through the usual youth justice facilities.

There were also key differences in relation to what was in the pilot and what is in this legislation. That raises further questions about the negative impact of this legislation—for instance, the pilot was voluntary, and the legislation mandates military-style academies as a sentencing option. There is an importance difference: voluntary participation has an impact on the experience and outcomes, and voluntary participation also means that young people can leave the military-style academy if they are experiencing harm. The legislation does not allow for that, and, as we have seen with the most recent military-style academy, two young people voluntarily left the in-residence phase of the military-style academy. That cannot happen under this legislation.

Also in the pilot, it was 12 weeks in residence, whereas in the legislation it allows for up to 12 months. We know that the longer a young person spends time in residence, it increases institutionalisation and isolation, potentially impacting negatively on the young person, particularly when they have no option to leave the military-style academy.

The pilot was also a cohort of young people who started and finished together. The legislation does not appear to account for this, with the potential for young people to be coming and going off the military-style academy sentences. This can have a negative impact on them.

It is not clear what the pilot was supposed to test, given that this legislation is so different from what was in the pilot. The pilot didn’t teach us anything that we didn’t already know, and that is that the best approaches are wraparound and therapeutic, and not military in any way.

We know that this bill is discriminatory. When we look at the young people who are most likely to be sentenced to a military-style academy, 85 percent of the young people directly affected by this bill will be Māori, and yet the bill was not developed in partnership with Māori. There was no consultation and there was no reasonable and good-faith engagement. Māori, Pasifika, rangatahi whaikaha, and rangatahi with neuro-diversities and neuro-disabilities are overrepresented in the youth justice system. It will be these already vulnerable groups of young people who will bear the brunt of this risk.

There were a lot of submissions on the negative aspects of labelling our young people as “young serious offenders”. Again, it suits the political rhetoric and it suits the punitive rhetoric that we have heard. What we found out through the select committee process was that it is not required administratively, and so why is that label being put on young people?

I have only two minutes left to make further contributions. I want to turn to the fact that there are important details in this legislation that are being left to regulation. It is one of the many concerns that we have with this bill that a great deal of detail is going to be in regulations, including the implementation, operation, and monitoring of military-style academy programmes and providers, and safeguards for the use of force and actions that must be taken to ensure a young person subject to the young serious offender declaration receives the appropriate standard of care. All of those really important things are not in the primary legislation, and they are being left for regulations.

The widening of the use of force is something that concerned many, many submitters. That has been left to regulations.

The safeguards around the widening of the use of force powers is going to be done in regulation. The Social Services and Community Committee has not had the opportunity to see and scrutinise what any of that is. Extending the use of force powers to third-party providers, who may not receive appropriate training and support, simply heightens the risk of harm to these young people.

To sum it up: given that this bill is likely to pass, we will be bringing amendments to the committee of the whole House for consideration to reduce the potential harm that could be caused to young people. But it must be clear and on record that the Labour Party opposes this bill, and we believe the sentencing of children to a military-style academy has no place in legislation.

Alongside youth and social workers, parents, criminologists, psychologists, judges and lawyers, survivors of abuse in State care, the outgoing Children’s Commissioner, and mokopuna themselves, the Greens completely and in the strongest terms oppose this bill and have from the beginning.

Now, this Government likes to claim credit for a reduction in youth offending that was already happening. I hope that every New Zealander completely rejects the moral panic that has been whipped up in this House by the Minister who is meant to protect the most vulnerable children in this country to make it out like things are much worse than they really are. If you actually look at evidence—which should be the absolute fundamental basis of any legislation that concerns vulnerable children—you will see that for decades, youth crime has been in decline, bar a spike during the COVID-19 lockdowns. That’s not something that any one Government can take credit for. That’s because, finally, as a country, we’d gotten smart enough to accept that punishing children does not get the outcomes that it intends. It has never worked, and it will never work.

What the spike in youth offending during the COVID-19 lockdowns showed us is that—and this was acknowledged by the Minister of Police at the time—if children aren’t able to be in school or in their communities, and they are stuck at home in unsafe environments, they will offend. That is exactly what these military-style academies, or “boot camps” as everybody else calls them, do. Let’s start with the boot camps. There’s a lot to say on this ill, and I’m going to try and break it down, but 10 minutes simply isn’t enough time to explain why this bill is so deeply cruel and callous.

The military boot camps are a complete slap in the face of every person who was abused in State care that this House apologised to two years ago. In fact, Sonja Cooper, one of the lawyers who has been standing in solidarity with survivors, actually said that the military-style academies are like giving the fingers to the royal commission. That’s because it’s not learning from our history. As the previous speaker just said, there was a boot camp on Great Barrier Island called Te Whakapakari in the 1970s where children were abused and tortured. The three main settings of that boot camp that allowed for that abuse to take place were the lack of safeguards, untrained staff, and the fact that it was in an isolated location.

That is completely reminiscent of what is taking place in these boot camps, where you have a lack of safeguards in this bill—which will be developed “later on” as part of the regulations once this bill is already in law—it gives power to third-party providers and there are no standards for what level of training or expertise those staff have to have, and the trials for this boot camp were again in an isolated location. Most of the participants are from Auckland, and they were chucked down do Palmerston North and isolated from their communities and their families. Can we not see that this is repeating history again?

All of the evidence points to the fact that boot camps do not work. There is not one shred of international or domestic evidence whatsoever that military-style interventions work to reduce crime. But there is plenty of evidence that says that trauma can indeed be inflicted or compounded by the military-style, short sharp shock type of interventions provided for in this bill. Even the New Zealand Defence Force, the voice on military, expressed serious concerns to Oranga Tamariki around the boot camps. That is why this kind of approach will never work.

Let’s talk about the trial for a minute as well. The trial that was piloted on these boot camps actually never mattered in the first place, because this legislation was already written before the pilot had even been completed or evaluated. Not to mention, a pilot should always try and replicate the conditions that it is meant to operate with in real life, but the trial of these boot camps could not be further from what the boot camps will actually be. The pilot was voluntary; the actual boot camps will be compulsory. The pilot was 12 weeks; the actual bill proposes 12 months. Incentives were offered to the participants in this trial, such as less time in detention, which will not be reflected in real life. The pilot itself had far more resources than most youth justice residences even have to run a military-style academy, and the pilot’s participants had not been designated as young serious offenders, as proposed in the bill, which may have affected their actual experience.

Every child in the trial was given hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources, which they deserve, because they have been failed by multiple systems. The reality of when these are implemented is each child that passes through this boot camp will not be given that level of care and attention and resource—that they deserve, but will not get—because this Government threw everything into this pilot to try and make it work. Guess what! It still failed. In the end, what it shows is that even with children from the most troubled backgrounds, given all of this resource, given access to the highest level of officials, it is a broken model, and no matter how much you try to change what it really is on the inside, it simply will not work.

The young serious offender label is something that we’re deeply disturbed by. That’s because when you label a young person when their brain is still developing, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We feel that labelling a young person will have detrimental lifelong impacts on how that young person sees themselves, how they see their place within society, and how they see their lifetime’s potential. To be clear, there is absolutely no administrative or legal benefit to designating human beings or children as young serious offenders. We heard that from the Criminal Bar Association New Zealand. We heard that from YouthLaw Aotearoa. We heard it from people who work in the courts, from judges to lawyers, who say that there is no benefit to this, except a sick punishment from this Government, who went around campaigning on cracking down on the most vulnerable kids in our country.

Did this House not learn the lesson on what happens when you label a group of young people? There were some young Māori men that stood before a court in Lower Hutt, and guess what! They were labelled mongrels. They were labelled mongrels, and guess what their life turned out to be? That is how the Mongrel Mob was created. We don’t realise that these labels can also become badges of honour. Experts came and spoke to us about that, and they said be careful when you create a label like a young serious offender, because it might become a badge that people actually want to earn. What we know about youth offending is that these activities, like ram raiding, become a badge of honour. They do it for social licence, to impress their friends in some cases. Congratulations, you’ve just handed them another badge of honour to earn.

The other thing that we’re deeply concerned about is the fact that this bill legislates for police and third-party providers to be able to use force against young people. For the record, there is never a reason where force should be used against children. That was the overwhelming sentiment from people who work with children—actually work with some of the most difficult violent children—they’ve said there is never an excuse for violence, or force, because if you use that against a child, you are telling them that they, too, are able to use violence and force to get what they want. Some people make the argument that we have to use force to prevent children from absconding from these youth justice residences, and we say to that, children do not try to escape from an environment that meets all of their needs.

We know for a fact that there is some dodgy behaviour happening in those youth justice residences, and Korowai Manaaki is the worst. That is why those kids keep jumping up on the roof. We heard today in question time what’s been going on in Korowai Manaaki, but the Minister won’t let any of us into the youth justice residence to actually see what’s going on. There have been consistent reports from Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture monitoring to say that there are dodgy dealings going on in Korowai Manaaki. I’ve got 30 seconds left. I haven’t even touched all of the details within the bill, because it is that disgusting of a bill.

We think that it is wrong to try and be tough on people, and young people, whose lives have been tougher than any of us could fathom, and that is why we are in complete, staunch opposition to this disgusting bill and the boot camps.

Thank God Tamatha Paul is not in charge, and may she stay in Opposition for a very long time. To try and conflate the abuse in State care with this bill is ludicrous. The Opposition, especially the Greens, have memories like goldfish. The trauma, which was experienced in 2022-2023, well past COVID by the way, goes to the business owners and members of the public who experienced ram raids right through Hamilton in the malls, and other centres across the country. This is just another example of proactive, measured law and order and community safety that may well be the necessary intervention that these young people need.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill. Firstly, I’d just like to thank the select committee and the amendments that they’ve made to this bill. But it is with no pleasure to be standing when we are talking about our future generation of 14- to 17-year-olds that this bill is actually targeted at.

We are talking about serious crime committed—multiple high-penalty offences—the most serious offences that we could think of. It is declaring a YSO—and I know, Mr Speaker, you don’t like acronyms, it’s a young serious offender—but it is targeting those most serious cases, and it is about these youth that have been out of control, causing persistent crime in our communities, and on this side of the House we believe that there should be consequences for your actions.

One thing is about restoring public safety. This Government wants to make sure that public safety is restored, so making sure that for offenders that are committing the most offences, there are actually programmes put in place. It’s also about rehabilitation and focused interventions, and we have heard about the military-style academies. This is a tool in the tool box; it’s not used all the time, but it is a tool that can be used. There needs to be effective deterrence, and having children and being a family, or anything, you need to be able to teach consequence, and sometimes deterrence, and actually having programmes, if there’s consequence when you do something—that’s where you can end up—it actually a tool in itself.

This legislation makes a significant step towards addressing the complexities of youth offending, ensuring that our justice system serves both the offenders’ rehabilitation needs and the public’s demands for safety and accountability. New Zealand First strongly supports this bill as a fair and necessary response to serious youth crime in New Zealand, and I commend the bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a split call—Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke.

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that we completely oppose this bill. This bill establishes a serious offender declaration and a new military-style academy order in the Oranga Tamariki Act 1989 if the young person is aged 14 to 17 years old at the time of offending, the young person has two or more eligible offences punishable by at least 10 years or imprisonment. This bill takes rangitahi who have already been failed by our system, brands them as “young serious offenders”, and sends them further into the very institutions that have repeatedly caused harm. A label is not a solution. A bootcamp is not rehabilitation. Māori children now make up over 53 percent of all tamariki in severe struggle across Aotearoa. One in four tamariki Māori are growing up in whānau that can’t afford basics—that’s 77,000 children.

Aotearoa has tried this before, as activity camps, bootcamps, and institutions. Even the Government’s own evaluation cannot justify turning this pilot into law. Only 11 rangitahi participated; all were Māori. The evaluators themselves said larger numbers and long-term analyses were needed before strong conclusions could be drawn.

The Social Services and Community Committee received 5,405 submissions in total. Nearly all submitters expressed a clear position on the bill. Of the total submissions, 24 supported the bill and 5,346 did not. So 66 percent of those appearing in the Youth Court are Māori—that’s 14 percent of the population; no conclusive evidence that military-style academies work. New research published in the MAI Journal 2026 speaks directly to this bill. The study draws on a wānanga with 11 kaupapa Māori social workers, youth workers, and organisational leaders, working closely with rangitahi Māori involved in serious offending. When the State mistakes trauma for defence and responds with control instead of care, restraint instead of relationship, and punishment instead of healing, a military-style academy is built around that very misunderstanding. It sees the behaviour but refuses to understand the context that created it.

I’m often whakama to talk about kaupapa and polices that relate to Oranga Tamariki matters because my upbringing has been the complete antithesis of this. Te reo Māori was my first language, access to my culture, growing up on my papakāinga whenua, not even being able to just visit my pepeha but live on my pepeha. I’ve often seen that as a privilege, but it isn’t a privilege; these are basic rights that all tamariki Māori should have access to across the country. These are the legislations that are in front of tamariki who have kai, whenua, health, education, and housing needs.

So I ask this side of the Government, who is consistently interjecting into my kōrero: what is this Government doing to address those needs? Instead of creating different ways of punishing rangatahi who are in State care, who are reoffending, what are the contexts behind it? You have to ask yourself: why are rangatahi going up on the roofs? Why are rangatahi actually in State care in the first place? Let’s answer that. Because these are the policies in legislation, this is the finding: there is no evidence as to how a military-style bootcamp will be successful in removing tamariki Māori outside of State care.

I want to acknowledge the kōrero of my colleague Tamatha Paul for the Green Party. Two of the most experiences that I’ve had here in Parliament is listening to the removal of section 7AA from the Oranga Tamariki Act and being a rangatahi Māori in one of the highest positions in governance roles in the country and not being able to assist tamariki who are on the roofs of Korowai Manaaki, and that’s what we have talked about tonight. Because we should be able to get tamariki out of State care and the legislation that affects it, not punish them even more.

I rise to speak on the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill, and to confirm that the Green Party opposes this legislation, alongside survivors of abuse in care, kids currently in State care, kids who have been through the system, experts, and those at the flax-roots, along with a plethora of Social Services and Community Committee submitters.

The ideology behind this bill is based on punishment, rather than what works. It’s a bill based on flawed thinking—that if we become tougher on young people, we will reduce offending. There is no evidence to show that this will happen. I challenge the Government MPs to think about radical love. When you show someone love and you wrap support around them and their families, they can do great things. When we ensure that people have access to a community, rehabilitation, and all of the things they need, we make our society safer.

This bill is a national shame, and I am embarrassed for members who cheer on such cruelty towards our young people, who often have never seen anything except cruelty. Government parties and the Minister in charge have been kicking these young people around like a political football for years, and it has to stop. All through the 2023 campaign, National campaigned on being tough on crime. Things like “Your bootcamps didn’t work but ours will.”, instead of looking at evidence, instead of resourcing the communities that prevent this harm from happening, instead of ensuring that children in Aotearoa don’t grow up in poverty. These are things that this Government could be focusing on, but instead they’re sticking to that ideology of tough on crime and cruelty, and I’m ashamed.

This tough on crime rhetoric came amid rising poverty, hefty cuts to community programmes—programmes that were working with youth—and other policies affecting vulnerable families. We’ve got a Government who is pushing through with things like cancelling emergency housing, they have cancelled emergency food parcels, bringing in benefit sanctions, and making it harder for young people to access a benefit if they’re disabled or in cancer treatment. The Minister has continued to use these kids as a political football, until the bootcamp pilot was a complete failure, and then the Minister started refusing to have any transparency around the trial when it didn’t work for them and their narrative.

In the Green Party, we believe in ensuring that every child in Aotearoa grows up with safety, stability, and aroha. It is clear from the actions of this Government, from the policies that they choose to prioritise, that this is not a vision that we share. I believe that the young people in this country can be the best that they can possibly be when we give them all of the things they need.

Gosh, there’s so much to say on this bill and only a few more minutes to say it. Let’s just look into one area: it is labelling these kids as “serious young offenders”. Young people are not simply statistics, labels, or problems to be managed. They are young people who have experienced profound trauma, instability, neglect, abuse, poverty, and disconnection from their communities; many are neurodivergent; many have experienced significant failures in the systems that were meant to support them.

In the Green Party, we have a plan to ensure that children in this country have everything that they need and their families are supported. That is a future we believe in and that is a future that we will continue to fight for.

Let’s come back to the evidence. The evidence is that there are a small, small, small group of youth offenders who repeatedly commit very serious offences around the country, who, under the current justice system, are not being properly rehabilitated, they are not paying the price for the consequences, and that is putting the victims at the top of harm. I cannot believe that the Opposition parties would go about aroha and everything else, without putting victims first. This is the National Party who’s serious about restoring law and order and building the future for all New Zealanders.

Madam Speaker, thank you. In response to the last speaker, there are about 850 of these children who are in this category, according to Judge Ida Malosi, who’s done this work all her life.

I want to start by—I thought about what the public out there would want to know, and I thought about how it was perfectly legitimate to worry about safety. That’s often the accusation levelled at the Opposition when we object to these kinds of bills. And I thought, do we really want to solve this problem? We’ve got 850 children who are really worrying in their behaviour and might be called serious offenders, and might very much grow into them. What do we do if we really want to solve the problem?

The answer is not this bill. In fact, the reality is that this bill is very likely going to end up with more victims of violence than if we didn’t have it. That’s a real concern. I want to explain why that is. I was on the Social Services and Community Committee, so I listened to submitters. The first thing we probably need to do is listen to submitters in this House more often than we do, because most of them were appalled at this piece of legislation.

I want to, in the spirit of debate, also talk about the issue raised by Ryan Hamilton today where, again, he criticised the Opposition parties for raising the issue of the boot camps that were part of the inquiry into abuse of children. Well, that’s not something that we did alone. That’s something that submitter after submitter did. They raised that issue, because at the base of it is the same problem. In the issue of abuse in the boot camps that happened on Great Barrier Island, etc., people thought that they were just producing disciplined children. They thought what they were doing was a short, sharp shock; that it was bringing about a discipline in those children. In fact, it was abuse, and it caused great trauma and it didn’t fix the problem. We ended up, as Tamatha Paul said, with people who joined the gangs. That’s what happened. So there is a really natural connection between those things and saying we need to learn those lessons.

I don’t think it’s fair to simply poke holes in something without talking about a solution. I want to talk about one today that I haven’t heard talked about in this debate. I want to talk about that wraparound and what it looks like, and what’s wrong with the bill today in comparison to what we know works.

Now, there’s a film that everybody who’s watching this should watch. It’s called BackTrack Boys and it’s an Australian film, and it’s about a man who won Australian of the Year and his entity he set up that takes on children in this category, who would be serious youth offenders. He takes on these children, and you can watch through the documentary what he does that works. What they did differently was they said, “All right, these kids, we’re going to invite them into a community and we’re going to build their community. We’re going to make sure that they know each other in an environment and we’re going to work with them, and with animals.” They actually work with dogs, so they build a rapport with an animal and they help train the animal, and they have an activity that they go out to and they sit around campfires and they do things together and they share stories. One of the things I remember him saying was that there is a myth out there that young boys don’t talk. When they’re around a campfire in that sort of situation, they talk about their feelings. He builds that and that self-discipline in the context of a community that loves those kids.

One of the things they do is they say that once you’re in the BackTrack group, you never leave. You’re there; you’ve always got the right to come back. So he creates a community that never rejects that child. That is even when those children offend and go to prison—even then, they’re there, beside those kids. It’s the most beautiful movie about what happens to those children. One actually does go to jail during the during the programme, and it is devastating to see this kid close down in an environment that is not suitable for children. What you can actually do now, because that movie was made a few years ago, is you can actually look and see what happened to those children. Some joined apprenticeships, and some ended up leading programmes like that all around that part of Australia. They have ended up being able to help each other and help children who are in similar positions.

Now I want to contrast that with what we see here. We have a situation here where people will be stuck in a situation they can’t get out of. Remember that they’re little kids. If you watch the movie, think about a kid like Rusty going through this process. They will be away from their families. They will be away from their support. They will be in an environment that’s completely alien. They will lose all power over the situation. They will be in our construct, which is that we are teaching them discipline, etc., but they will not have those things that were given to these children in the movie. They will not have ongoing support in the way that they should, and they will end up in a situation where they are then out of that programme and back in a community that may well be dysfunctional—because, after all, they’re there in the first place, right?

What we will have done is we will have lost an opportunity with those children when we are absolutely aware that other programmes work. I’ve suggested to you one that comes from Australia, but we have wraparound programmes here that were working and that we continue with. But we are taking this group of children out of the situation, and we are putting them into something that the evidence simply does not support works.

What I think we would all agree on in this House is that the children we are dealing with have come from high-trauma situations, and we know a lot about trauma now. We know what we have to do when we want to rewire the brain. We know how important it is to build community. We know what we need to do, and yet we are not doing it. What we are doing is pouring a massive amount of money in the wrong direction. And why are we doing it? Maybe because we don’t want to accept the reality of what has gone on.

That is not soft; it’s not woke. It’s the reality that we have a group of children in this country that are utterly disconnected—that are mainly Māori, actually. We live in a country with a record of deep poverty in that very community, deep disconnection with whānau in those very communities. We know that, and we have to face it if we’re going to be grown-ups, but we also need to face it if we’re going to come up with a solution that protects our citizens from violence.

So I say to Nancy Lu, specifically, who raised the issue that she thinks that she is tough on crime and we are not: this is actually the tougher approach on crime. I am not talking about adopting a system that doesn’t work and doesn’t keep New Zealanders safe. That is a strawman. That is manipulating the public sphere. I am talking about building a system that keeps people safe and deals with trauma in this country effectively, so we don’t end up with gang members on the street, so we don’t end up with people raping our citizens, because that is what is built by this method. We alienate people, we retraumatise them, because somehow it makes us feel better, and we do it totally denying the evidence that’s there. Now, we know the evidence is there and I want to go back to the submitters. We had a lot of submissions—about 5,000 submissions. I think there were a handful, though, that were actually for this. Most of those submissions came from people who know much better than me—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill deals with a small cohort of young people who repeatedly and seriously commit offences and these young people commit the largest portion of youth offending. It is a much-needed intervention into their lives. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to debate the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill, and the Labour Party strongly opposes this bill. I would like to start with a number: seven out of 10. Seven out of 10 young people who went through this Government’s military-style academy pilot reoffended, and most of them within two months of coming home. That is not a rumour. That is not a talking point from us on this side of the House. That is numbers from the Government’s own independent evaluation of the Government’s own programme.

Now, here is what should trouble and worry all of us as members of this House of Parliament in Aotearoa: we have seen this before. In 2009 and 2010, New Zealand ran military-style camps for young offenders under a previous National-led Government. They cost a great deal, and they did not make much difference to reoffending compared with simply keeping those same young people in a standard youth justice residence. Now, that finding sat in a ministry report, as I understand; a report that was so relevant that officials dug it up and circulated it to Oranga Tamariki staff in March 2024 while they were designing this very pilot. It was a warning against the pitfalls that might face this pilot if they were to go ahead with it. But what happened? Well, this coalition Government were warned, but they built the same programme anyway.

I do not doubt that each member of this House, especially those on the other side of the House, would want fewer young people offending, fewer victims, and they would like safer communities. All of us on the side of the House, we all want that as well. I’m sure that everyone, every parent, and every electorate, including my own from South Auckland in Panmure-Ōtāhuhu, we want that as well. This is not a debate about whether we as members of Parliament care. It is actually a debate about whether we’re willing to do what is actually something that works, or what evidence tells us works, or whether we would rather be seen to be tough.

Because the evidence—not opinion; the actual evidence—tells us clearly what works and what does not. Not just evidence from here in Aotearoa New Zealand; international research reviewing 12 different types of youth justice interventions found that discipline-based boot camp models sit at the very bottom. Some evidence suggests that they can make things worse. On the top are family-focused support, skills-based programmes, and sustained mentoring in the community—not up to 12 months’ residence with mentoring bolted on as an afterthought. What works is sustained, resourced, whole-of-childhood support.

This is not my view, or even the Opposition or our party’s view. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists told the Social Services and Community when they came to present that this bill’s predecessor, and I quote, “failed to demonstrate any value”. The Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers, standing with more than 20 child and youth organisations, told this Parliament that our tamariki are taonga, not serious youth offenders to be labelled and shipped off, at high risk of re-traumatisation, away from the very whānau and community connections that we know would keep young people safe. Save the Children and Children’s Rights Alliance told us the same thing. Individual New Zealanders who gave up their evenings to write submissions to this Government gave them their submissions, and so many of the submissions were along these lines.

The young people this bill is aimed at are not strangers to hardship. Of the 10 young people this Government’s own pilot had, six have ADHD, three of them unmedicated; almost all had documented substance abuse. Several were dealing with anxiety, PTSD, and risk of suicide. Labour’s alternative is not softness, it is rigour. It is investing, before a child ever reaches a youth court door, in housing, in mental health, in support, in whānau, and in iwi and community organisations who know these young people’s names and their family’s history. We oppose this bill strongly.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I think I agree wholeheartedly with one of the points the previous speaker just made: that we all want the best for the young people in New Zealand. As a patron of the Limited Service Volunteers, I have seen the difference it has made in young people’s lives and have really turned their lives around, so I wholeheartedly commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. There comes a point when you listen to the contributions in this House, and I wasn’t on the Social Services and Community, and I don’t profess to being an expert in youth justice, but the evidence that’s been provided through this process—the little bit of research that it takes to look at the evidence that’s been provided over a long period of time—is so overwhelming that you do have to ask yourself: who in their right mind would continue to pursue something that just doesn’t stack up?

This is one of those cases, and the cynic in me says, (a) it’s this Government, (b) because they’re trying to achieve something else. It’s not this. They’re trying to signal to the wider public, many of whom live busy lives, who don’t pay a lot of attention, who aren’t particularly engaged in politics and the finer nuances of evidence-based decision-making for the future of this country, but a little bit of a sound bite sounds good to them. The whole kind of boot camp tough on crime rhetoric resonates with some pretty decent people who, if you engage them in some conversation, doesn’t take long even for them to realise that things like this don’t actually work and they don’t make as much sense as that knee-jerk reaction that they may have first had to it.

Yet here we are pursuing after a pilot that we’ve heard from contributions on this side of the House didn’t seem to be all that good, that hasn’t finished, that the evidence hasn’t even been properly analysed and worked into the next stage of this, and yet here we are already pursuing at second reading the next iteration of something that’s a failed experiment. It’s really disheartening to listen to these contributions, because it’s not like all of this effort to signal to the wider public—a minority of the wider public potentially—that they’re tough on crime and that boot camps are somehow good. It’s not like there’s no negative consequences for anybody in that scenario. There’s actually young people’s lives that are concerned here, and we should be doing what we can to make that better and not worse.

Look, Labour obviously, clearly, does not support this bill. We all agree with the fact that we clearly want safer communities. That’s a no-brainer. We clearly want and acknowledge the fact that when young people, including serious recidivist offenders, continue to offend, they need to be held accountable. But we should be doing something to actually make that stop, something that really reduces reoffending, something that reduces future victims, and something that just quite simply helps those young people change the course of their life.

Whilst I said that I wasn’t any kind of expert in youth justice, I have been and seen my fair share of adult justice, and am not unfamiliar with the prison system per se. I’m not unfamiliar with the mental health system and with various other institutions and institutionalised processes where we find our broken people in society for which many of whom, with the benefit of some early intervention, could have lived very different lives. Military-style programmes, as I said, sound tough, but toughness is not the same as effectiveness. These approaches should not now be written into this law, and interventions should instead be based on evidence.

I also want to take the time to acknowledge one group in particular who do do good work in this area, and they’re certainly not soft on crime. They’re certainly not pursuing things that are not grounded in evidence. But I would like to acknowledge Dan and his team at the St John of God Waipuna in Christchurch, who run a specialised outdoor rehab and often work with some of the very same cohort of young people that we’re talking about here. It’s not an easy job. It’s not an easy programme. There’s certainly nothing soft about it. It’s incredibly positive because it does get good results. It does go to show that you don’t have to have this punitive approach to achieve the same outcomes. I’d like to acknowledge all of the work that they do and also acknowledge the fact that they constantly struggle for funding. Whilst this pilot seems to be a little bit gold plated and there didn’t seem to be any shortage of resources in an attempt to try and make this pilot produce the results that the Government very dearly wanted it to be able to, there are plenty of good providers out there providing good programmes and doing so on the smell of an oily rag and who, in fact, have lost funding during the course of this Government, whilst this Government makes very different priorities.

Many young people in the youth justice system, as has been said, have experienced trauma, they have experienced neglect, and they’ve had incredibly disrupted education and family lives. All of those factors sound complicated, but they’re not unknown to us, and there’s a good body of well-evidenced information that does tell us how to deal with that and does tell us how to put programmes together that would be much more successful than this rubbish one.

I also want to acknowledge that the royal commission into abuse in care warned about the dangers of institutionalisation, particularly when there were weak safeguards and unchecked power, yet this bill is another example of the use of force, including by third-party providers, when the crucial details about standards monitoring, provider accountability, and the use of force are being left to regulations. I don’t know if we’ve really discussed that much at length today, but that is something that certainly is worthy of further consideration. They’re not minor details. They’re actually there to provide protections and determine whether young people are safe or not, and that’s important. You’d think that if this Government was hell-bent on heading further and further down this path of the bootcamp philosophy, they would at least have a better idea of how to build the safeguards into legislation and not be completely reliant on doing the legislative work first and then working out those safeguards later. That feels absolutely wrong.

When I looked at some of the submissions—as I said, I wasn’t on the select committee—I noted that there were a huge number of submissions, 5,404, but that only 24 submissions supported the bill. That’s an incredible ratio of people that took time and applied their expertise and applied their lived experience and knowledge to making sure that their views were heard in opposition to this bill. Many of the submitters considered that the bill breached Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and impacts on Māori, human rights, Pacific, youth, and all of those other neurodivergent and disabled young people. Issues were raised during the select committee process, none of which seemed to have made any difference to the Government in terms of proceeding with this bill.

It’s also worth noting that it wasn’t just advice from submitters—it wasn’t just the information that they were able to provide. In the regulatory impact statement, officials outlined that there was a lack of evidence underpinning the military-style component. The regulatory impact statement cautions for the need to balance the rights of the child with public safety, and no one is suggesting that one of those elements of absolute concern needs to take precedent over the other. There are ways to achieve win-wins with both of those factors in regard. It just feels like this has been a cheap and nasty, short-sighted, shallow, and somewhat vacuous attempt at providing a solution to a real problem, but a real problem that is worthy of a lot more thought than what this bill provides.

The choice, as I said, is not between simply doing nothing. No one is suggesting that. The choice isn’t between doing nothing or supporting this bill. That’s a false choice. We can respond firmly to serious youth offending. We have responded firmly to serious youth offending in the past. The Circuit Breaker programme was incredibly, incredibly successful. If you resource things properly and you provide that wraparound service and you get on to it quickly, there are absolute ways of being able to deal with serious youth offending. If you prioritise rehabilitation and if you actually, actually prioritise mental health and addiction support and look at the basics like safe accommodation—we are incarcerating women at 2.7 times the rate of men at the moment, often for theft and for lower-level crimes that no man would go to jail for, because of a lack of bail housing. We are risk of doing the same to our young people. We do not support this bill.

This is a very serious matter, which we’re talking about. Nobody in New Zealand wants to see youth carrying out serious offences. We also do not want to see victims of serious crime. The other side here have wailed and gnashed teeth and tried to say that we are doing sound bites. I think the last speaker said, “Let’s put some evidence behind it what you’ve actually achieved as a Government.” Well, first of all, shall we look at their track record? Total victimisations rose from 2017 to 2020 here in New Zealand from 241,000 to 350,000, an increase of 46 percent. That side do not know what they’re talking about when it comes to law and order. There was a 400 percent increase in ram raids. What’s happened since we’ve come into Government? There’s been a 22 percent decrease in youth offending. There has been 49,000 less victims of violent crime. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is, That the amendments recommended by the Social Services and Community Committee by majority be agreed to.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendments be agreed to.

Ayes 67

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

Noes 51

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 13; Te Pāti Māori 2; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi.

Amendments agreed to.

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

Ayes 67

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

Noes 51

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 13; Te Pāti Māori 2; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

English Language Bill

Legislative Statement