OPINION
Not being an avid watcher of MSM news (to avoid verbally assaulting my TV), I accidentally stumbled on the following online interview. This is a pity because New Zealanders are motivated to curtail youth crime and the dialogue is hard to find being buried under an inappropriate title.
The interview was recorded on this Wednesday’s Breakfast on TV1 and reproduced online headed “National to rewrite the curriculum for kids – Luxon”.
The majority of the conversation (3.5 minutes of 5.45 minutes) is about National’s policy for tackling youth re-offending. The policy is not new; it was introduced by Bill English in 2017 and revived last November by Luxon.
While the interviewer, Chris Chang, fixates on the evils of putting ankle bracelets on ‘kids’ (a broad term including youth up to age 18) and the laughable notion that media are reputable because they base their views on statistics (I wish), Luxon discussed National’s policy to tackle repeat youth offending based on extending existing community programmes.
It makes no sense to argue rising youth crime doesn’t exist simply because fewer youths are appearing in the courts – but that is exactly what Chang does.
Chucking money at delinquent families and keeping youth out of court hasn’t stopped the upward trend either, a fact clear to everyone except this Government and the media.
Chang
The number of children appearing before court is continuing to decline according to the latest data from statistics NZ.
In 1992 more than 3,000 youth were charged with a crime. Thirty years later that number has less than halved.
National,says it’s not good enough and that there’s more crime, less jail time, so, what would a National government do differently?
Leader Christopher Luxon joins us now live. Kia ora Mr Luxon, what would you do differently?
Luxon
Well look, I mean the thing that we’ve got to acknowledge Chris, is that people – New Zealanders – aren’t feeling safe in their own homes, their own businesses, in their own communities. What we’ve seen from this Government is one target in the justice space which is a 30% reduction in the prison population.
That would be fantastic, that would be great if we’d actually had a 30% reduction in crime but that’s not what’s happening in NZ.
We have violent crime up 30%, retail crime up over 40%, a 55% growth in gang membership and now a ram raid happening every 10 hours in NZ.
So that situation is not acceptable, we just cannot accept that that is the new normal in NZ and we think it’s important that we do things about it.
Chang
Is it acceptable for ankle bracelets on kids?
Luxon
Well, what we have, particularly with youth offenders, is a series of penalties and they range from family group conferences to community service to incorporate bracelets to juvenile youth detention facilities.
Chang
So you are happy putting ankle bracelets on kids?
Luxon
Well, there’s a spectrum of penalty and consequences that should be used and they’re there in the existing legislation today, but they’re not always being used.
What we’ve also proposed is say hey listen, when we’ve got these serious repeat young offenders who’ve often done two ram raids, two aggravated burglaries or robberies we should create a special category called ‘young serious offender’ and that would then give the judges and the court an opportunity to say, hey listen, we think as a 15-17 year old we’d like you to attend a youth military academy – I know how the media presented that – the reality is very different…
Chang
Media or statistics as well, let’s not just say it’s media…
Luxon
Let me just talk that through a little bit, there are some very good programmes like the…the service programme LIV which has excellent results…we would build a lot of this programme off, we would have community organisations embedded with the military so that when they come out after a year they are actually with those community organisations making sure that those new habits and that new pathway that they want to get in is actually established.
I’ve been and sat down with ram-raid kids and I’ve sat down with organisations that are doing some amazing and incredible work with them and we want to power up that community sector big time – take the money out of Wellington and get it to them, so they can continue to do that work.
Chang
So you’re saying there’s a spectrum for ankle bracelets, ACT has been pretty strong on this, last couple of weeks they’ve been on Breakfast here, their deputy leader has said “ankle bracelets, we need that”. They’re going to be your natural bedfellow if the polls are anything to go by you are going to need them to be in government.
Are you going to…can you work with that and it sounds like that is going to be a policy that they are very keen on.
Luxon
Well what we are really focused on saying is hey listen, we’ve got to be on the side of the victims here, not the offenders and what we’ve seen in NZ is a government that has been soft on crime as evidenced by the situation we’ve seen is rising levels of crime. That is not an acceptable place for NZ to be.
And I’m really sorry, we know when we get to govern we are going to have to turn it around because we have great potential in this country but we are not solving our big problems.
And here’s an example of one: say we don’t accept that every ten hours there’s got to be a ram raid in NZ. So, it is a consequence of “yes, we’ve got to have some tougher consequences for offenders”, we also have to go to work on the root causes of actually what’s causing some of this, it matters where our social investment thinking comes in very strongly…
Chang
All right, but we’ve got to move onto curriculum…
I would have liked to hear more from Luxon about the National Party’s thinking on “social investment” but Chang cut that conversation short.
Community run youth programmes are already operating including: Upside, the Graeme Dingle Foundation, Blue Light, Strive Community Trust, Visionwest and the Youth Hub Christchurch.
The full interview is here.