The policy platform essentially means Labour has raised the white flag on law and order and broadly accepts the current direction of travel; whether a Labour-led left governing bloc would also do so is another matter.
It also means Labour accepts the fiscal cost, in the billions of dollars, of a growing and ongoing need for more prison beds, along with the “fiscal cliff” – in Treasury’s words – facing NZ Police and the budgetary stretches that Corrections has made an annual exercise.
This shrinks the investment Labour could actually make in crime prevention and rehabilitation, which the party isn’t committing to anyway.
For example, more Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Courts could actually make a dent in reoffending. Labour’s manifesto promises to “look to expand” specialist courts.
It also wants to identify opportunities “where [youth offending programme] Circuit Breaker could be expanded”, rather than actually do it.
Leader Chris Hipkins has talked about how Labour over-promised in previous campaigns and he wasn’t going to do that this time.
But these commitments promise little more than nothing substantive.
Take “introducing evidence-based crime prevention and early intervention programmes that tackle the causes of offending”.
Or how about: “Strengthen the Police Resilience to Organised Crime in Communities programme, with deeper links to health and social services.
“Enhance alternative resolution approaches, including Family Group Conferences and Te Pae Oranga.”
No specifics, in other words.
Where the manifesto is specific, it’s underwhelmingly so. Take banning non-consensual, deepfake pornography.
A bill that would criminalise such content, from Act’s Laura McClure, is already being considered in Parliament at select committee.
Or introducing an affirmative definition of consent, which National could have done this term with bipartisan support but has committed to doing next term.
There’s also the “already happening” category.
Labour will respond to the Law Commission review on hate crimes, which the coalition has pushed into the next parliamentary term. This means business as usual.
There are some specific firearms law proposals but the main issue is already dealt with: Act failed to bring back military-style, semi-automatic firearms and has no political consensus to change that.
It’s an understandable tactic for Labour. Law and order is the only issue where voters have consistently backed National over Labour.
And the coalition has a track record: the overall number of victims of violent crime has dropped by an estimated 37,000 this term.
But the data doesn’t correlate with terms in government.
The number of victims rose for the first nine months of the coalition Government’s term, dropped for the next period of just over a year, and has been rising again since October last year.
Nor does the period when the number started dropping (from mid-2024) correlate with the implementation of most of the coalition’s key justice policies (from mid-2025).
Nor do the numbers support the coalition’s main law and order criticism about Labour: that violent crime rose as the prison population dropped.
Using the Government’s own measure, the NZ Crime and Victims Survey, violent crime dropped for the period under Labour when the prison population dropped. It rose in Labour’s final year in office, when the number of prisoners was also rising.
None of these data trends is definitive, nor are they easily explained.
And explaining is losing in politics.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.