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.<\/p>\n
It also means Labour accepts the fiscal cost, in the billions of dollars<\/a>, of a growing and ongoing need for more prison beds, along with the \u201cfiscal cliff\u201d \u2013 in Treasury\u2019s words \u2013 facing NZ Police and the budgetary stretches that Corrections has made an annual exercise<\/a>.<\/p>\n This shrinks the investment Labour could actually make in crime prevention and rehabilitation, which the party isn\u2019t committing to anyway.<\/p>\n For example, more Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Courts could actually make a dent in reoffending. Labour\u2019s manifesto promises to \u201clook to expand\u201d specialist courts.<\/p>\n It also wants to identify opportunities \u201cwhere [youth offending programme] Circuit Breaker could be expanded\u201d, rather than actually do it. <\/p>\n Leader Chris Hipkins has talked about how Labour over-promised in previous campaigns and he wasn\u2019t going to do that this time. <\/p>\n But these commitments promise little more than nothing substantive.<\/p>\n Take \u201cintroducing evidence-based crime prevention and early intervention programmes that tackle the causes of offending\u201d. <\/p>\n Or how about: \u201cStrengthen the Police Resilience to Organised Crime in Communities programme, with deeper links to health and social services. <\/p>\n \u201cEnhance alternative resolution approaches, including Family Group Conferences and Te Pae Oranga.\u201d <\/p>\n No specifics, in other words.<\/p>\n Where the manifesto is specific, it\u2019s underwhelmingly so. Take banning non-consensual, deepfake pornography. <\/p>\n A bill that would criminalise such content, from Act\u2019s Laura McClure, is already being considered in Parliament at select committee.<\/p>\n Or introducing an affirmative definition of consent<\/a>, which National could have done this term with bipartisan support but has committed to doing next term.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the \u201calready happening\u201d category.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an understandable tactic for Labour. Law and order is the only issue where voters have consistently backed National over Labour.<\/p>\n And the coalition has a track record: the overall number of victims of violent crime has dropped by an estimated 37,000 this term.<\/p>\n But the data doesn\u2019t correlate with terms in government<\/a>.<\/p>\n The number of victims rose for the first nine months of the coalition Government\u2019s term, dropped for the next period of just over a year, and has been rising again since October last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nor does the period when the number started dropping (from mid-2024) correlate with the implementation of most of the coalition\u2019s key justice policies (from mid-2025). <\/p>\n Nor do the numbers support the coalition\u2019s main law and order criticism about Labour: that violent crime rose as the prison population dropped. <\/p>\n