Bootcamp bill to have first reading before verdict on 10-boy pilot project

A new bill that will legally label rangatahi as ‘serious young offenders’ and allow them to be sent to military-style academies has been introduced to the House before the Government has had a chance to evaluate the outcomes of its bootcamp pilot.
On Monday, less than a week after Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the acting chief executive of Oranga Tamariki apologised to survivors for the abuse they suffered in state care, the Children’s Minister Karen Chhour introduced her bootcamp bill.
On Thursday, the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill will have its first reading, and Chhour told Newsroom she expected the legislation to be enacted mid-2025.
The proposed law creates a new serious young offender category, giving judges greater sentencing powers, including the option to send the young offenders to a military-style academy.
To be considered a ‘serious young offender’ the person would need to be aged 14-17, and have committed at least two crimes with a punishment of at least 10 years’ imprisonment or more. The judge also needs to believe the young person is likely to reoffend.
This new categorisation would allow the court to impose harsher punishments, including longer supervision orders. And when sentencing, the court would need to take into account whether the person recorded or shared their offending on social media.
The proposed law would also give police greater powers, allowing them to apply to designate someone as a serious young offender, and arrest those deemed to be serious young offenders without a warrant.
Under the proposed law, judges would also be able to sentence those aged 15-17 to take part in a military-style academy for somewhere between three and 12 months. And a supervision order would follow that for six to 18 months, as long as the two components of the new regime didn’t last longer than two years.
The military-style academies sentencing regime has been well-signalled by the Government, and despite strong publish pushback, the coalition has forged ahead with the commitment.
But the move to enshrine the military-style academies in law comes as the high-profile ‘bootcamp’ pilot programme is still underway, raising questions about whether the Government is open to responding to the outcomes of the test case.
The current pilot programme, which launched in July with 10 people (one person dropped out and was replaced a week later), recently entered the community phase, with six NGOs providing intensive mentoring services.
Chhour said she visited the Manawatū youth justice facility several times during the first portion of the pilot and had received regular updates about the progress of the pilot programme.
An evaluation process was underway throughout the pilot, the minister said, adding that “any learnings will be brought to my attention once a review has been completed”.
The bill has drawn criticism from state abuse survivors, independent experts and opposition parties. Now, some are questioning whether the Government is open to listening to the evidence and learning from the pilot before writing bootcamps into law.
Chief Children’s Commissioner Claire Achmad said she urged the minister and others to take “careful thought and time, incorporating what has been learned in the residential part of the pilot programme and at the end of the whole pilot, including the perspectives of the rangatahi who took part in it, before making any decisions about how the programme will develop as a compulsory sentencing option”.
Achmad said evidence from New Zealand and internationally showed that taking military-based approaches to youth justice didn’t create positive long-term change. 
“We simply shouldn’t be including anything that is military-based in youth justice when the evidence shows that what does work is trauma-informed, rehabilitative, wraparound approaches. 
“These things work because children who are in our youth justice system have already had traumatic lives, and positive, holistic support helps them get onto brighter pathways,” she said.
“By recognising trauma, abuse and harm as drivers for offending – as the Royal Commission so clearly evidences, and our current care and custody data shows – we can hold mokopuna to account in ways that address the causes of their offending, keep our communities safe, and support mokopuna onto brighter pathways.”
Green Party justice spokesperson Tamatha Paul said the fact the new law was expected to be enacted in mid-2025, at the same time the current pilot was due to end showed the Government was legislating bootcamps without understanding what the impact of the pilot had been.
“Bootcamps were a vote-winner for the Government parties, then they are working backwards from there to justify and legitimise these bootcamps, when the overwhelming warnings and evidence show a military-style intervention for young people who have committed crime is completely ineffective.”
Paul said successive governments had failed young people.
“It’s this really awful game, where politicians see our young people as an opportunity to win votes. That’s a legacy that needs to end.”
Introducing the bill for first reading the week after the national apology (the pilot bootcamp was launched the week after the Royal Commission report was tabled) showed the Government “had learned nothing from our history and the conditions where we put our rangatahi at risk of abuse”, she said.
Both Paul and Achmad said they were pleased to know the pilot programme did not have a heavy military component; when Achmad visited the facility, she said she couldn’t see anything military-style. But both still raised concerns about the academies as a whole and the new serious young offender category.
Paul said she worried the one-to-one therapeutic and trauma-informed approach could be lost when the bill was passed and the bootcamps were scaled up.
Speaking to Newsroom about youth justice interventions and drivers of crime last month, Principal Youth Court Judge Ida Malosi said the focus should be on finding ways to avoid getting to the point where someone would be referred to a bootcamp.
“It seems to me that if we’re robust in our practice, it should only be a very small number who then fall into the categories … so I think it’s a great opportunity for us to look at what we do, how we do it, what’s effective, and to supercharge those practices, and to look at the things we know don’t work, and go down a different path.”
Malosi said while there had been a lot of discussion about youth offending, the number of young people actually before the Youth Court was low – about 850.
The number of repeat offenders who hadn’t been responsive to other interventions thus far was even lower.
With a number like that, the problem was solvable, Malosi said.
While Chhour’s bootcamp bill was one response to youth offending, the minister had also scaled up Labour’s fast-track programme, which was an intensive intervention programme aimed at those aged 10-14.
The programme was seeing positive results, Chhour said, adding that there were now nine fast-track teams across the country and in June a further $30.6m was found to expand the programme to include 14 to 17-year-olds in six locations.
The fast-track had been supported by politicians, experts and advocates across the political spectrum, but the military-style academies had been heavily criticised by experts and opposition parties.
The publication of the full bill came on the same day the NZ Herald reported on a leaked email that said the minister had amended the original plan after some government departments raised concerns about upholding the rights of the child, the proximity to the Royal Commission on Abuse in Care, and the lack of safeguards around staff and contractors’ ability to use force on the young people.
The bill says the Oranga Tamariki chief executive, or those acting on their behalf, such as staff in the youth justice facility and contractors, could use “reasonable physical force” outside a residential setting to stop the young person running away, or from being harmed, harming themself or others.
Additional protections written into the legislation included a requirement for all uses of force to be recorded and communicated to the chief executive. However, the remaining safeguards around the use of force would be separately regulated, rather than written into the law itself.
Chhour’s officials also had issue with the policy and the lack of evidence under-pinning the military-style component.
The Regulatory Impact Statement cautioned the need to balance the rights of the child with public safety. Officials also pointed to the unsuitability of a military-style intervention for some disabled and neurodivergent young people, as well as those with a history of trauma or violence.
Meanwhile, the statement pointed out that officials were directed to come up with a legislative response, so were not able to consider a non-legislative response to serious and persistent youth offending. It repeatedly highlighted the expected disproportionate impact on rangatahi Māori.
Officials gave the minister three options: the status quo, a moderate legislative response, and an “enhanced legislative response”, which allowed police to apply for a serious young offender designation and arrest serious young offenders without a warrant.
Officials also raised the lack of consultation.
On the last point, Chhour has committed to a full, six-month select committee process in order to allow members of the public and other interested parties to have their say.