New Zealand First has turned on a law its own coalition promised to deliver, branding the government’s new coward punch legislation as close to “window dressing” and warning that it does nothing to fix the weak sentences at the heart of the problem.
The criticism, reported by RNZ, is striking because the coward punch offence was a New Zealand First win in the first place. Creating a specific crime for these attacks was written into the party’s coalition agreement with National, and the government announced the policy with some fanfare. Now the junior partner says the version heading through Parliament has been hollowed out to the point of being almost meaningless.
A coward punch is a single, often unexpected blow to the head or neck, usually thrown when the victim is not looking. The attacks can cause catastrophic brain injury or death, and families of victims have spent years arguing that the courts treat them too leniently. When Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced the new offences, he said the attacks were “often committed by cowardly attackers, who strike when the victim is distracted”.
The legislation, part of the Crimes Amendment Bill introduced late in 2025, creates two new offences. One covers a single punch that causes grievous bodily harm, carrying a maximum of eight years in prison, rising to 15 years where the attacker intended to cause serious harm. The other covers a single punch that kills, carrying a maximum of life imprisonment. Both sit inside the three strikes regime.
On paper that looks tough. The problem New Zealand First has seized on is more technical, and it goes to the difference between creating an offence and changing what happens at sentencing. The bill amends the Crimes Act, which defines crimes, but it cannot reach into the Sentencing Act, which governs how judges actually punish them. So a new label can be attached to coward punch attacks, but the penalties handed down can stay exactly where they have always been.
That is the gap the party is furious about. A New Zealand First spokesperson said the proposed legislation “only seeks to create a new offence but doesn’t deal with the concern of the weak sentences being handed out, which is the foundational issue”, and that this rendered the new offence “close to window dressing”. The party argues the outcome breaches the coalition commitment to mandatory minimum prison sentences and has signalled it will table amendments when the bill returns to the House.
It is a familiar move for New Zealand First, which has spent much of this term carving out daylight between itself and National on law and order, immigration and culture, all while sitting inside the same government. With the general election set for November, every public disagreement doubles as a chance for the party to remind its base that it is the one pushing hardest on crime. The risk for National is that these flashes of coalition friction make the government look divided on one of its signature issues.
New Zealand First is not alone in saying the law falls short, though others come at it from very different directions. The Walk Without Fear Trust, which campaigns for victims of one punch attacks, supports the new offences but says they will mean little without a mandatory minimum non-parole period. Chairman Eugene Bareman, the boxing coach behind some of the country’s best known fighters, said judges “remain bound by the same precedents that have produced inadequate sentences for decades”. The trust warns that without a legislated sentencing floor, offenders could still be back in the community within about a year of a typical three year sentence.
The opposition parties are sceptical for the opposite reasons. Labour has called the new offence “unworkable” and warned it could lead to fewer convictions, not more, if juries baulk at the higher charge. The Greens have argued that mandatory minimum sentences are a blunt tool that can sweep up accidental or borderline incidents alongside genuine attacks. Even ACT, another coalition partner, has pointed out the plain truth at the centre of the row, which is that the offence as drafted would not actually increase the prison time served by coward punch offenders.
The bill has already had a rough passage. A select committee initially stripped the coward punch clause out altogether over concerns about how it would work and the chance of unintended consequences, before the clauses were put back by majority vote. Goldsmith has declined to comment further while the bill is before the House.
What it all adds up to is a law that nobody seems fully happy with. Victims’ advocates say it does not go far enough on sentencing, the opposition says it goes too far, and the government’s own partner says the headline promise has been watered down to a label change. Whether New Zealand First can force its mandatory minimums back in before the bill passes, or whether it simply banks the fight as an election talking point, will be one of the small tests of how much muscle the junior partners really have in the final months of this term.
Wondering where the parties stand on crime and sentencing before you vote in November? You can compare their positions using our voting tool.
What do you think? Should coward punch attacks carry a mandatory minimum sentence, or is that the wrong way to fix the courts? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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