The ACT Party has pulled together five law and order policies into a single election pitch, promising what leader David Seymour calls a tougher and smarter response to crime as the November vote draws closer.
The package, announced on Sunday, gathers policies the party has rolled out over recent weeks and sets out how ACT would campaign on crime as it fights to hold its place in Parliament after the 7 November election. Seymour said the party wanted to give ordinary people and communities practical tools to deal with offending before it escalates.
“Being tough on crime is not the opposite of being smart on crime,” Seymour said. “It is smart to give communities tools to stand up for themselves, to stop repeat offenders creating more victims, and to target behaviour that can escalate into more serious offending.”
The most contested part of the package is a plan to give trained and licensed security staff real powers, with what ACT describes as clear limits. Under the proposal, a new class of accredited security operators would be able to require a person’s name and address on private premises, detain someone for up to 30 minutes until police arrive if they refuse to leave, issue exclusion notices that could run for up to three years across multiple sites, remove people who threaten safety or cause damage, and use reasonable and proportionate force as a last resort. ACT argues that police cannot be everywhere at once and that shops, transport operators and other businesses need a way to manage threatening behaviour on the spot.
That idea has drawn the sharpest response. Thomas Beagle of the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties told reporters he was uneasy about handing detention and search powers to private staff. “I’m really disturbed by the idea they want private security guards to have these powers,” he said, noting that the country already has trained officers with those powers in the form of the police. The union E tu has warned that any expansion of guard powers needs to come with stronger protections for workers who are often low paid and already exposed to risk on the front line, with Pacific staff heavily represented in the work. Retail New Zealand, by contrast, welcomed the plan as a way to protect shop workers.
A second plank keeps ACT’s earlier promise of a three strikes regime for burglary, under which someone convicted of burglary for a third time, or convicted of three or more counts at once, would face a minimum three year sentence with no parole. The coalition Government has already restored a three strikes scheme this term, but only for the most serious offences, and ACT wants ordinary burglary added to the list.
The package also sets out a plan to deport more serious offenders. ACT would make resident visa holders liable for deportation if they are convicted of a crime carrying a maximum sentence of ten years or more, regardless of how long they have lived in New Zealand. The party frames it as a way to remove people who commit the gravest offences, though the change would sit alongside existing deportation rules and immigration appeal rights.
Rural crime is the fourth focus. ACT points to survey figures showing 67 percent of farmers have experienced crime, up from 41 percent in 2016, and promises 100,000 extra rural patrol hours a year, a dedicated rural crime unit, a way to reach the 111 emergency line by text where mobile coverage is patchy, and tougher penalties for poaching and stealing livestock. Farming groups have complained for years that offending in the countryside goes unreported and unpunished because officers are stretched thin and response times are long.
The final policy targets family violence. ACT would create a new offence of coercion through animal abuse, recognising that abusers sometimes use a family pet to control and trap a partner. The party says pets are too often used as a weapon inside violent relationships, and that the law should treat that behaviour as part of the abuse.
Taken together, the announcements are as much about positioning as detail. ACT is polling in the high single digits and is competing hard for the centre right vote against New Zealand First, and law and order has long been core territory for the party. Whether the security guard plan in particular survives contact with the courts, employers and unions is another question, and one that would only be tested if ACT can turn the policy into law after the election.
Voters weighing up where the parties stand on crime, and on everything else, can compare them using our voting tool ahead of the 7 November election.
What do you make of ACT’s crime package, and would you be comfortable with security guards holding these powers? Let us know 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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