ACT has confirmed it will campaign at this year’s election on a new three strikes regime aimed squarely at burglars, promising a minimum of three years in prison with no parole for anyone convicted of the crime three times.
The policy was announced on Wednesday by ACT deputy leader Nicole McKee, who framed it as a way to take a small number of persistent offenders off the street rather than as a broad crackdown. Under the plan, ordinary burglary would be added to the existing three strikes list that already covers serious violent and sexual offending. A third burglary conviction, or a single conviction carrying three or more counts of burglary, would trigger a mandatory sentence of at least three years behind bars with no home detention, no early release and no parole.
Judges would keep some room to move. The three year figure is a floor rather than a fixed term, and courts could still hand down anything up to the ten year maximum for burglary. Aggravated burglary, where an offender is armed or the offending involves violence, would count as a strike under both the new burglary regime and the existing three strikes law for violent crime.
McKee built her case around the sheer number of people affected by the crime. “In 2025, 184,000 New Zealanders were victims of burglary,” she said, pointing to burglary as one of the offences that does the most to make people feel unsafe in their own homes. ACT argues the problem is concentrated in a small group of repeat offenders who keep cycling through the courts and back onto the street.
The party leans heavily on reoffending figures to make that argument. It says most people released from prison after a burglary sentence are back behind bars within two years, and that close to three quarters are resentenced for further offending. On ACT’s reading, that pattern shows the current approach is failing both victims and offenders, and that longer sentences for the worst repeat burglars would simply stop them committing more crimes while they are locked up.
McKee was blunt about the logic when asked whether the policy would actually change behaviour. “I think eventually we will get to a point where only the hardened career burglars will continue to carry on until they get to a point where they cannot any longer because they’re locked behind bars,” she said. In other words, ACT is presenting the plan less as a deterrent and more as a way of physically preventing a hard core of offenders from reoffending.
That focus on incapacitation rather than deterrence matters, because it sidesteps one of the main criticisms of three strikes style laws. A large body of research from the United States, where similar regimes have run for decades, has found little clear evidence that mandatory minimum sentences reduce crime by scaring people off offending. Critics of the original New Zealand law also warned that it fell hardest on Māori and risked pushing up the prison population without making communities noticeably safer.
Cost is likely to be one of the sharper points of debate. McKee estimated the policy would add around 200 million dollars a year to the corrections bill, though she argued that figure would fall over time as fewer repeat burglars remained free to offend. Opponents are certain to question whether that money would do more good spent on prevention, rehabilitation and support for victims than on longer prison terms.
The announcement also underlines how ACT plans to position itself heading into the campaign. Law and order has long been core territory for the party, and McKee made clear she saw no need to clear the policy with coalition partners National and New Zealand First before releasing it, saying she was confident they would back it. The National led government has already reinstated a version of three strikes for serious violent and sexual offending after Labour repealed the earlier law in 2022, so the direction of travel on sentencing is familiar ground for the current coalition.
Labour and the Greens are likely to resist any expansion. When the previous Labour government scrapped the original three strikes law it argued there was little evidence the regime had reduced serious offending and said the money would be better directed at policies that actually cut crime. Expect that same argument to return as the parties stake out their positions on crime ahead of polling day.
For voters, burglary policy is shaping up as one of the clearer dividing lines of the election, with ACT betting that a tough, simple message on repeat offenders will resonate with people who have been burgled or fear they will be. Whether that translates into votes, and whether the numbers behind the policy stand up to scrutiny, will be tested over the coming months.
You can compare where the parties stand on crime and other issues using our interactive voting tool, and read the full announcement via RNZ and Scoop.
What do you make of ACT’s three strikes plan for burglars? Would longer mandatory sentences make you feel safer, or would you rather see the money spent elsewhere? Share your thoughts 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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