Boot camps for serious young offenders cleared their final hurdle in Parliament on Thursday night, after the Government used urgency to push the legislation through its third reading with barely a week of the parliamentary term left to run.
The Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill gives the Youth Court the power to send 14 to 17-year-olds to a military-style academy, the formal name for the boot camps National and ACT campaigned on in 2023. It also creates a young serious offender declaration, a new legal category for teenagers with a record of repeat serious offending. The bill becomes law once it receives Royal assent.
Minister for Children Karen Chhour told the House the status quo was not good enough, with too many young people “causing significant harm to victims and creating fear in our communities”, RNZ reported.
“The new military-style academy order will be the most intensive response available to the Youth Court. The order combines structure, discipline, education, therapeutic support, and transition planning,” Chhour said.
“Ultimately, this legislation will help create less victims and make our communities safer.”
In a statement released after the vote, Chhour said “when I became the Minister for Children, I made it clear that the status quo was not good enough”, and pointed to a fall in the number of serious youth offenders, which she said “has reduced by 26 percent since June 2023”. The Government has set a target of cutting serious youth offending by 15 percent by 2030.
Under the new law the Youth Court cannot reach for an academy order first. National’s Joseph Mooney told the House the court must be satisfied that “previous interventions have been unsuccessful, and the young person is likely to reoffend”. Mooney also used his speech to attack opposition MPs who spoke against the bill, saying “there’s nothing like listening to speeches from the other side to really underpin the point that they have no life experience”.
Labour’s children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime said her party would repeal the legislation if it wins the election on 7 November, and took aim at the timing of the vote.
“Here we are in the final days, the final hours of this parliamentary term, sitting under urgency, and this government is rushing through the final stages of this legislation,” Prime said.
“Does this government just ignore all the evidence and all the experts, and continue to push ahead their political agenda? This is about politics and rhetoric, punitive, tough on crime, tough on children approach.”
Green MP Tamatha Paul described the bill as the product of “electioneering and campaigning, primarily by the ACT Party”, and said Sir John Key’s government had already tried boot camps without success.
“This is a response to a campaign against the most vulnerable young people in New Zealand, and it doesn’t align with what the actual evidence says around youth crime, and that is why it is a moral panic,” Paul said.
Children’s Commissioner Jane Searle said she was disappointed to see the bill pass. She said she welcomed more investment in young people with complex needs, but did not accept that military-style academies were the way to deliver it.
“The name itself reflects an approach that is inconsistent with what we know works best for children and young people,” Searle said. “You cannot march young people into good behaviour.”
Searle said the money would be better spent on therapeutic, trauma-informed and evidence-based services that deal with the causes of offending rather than the behaviour alone.
Much of the argument through the bill’s passage has turned on the pilot programme that ran ahead of it. Oranga Tamariki says an academy order runs for between three and twelve months, with roughly three months inside a secure youth justice residence followed by about nine months of supported transition back into the community. The first pilot ran for a year from July 2024 at a youth justice residence in Palmerston North, starting with ten young people already in the system. An independent evaluation published in November 2025 found the rollout had been rushed, and seven of the ten reoffended.
A second version of the pilot has been running on a voluntary basis. Two participants have already walked away from it. Under the law just passed, young people placed in an academy by the court will not be able to leave except in extreme circumstances, and Prime said the minister had not been able to spell out what would meet the threshold for compassionate release.
Prime also questioned why the bill was introduced in November 2024, months before the pilot it was meant to build on had finished running.
The vote lands in the last stretch of the term. Parliament rises on 24 September and is dissolved on 1 October, ahead of the general election on 7 November, which means a run of bills is being squeezed through in the final sitting days. The India free trade agreement legislation cleared the House this week as well.
Youth offending itself has been falling on the Government’s own numbers. Last week Chhour announced $2.4 million for sport and outdoor programmes aimed at young people, citing the same 26 percent drop in serious youth offenders since June 2023. What the two sides cannot agree on is whether the harder end of the response, the part now written into the Oranga Tamariki Act, is doing any of that work.
Because boot camps are now law rather than policy, the question of whether they survive rests with voters. Labour and the Greens have both committed to scrapping the academies. If you want to check where the parties stand before you vote, our voting tool lets you compare policies side by side.
What do you make of it? Do military-style academies deserve a proper run, or is the evidence already in? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
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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