Government scraps Labour’s target of reducing the prison population and funding for cultural reports

The Government is eyeing a law and order and welfare crackdown as Parliament heads towards a long, four-week Parliamentary sitting block in which ministers hope to tick off the remaining items of its 100-day plan.

But questions were raised on Wednesday as to whether the Government is simply claiming credit for ditching things Labour had already ditched.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith joined Prime Minister Christopher Luxon yesterday to announce that the Government was scrapping Labour’s target of reducing the prison population to 30 per cent over from 2017 levels, and government funding for Section 27 reports, which can be submitted to give an insight into an offender’s background.

Section 27 or cultural reports are used during criminal sentencings to provide the judge with information about the defendant’s personal, family, community and cultural background, and how it may relate to their offending. These reports may lead to the judge allowing a discount to the overall sentence, but that is not guaranteed.

“In recent years, the development of Section 27 reports has turned into a cottage industry costing taxpayers millions and doing nothing for the victims of crime,” Goldsmith said.

He added that “$40,000 was spent on Section 27 reports in 2017. In the last financial year, this had increased to more than $7 million.”

Goldsmith said that if National hadn’t raised the issue on the campaign, “costs would have kept on growing”.

The reports are funded under the legal aid scheme. A bill will be introduced in the next sitting block to remove the reports from the scheme.

The Greens attacked the decision saying that it was “irrational” and “senseless”.

Courts spokeswoman Tamatha Paul said the Government had “taken us even further away from a justice system that treats everyone with humanity, dignity, and respect”.

“While pre-sentencing background reports are available to anyone, the ongoing and heartbreaking over-representation of Māori in our courts means that it is our people who will be hurt the most,” she said.

National has long campaigned on scrapping Labour’s prison population target, but it appears that Wednesday’s announcement was less binning Labour’s old target than it was putting out a press release claiming the act of not setting a new target was in fact the abolition of a previous, now expired, target.

During last year’s election, then-prime minister Chris Hipkins said the prison population reduction target was already gone, as did the-then corrections minister.

“We don’t have a target for the next term,” Hipkins said last September.

National’s then-corrections spokesman Mark Mitchell clocked the change at the time, and applauded it.

When asked, Luxon and Goldsmith could not say where the target had come from. When asked whether the Government was not actually repealing a target, as it said in its press release, but declining to set a new one, Luxon responded that this was “correct”.

“Our target is going to be reducing crime, not reducing prisoners,” Luxon said.

Luxon would not say whether he had received any advice on the decision, and Goldsmith confirmed that the decision was so minor it did not even require a paper to be taken to Cabinet.

“It didn’t require a Cabinet Paper, what it required was a Government that knew what it wanted to achieve in the Justice Sector,” Goldsmith said.

Social Development Minister Louise Upston announced the Government would “refocus employment efforts and the welfare system so that supporting people who can work into jobs is the number one priority”.

She said this would have two areas of focus, firstly “early interventions to get people into work or training and prevent them from entering the benefit system”, and secondly, “refocusing the benefit system so that it reduces dependency by making sure those who can work are preparing for and finding jobs”.

“We will intervene early and prioritise people who need the most support to help them find work. We are committed to using an evidence-based approach to understand what works, and for whom.

“We will use community providers and offer a broader range of tools to support jobseekers, giving young job seekers a job coach and a proper plan for addressing what’s holding them back from finding suitable work,” she said.

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.