The military-style academy pilot, also known as a bootcamp, was billed as one of the Government’s key interventions to address recidivist youth crime that formed a significant part of the 2023 election.
Its supporters, namely National’s Mark Mitchell and Act’s Karen Chhour, promised a tangible impact on the offending rates of some of the most prolific young criminals in New Zealand who, they claimed, Labour had failed to manage while in Government.
And yet, about eight months into the 12-month pilot, its lead agency, Oranga Tamariki, is refusing to release information about how many of the nine pilot participants have re-offended.
It comes as the Government faces increasing pressure to drop the legislation that will allow future bootcamps to be run, as experts and abuse survivors warn of the impact previous iterations of bootcamp-style programmes have had.
Oranga Tamariki’s decision to restrict publication of reoffending levels stemmed from the tragic death of one participant in a car crash near Tirau in November, which was followed by two other participants absconding for several days and allegedly offending. Soon after, another participant was also facing charges for alleged offending.
As media scrutiny and political pressure intensified, Oranga Tamariki abruptly stopped giving further updates and decided it would only address reoffending by pilot participants if the “circumstances are exceptional or a matter of public safety”.
At that time, the agency spoke of the “impact of the additional public scrutiny on these young people and their whānau”.
The policy conflicts with past assurances from Chhour, now the Children’s Minister, who promised transparency in light of Oranga Tamariki’s historical failings.
However, under questioning from Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime in the House this week, Chhour explained why she was backing her agency’s position.
“We tried to be as open and transparent as possible when it came to this pilot programme, but then it became very apparent that the Opposition used that opportunity to drag these young people through the mud with venom, trying to make them be unsuccessful,” she said.
Her sharp response was prompted by Prime’s claim several of the participants have returned to youth justice facilities following offending, a claim neither Oranga Tamariki nor Chhour would address.
Oranga Tamariki deputy chief executive and pilot lead Iain Chapman, speaking in his first interview since the participant’s tragic death, said he understood his obligation to inform the public but argued the intense scrutiny in recent months had taken its toll.
“The reality is that not only have these young men, who have never really been subject to such exposure, now have such a heavy political spotlight on them ... we’re also dealing with an immense amount of grief that does add an element to it which I would hope that everyone would be able to accept,” he told the Herald.
“I firmly believe that that does give us even more of a reason as to why, for now, we keep the finer details of what we’re dealing with, to keep that closer so that we have got every opportunity to allow these young men to succeed.
“There’s an immense amount of tragedy that happened here at the same time and I think we lose sight of that.”
Separate reviews have been conducted into the participant’s death and the absconding incidents. Chapman explained the former sat with the Coroner while the latter was expected to be published soon.
While he refused to detail reoffending since the pilot’s in-community phase began in October, Chapman acknowledged the agency had had to “pivot some plans” for some participants who had reoffended.
“We are working really closely with them, they are still engaged with their mentors, they are still engaged with the intensive supervision and social workers, and we are still engaged strongly with their whānau.”
In light of the participant’s death, Chapman said Oranga Tamariki had enhanced the counselling offered to the boys and to staff who worked closely with the participants during the three-month stint at Palmerston North’s Te Au Rere a te Tonga facility.
However, Chapman believed the benefits of the pilot had shone through amid the response to the boy’s death as his fellow participants arrived at his tangi with formal clothes they had purchased with the money earned from jobs attained through the programme.
“It’s those sorts of stories that, whilst the attention obviously goes towards areas that either went wrong or perceived to have gone wrong, we actually have dotted throughout some real signs of turning these young men’s lives around.”
Chapman said the changes were evident in other ways, even in the ability to look someone in the eye as they are shaking hands.
Oranga Tamariki today released its review of the three-month in-residence phase which the agency welcomed as “largely positive”, even though the independent evaluation found the pilot’s design was “untested”, local iwi members were not consulted early enough and staff were put through “unsustainable” workloads.
The review noted Oranga Tamariki was only given a “very limited” window from March to July to plan for the 12-month pilot, which reviewers from Malatest International pointed to in its finding the programme’s design was untested.
Asked whether it was acceptable to launch a pilot with an untested design, Chapman accepted his agency was under a “significant amount of pressure to deliver this pilot”.
However, Chapman argued pilot programmes would always come with flaws.
“You could always argue that the best time to plant a tree is yesterday, but the reality is that in the time that we were given to plan the military-style academy and to the time that we started, I think that what we have delivered is a residential component that is certainly worthy of at least pulling some of the successes out for whatever the next phase of military-style academies could look like.”
Adam Pearse is a political reporter in the NZ Herald Press Gallery team, based at Parliament. He has worked for NZME since 2018, covering sport and health for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei before moving to the NZ Herald in Auckland, covering Covid-19 and crime.
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