Keeping communities safe through prevention and rehabilitation.
The Green Party will make our communities safer by addressing the drivers of crime.
Our approach is to prevent harm happening in the first place. We will reform the justice system to make it fair, just and equitable.
The current Government’s approach of packing prisons, restricting what judges can decide and neglecting much-needed rehabilitation only causes more harm and hardship.
Our communities are safer when everyone, especially young people, have access to the basics: food, health care, inclusive education, adequate incomes and a safe home environment.
The Green Party will keep our communities safe by prioritising rehabilitation, strengthening true accountability and tackling bias and discrimination in the justice system. Our policies to provide mental health and addiction services, safe and warm housing, and adequate incomes for all will help to address the root causes of crime.
Each person deserves to live free from violence, harm and discrimination. People should not be punished for being poor. We need a justice system that supports this basic premise.
Our plan
- Resource evidence-based rehabilitation for anyone convicted of an offence, and ensure tikanga-based and restorative justice solutions (such as Te Pae Oranga) are available to anyone who wishes to access these.
- Expand Te Ao Mārama to all courts in Aotearoa, and ensure specialist youth courts including the Rangatahi and Pasifika Courts, Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Court, and New Beginnings Court are available to all who wish to access them.
- End military-style academies, raise the age of criminal responsibility and ban the detention of young people in the company of adults in all circumstances.
- Require body cameras for frontline police, strengthen powers for the Independent Police Conduct Authority, deliver de-escalation and trauma training for police, and increase resourcing for Māori Wardens and Pacific Wardens.
- Improve community reintegration support for people leaving the criminal justice system, including housing, and increase the Steps to Freedom Grant to cover at least 30 years of inflation.
- Extend legal aid and duty lawyers, better resource community law centres and make applications for protection and parenting orders free.
- Enable judicial discretion in sentencing, including by abolishing mandatory minimum sentences, life sentences, preventive detention, limits on sentence discounts, three strikes and limits on when home detention can be imposed instead of imprisonment.
- Implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019. Extend hate speech laws to cover religion, gender, disability and rainbow communities. Continue to oppose possession of military-style semi-automatic firearms.
- Implement all recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, in consultation with people with lived experience.