Week in Politics: 'Crime wave' puts government's target in doubt

Analysis - A surge in violent crime throws the government's reduction target into doubt and a last-minute 'home patch ban' raises serious questions, Health NZ's problems are described as 'a cocktail of issues' and Labour's Chris Hipkins has to deal with a bad poll.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon began his post-Cabinet press conference with some good news.

The first quarterly report on the government's nine public service performance targets showed the number of households in emergency housing had fallen by 34 percent, which meant there were more than 1000 fewer children living in motels.

The target was a 75 percent reduction by 2030, so a really good start had been made.

So much for the good news. Luxon described the targets as ambitious and said the report confirmed they would be challenging.

That set up the press conference for the bad news. The government's violent crime target was set at 20,000 fewer victims of assault, robbery and sexual assault by 2029.

First-quarter results, based on the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey of reported and unreported crime over the past 12 months, showed an increase of nearly 30,000, he said.

The impact was nicely captured in a Stuff report: "The government had set a target of reducing the baseline figure by 20,000 victims of crime, meaning it now has to do so by 50,000 to reach its target."

Challenging indeed, and the report said achieving the target was "at risk".

Explaining how this had happened, Luxon went for the blame game. Because of the way the information was gathered, any violent crime that showed up in the report could have happened between July 2022 and June 2024, Luxon said.

"This result adds fresh weight to previous data from police which also showed a concerning rise in reports of violent crime in recent years, and it's also further proof the previous 'soft on crime' approach has emboldened offenders and created a crime wave that will take a much tougher approach to stop," he said.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith was at the press conference with Luxon, and he explained changes that meant there were going to be "real consequences" for committing serious crimes.

These measures were proposed in June and Goldsmith said Cabinet had agreed to bring them in. They included putting a cap of 40 percent on sentence discounts and there would be a "clear expectation" that cumulative sentences would generally be imposed for offending on bail and on parole.

There would be a new aggravating factor for offences against sole charge workers, such as dairy owners, and two other aggravating factors taken from the previous government's ram-raid bill. They would cover adults who exploited children and young people by aiding or abetting them to offend, and offenders who glorified their actions by posting them online.

Under questioning, Goldsmith conceded the previous government did have "a couple of reasonable ideas" at the end of its term.

Ganging up on gangs

Goldsmith was Cabinet's 'most in the news' minister this week because he had something else to deal with, and it was highly controversial.

The gang patch legislation was going through Parliament and Goldsmith added a clause to it at the last minute, after it had been examined by a select committee. He put in what is described as the 'home patch ban'.

It means that after a third offence of wearing a gang patch in public within five years the offender will face a year in prison if they have any gang insignia at all, regardless of where they were.

"They will not be allowed to live in a house with any item that has a patch on it. That includes a patch, for example, on the jacket in a flatmate's closet, or being worn by someone visiting the house," the Herald said in its report.

Objections came from the Ministry of Justice, Te Puni Kokiri, the Ministry for Women, the Law Society and the privacy commissioner.

Among their reasons was that the powers would unjustifiably restrict protections in the Bill of Rights Act, RNZ reported.

"The request from police for the powers was initially rejected by Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith," the report by political editor Jo Moir said. "He has now changed his mind, meaning there will not be any public consultation or opportunity for feedback on it as the select committee process is already complete."

Goldsmith stood by his decision, saying it was very easy to avoid the home patch penalty - "just don't get caught three times within five years".

Police Minister Mark Mitchell, who from the start has been harder on gangs than anyone else in the Cabinet, said again that he had had enough of gangs and their intimidation.

"The police advice to me is that gang members don't like having their homes searched because often there's other contraband in there, firearms or drugs," he said.

Luxon told Morning Report gangs had forfeited their rights.

"When you've got a quarter of 1 percent[of the population] causing almost a fifth or a quarter of all the serious crime, that's a problem," he said. "And that says to me you don't care about the responsibilities of being a Kiwi, you don't want to have the duties of being a New Zealander, you're happy to cause pain and suffering and pedal misery and suffering on your fellow New Zealanders. That's not on."

Labour's justice spokesman, Duncan Webb, said the home patch ban was "a horrendous piece of legislation".

"This is a truly extraordinary intrusion into someone's personal life, that you're not only prohibiting them from having gang insignia in their possession or in their room, you're prohibiting their flatmates from having gang insignia - if they know about it - in another room."

The Police Association injected some rational thought into the situation, as it often does.

"Police Association president Chris Cahill said the gang insignia prohibition order is a big step but also a two-edged sword as it might be challenging to enforce," the Herald reported.

"Search warrants like that are certainly intrusive in someone's privacy so it could increase the tensions," Cahill said.

He explained that going into a home wasn't a simple matter.

"To do a gang warrant there's quite a risk assessment that needs to be done and quite a lot of paperwork, and then you can't just wander in with one or two officers because of the risk it could present," he said. "These are going to be significant operations… they won't be routine by any stretch of the imagination."

The Gangs Bill and the Sentencing Amendment Bill were passed into law on Thursday.

Police were expected to have use of the gang patch powers from 21 November, the Herald reported.

The government is going hard on gangs because it knows it's good politics, and Luxon was strong this week on giving police the powers they ask for.

Stuff's Tova O'Brien asked him about accepting "the will of the police" without any kind of scrutiny, and Luxon replied "it says that we're going to back the police".

O'Brien thought he was being a tad selective in that backing.

"Police also want the gun registry maintained but gun lobbyist-turned-ACT Party minister Nicole McKee - who campaigned on scrapping it entirely - has launched a wholesale review of the register," O'Brien said.

"Asked why not back the police and commit to maintaining the register, Luxon said 'we are reviewing the firearms register, there's no decision that we're not going to have a firearms register'."

O'Brien said McKee also wasn't ruling out reversing the ban on semi-automatics which was put in place after 15 March.

Police don't want the ban reversed and O'Brien questioned Luxon about his attitude to that as well.

"But Luxon won't commit to maintaining the ban, only to say Cabinet hasn't yet had any discussions about it or made any decisions," she reported.

Missed targets

The first quarter report on the targets was widely reported, and there were figures in it that the government didn't draw attention to at the press conference.

Shorter wait times for elective surgery was one of them. This was picked up by Politik, in a report which said the target was 95 percent of people waiting less than four months.

"Health NZ reports this target the other way around: how many people are waiting MORE than four months," it said.

"Outcome to March 2024: 44 percent. That's a big increase on the figure for the three months to December 2023 - 39.5 percent."

Health NZ was another of the week's big stories when Lester Levy, the commissioner put in charge of it with a mandate to bring it back to budget, appeared before a select committee.

He reiterated that $130-$140 million deficits were being recorded each month and if that didn't change Health NZ was looking at a $1.4 billion deficit by the end of the financial year (June 2025), RNZ reported.

But Levy said the "precarious" financial position wasn't the most pressing.

"The main show in town is actually getting these waiting times down, ensuring the services are safe and of high quality and creating an environment within the organisation that is a rewarding environment for staff to work, and we've got challenges across all these domains," he said.

Waiting times had deteriorated over a number of years and productivity was low, and Health NZ faced "a cocktail of issues", Levy said.

An interesting point, also picked up by Politik, was Levy talking about staff numbers.

When the government sacked what was left of the board and appointed Levy in July, it made much of the fact that Health NZ had picked up thousands of additional staff and the way its bureaucracy had blown out because of the "botched reform" which merged 21 DHBs into it.

"He said that one of the major problems was that the merger of the 21 DHBs was incomplete," Politik's report said.

"Many of the extra staff that Luxon talked about were there not because they had recently been hired, but because of duplication of the roles from the old DHBs across the system.

"We do have duplication, triplication, quadruplication," he said. "There are still the legacy effects of these organisations coming together."

The committee hearing didn't achieve what it set out to do, which was "a briefing on financial scrutiny" because, as Stuff reported, officials had not provided the committee with the information it needed.

There was no information to scrutinise, said Labour's health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall.

"We were not given the information to be able to hold Health New Zealand to account. We requested budgets, we requested staffing numbers, the monthly accounts," she said.

Levy said it would be delivered to the committee next week.

Hipkins slipping

Labour leader Chris Hipkins had some bad news this week when the latest Taxpayers Union-Curia poll showed he had lost support in the preferred prime minister stakes.

Hipkins dropped 6.1 percentage points, down to 12.6 percent while Luxon - despite losing 1.8 points - was well clear at the top with 32.7 percent.

Hipkins' net favourability saw an even steeper drop, falling 16 points to -10 percent, while Luxon's rose 1 point to +7 percent.

Hipkins said he had had a lower profile this year after the election defeat and it was just one poll that was more negative than others.

He said he had the full support of his caucus: "Overall, our goal is to build our support up as we head towards the next election."

The poll showed little change in party support with results within the margin of error.

*Peter Wilson is a life member of Parliament's press gallery, 22 years as NZPA's political editor and seven as Parliamentary bureau chief for NZ Newswire.