Boot camps ‘could end crime wave’ blamed on Ardern
Old-style justice is needed to halt New Zealand’s soaring offences, says conservative party leader
LAWBREAKERS could be forced into military boot camps to combat a carrelated crime wave in New Zealand, said the man expected to win the next general election after Jacinda Ardern stood down as prime minister.
Ms Ardern, whose popularity had plummeted, resigned earlier this week, claiming she didn’t have enough “in the tank” to fight elections in October.
Her rival, Christopher Luxon, the leader of the conservative National Party, has seen his support grow after vowing to crack down on crime.
The former airline chief executive, self-styled environmentalist and bornagain Christian, said parts of New Zealand resemble “the southside of Chicago”.
The country of five million people is recording what in Britain would be the equivalent of one serious vehicular crime an hour. More than 515 vehicular smash-and-grabs took place in 2022, the equivalent of 6,500 incidents taking place in a country like Britain.
When Jacinda Ardern first ushered her Labour Party to electoral victory in 2017, offences of this order were virtually unheard of. So was the policy the government introduced forbidding police to pursue offenders in vehicles in all but the most extreme circumstances.
By the time Mr Luxon, 52, entered national politics a couple of years later, emboldened young men behind the wheels of stolen cars were commonplace. Now they could propel the former Unilever executive into power after he became leader of the National Party scarcely a year after becoming an MP.
In the land of Mr Luxon’s youth, state-run institutions for wayward youth were once the order of the day, often with shambolic results. A royal commission of inquiry into the historical abuse that occurred at some of these “youth training” facilities is under way in New Zealand.
The centre-Right leader said that the old youth justice system worked well for the majority of young criminals, with 80 per cent of first-time offenders dealt with quickly and put back on the straight and narrow.
A slew of dismal polls for Labour published shortly before Ms Ardern’s resignation had Mr Luxon comfortably likely to lead the next government after the general election.
If he leads his party to victory this year, Mr Luxon would become the country’s first practising evangelical Christian leader.
The self-described apostle for “hardworking middle-class values” worships at Pentecostal churches that take the Bible’s words literally.
“It seems it has become acceptable to stereotype those who have a Christian faith in public life as being ‘extreme’,” he recently said. While his religion, wealth and gender mark him out as a conventional Right-wing leader, his support for gender equality and LGTB issues are less typical.
Some observers thought Mr Luxon, who was appointed to a business advisory group by Ms Ardern before he entered politics, might have joined the Labour Party.
But he insists that he has always been a conservative, despite his admiration for Barack Obama and his previous links to Ms Ardern, who has faced criticism for her “woke” policies.
Meanwhile, Chris Hipkins, former Covid-19 response minister, has been named as the country’s new leader.