Source: Radio New Zealand
Oranga Tamariki’s second boot camp will have 10 teenagers volunteering to live at Palmerston North’s youth justice facility. 123RF
Oranga Tamariki’s second boot camp that begins on Monday next week will be longer in the lock-up phase and have more staff but still have only pilot status.
The second military-style academy (MSA) would, like the first camp, have 10 teenagers volunteering to live at Palmerston North’s youth justice facility but they would be there for four months instead of three.
They would go out into the community, supervised, for the rest of the year.
The second would, like the first, be run without the legislation to establish permanent bootcamps going through Parliament yet, though the bill was introduced to Parliament almost 18 months ago.
“It will build on the 2024/25 pilot,” said Oranga Tamariki (OT) online.
The legislation was to give judges the sentencing option and set up a category of youth offenders they could use it on.
A review of the pilot camp in 2024 found it was too thin on clinical staff.
OT told RNZ it had learned from that.
“There will be consistent therapeutic support throughout both the residential and community phases,” it said in a statement.
The camps were part of government’s moves to reduce serious crime by teenagers but opposed by the opposition.
Both whānau and the rangatahi had agreed to take part in the second one, the agency’s Dean Winter said.
They had to be eligible under the bill, with histories of serious and repeat offending, and be on a supervision order.
The Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill was introduced to Parliament in late 2024 and had a select committee report last May but has not had a second reading.
It would also set up a young serious offender or YSO category for 14-17 year-olds where the Youth Court was “satisfied on reasonable grounds that the young person is likely to reoffend and previous interventions have been unsuccessful”.
Winter said the teenagers would get life skills like budgeting, cooking, household maintenance, applying for a job and completing an interview, getting a bank account and starting the process to get a driver’s licence.
This was on top of “intensive physical, mental wellbeing and cultural support aspects”.
Iwi provider Best Care (Whakapai Hauora) that worked in the pilot had helped OT design the second academy.
OT made no mention of Defence Force involvement.
The NZDF resisted running the boot camps from very early on and recoiled from government comments about how involved it was.
Officials early on advised the government that softer-style boot camps were better, and a strict discipline model was “likely to be detrimental to young people”.
“The pilot programme evaluation showed promising results in driving change for participants,” OT said.
“The second programme will incorporate lessons learnt from the pilot and will provide further learnings to assist in the implementation of MSA programmes once the YSO legislation is passed.”
Budget 2025 put $33 million into the camps.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
