The target for reducing violent crime is already looking shaky, just months into a five-year plan. Documents released under the Official Information Act give a glimpse of what’s been going on behind the bold claims and big promises.
Just over four months into his government’s first term, all the random shiny particles of Christopher Luxon’s corporate-inspired political philosophy crystallised perfectly into “nine big rocks”. Nine targets across law and order, health, education, housing and the environment, each designed to whip a flabby public sector into shape, to drive bureaucrats to strive for the “outcomes” the prime minister is so keen on – and to do so without throwing taxpayer money around. Yet, at the same time as they were given these “ambitious” new targets, government agencies were under strict instruction to trim the fat.
In the five months since that early April announcement, the targets popped up from time to time in press releases, speeches and debating chamber banter, but a midyear progress update still hadn’t eventuated by the time September rolled around. According to documents released to The Spinoff under the Official Information Act, lead ministers for each target were meant to be signing off on delivery plans in June, approving quarterly target reports for the quarter ending June 30 by July 16, then providing them to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) to submit to Cabinet’s Strategy Committee for its meeting on July 30 – after which they would be proactively released.
Seven weeks later, on Monday, September 16, an abbreviated “quarterly report summary” was finally made public, attached to a Christopher Luxon press release with the title “Targets data confirms rise in violent crime”. While promising results were seen for some targets, for others the scale of the challenge had become apparent, read the press release. The spikiest thorn in the government’s side? The reduced violent crime target. In a matter of months, new data had turned a required 20,000 reduction in victim numbers into a decidedly less surmountable one of 50,000, due to the baseline of 185,000 shooting up to 214,737 in a matter of months. Target status? At risk.
But hundreds of pages of correspondence released to The Spinoff under the Official Information Act suggest that data isn’t the only factor endangering the delivery of the reduced violent crime target – public sector belt tightening appears to have delayed, if not derailed, progress. Despite the government’s repeated assurances that its money-saving measures won’t impact frontline services, ministers have been warned that “back-office” cost-cutting is not only putting the delivery of the target at risk, it is expected to “place further pressure on frontline staff”.
In about six weeks’ time, the team that sounded these warning bells – the very one that was tasked with creating a comprehensive plan for how to deliver the reduced violent crime target – will cease to exist. That team is the Justice Sector Directorate, which was set up in 2022 to help the Ministry of Justice, NZ Police, Corrections, Oranga Tamariki, Crown Law and the Serious Fraud Office work together to tackle “system-wide issues”. When the 2024 budget was released in May, the directorate’s operating budget was slashed by nearly $1 million, and in late June, as part of a wider “organisational realignment” at the justice ministry that will result in a net reduction of 127 roles, a proposal to merge it with Corrections’ High Impact Innovation Programme (HIIP) was announced. All roles in both teams (21 at the directorate, five of which were vacant, and 47 at HIIP, nine of which were vacant) were to be disestablished, and a new combined team of 25 created within the Ministry of Justice. The proposal was confirmed on September 12.
Before it was nixed, the directorate was given the job of putting together comprehensive delivery plans for the reduced violent crime target (which is to have 20,000 fewer victims of assault, robbery and sexual assault by 2029) and the reduced child and youth offending target (a 15% reduction in the total number of children and young people with ”serious and persistent offending behaviour” by 2029). The Ministry of Justice, its chief executive Andrew Kibblewhite and justice minister Paul Goldsmith were put in charge of the former, while the latter is overseen by children’s minister Karen Chhour, Oranga Tamariki and its chief executive Chappie Te Kani. The directorate was tasked with wrangling various agencies across the justice, social and health sectors to contribute to the plans. (While The Spinoff’s Official Information Act request focused on the violent crime target, the plans were being developed in tandem, so some of the information released relates to both targets.)
But correspondence and briefings, while heavily redacted, suggest the road to reducing violent crime and youth offending is paved with “key risks to delivery”. The plans were meant to flag these, and a briefing that was attached to overviews of both crime target plans, sent to Goldsmith and Chhour for approval in early May, did just that.
Initial work on delivering the plans had “highlighted the delivery risk due to rapid public sector change and cost savings”, it read. “Most involved agencies are working through significant cuts to national office staff who are required to develop and drive new approaches.” (A draft version, revealed in emails between public servants working on the plans, had described that risk as “significant” and used the phrase “the breadth and depth of public sector change and cost savings”.)
The briefing further erodes the government’s assurances that its cuts won’t as much as graze the frontline.
“The government is managing through significant fiscal constraint,” the briefing continued. “The mandated Budget 24 cost savings have already targeted the immediate cuts that might otherwise have been reprioritised to support new initiatives.”
The briefing further erodes the government’s assurances that its cuts won’t as much as graze the frontline, saying not only that “implementation of delivery plans is expected to place further pressure on frontline staff”, but that those very frontline staff “have flagged the impact of funding uncertainty on future community capability for operational responses”.
After it was seen by the justice minister, the violent crime plan overview was revised, then redistributed to contributing agencies with a comment from Ryan Orange, deputy director of the Justice Sector Directorate, that suggested Goldsmith may not have felt everyone was sufficiently on board with his approach: “Please bear in mind that we are having to work across feedback from multiple agencies, and that it is the Minister’s plan and we need to align the content with his language and expectations,” said Orange.
In a similar vein, at a meeting at the end of May, justice ministry chief executive Andrew Kibblewhite was “wanting all CEs (some optional) to sit together at the head of the table in front of the ministers and in a choreographed co-ordinated fashion, inform the ministers of their commitment to the cross-agency serious violent plan [sic]”, according to an email from NZ Police’s justice sector liaison officer.
Why would such a “choreographed” and “co-ordinated” gesture to prove commitment be needed? The OIA documents hint at a potential imbalance between the government’s promise to address root causes and its pledge to get tough on crime, with feedback from NZ Police implying the initial plan development was too heavily weighted on the “cracking down” side of the ledger. The balance was always going to be a delicate one to navigate for a government needing to follow through on its tough-on-crime talk by being, well, tough on crime, while also addressing underlying drivers through its long-promised social investment approach. (But not too much, lest it be accused of “cuddling criminals”.)
While Luxon’s announcement of the targets referenced “digging deep to address root causes”, the language around the violent crime target has leaned heavily on “tough-on-crime” tropes, and this week’s update continued the trend: not only was the surge in victim numbers “further proof that the previous soft-on-crime approach has emboldened offenders and created a crime wave that will take a much tougher approach to stop”, it was justification for the government “taking action to hold offenders accountable through tougher sentences”.
Sentencing aside, the burden of any “crackdown” approach largely falls on police – whose feedback on the plan suggested they had concerns. Two emails from Paul Basham, assistant commissioner of investigations, were supplied to The Spinoff with heavy redactions under the OIA provision that applies “where release of the information at issue would inhibit the future exchange of free and frank opinions that are necessary for the effective conduct of public affairs”. The first email began with “Police consider that a joined up social investment approach is appropriate”, which was followed by 30 or so lines of redacted text, and ended with a request for flexibility on a May 10 deadline for agencies to provide “initial draft content and actions for allocated action areas”.
Flexibility wasn’t given, it would seem, as at 4.58pm on May 10, Police’s “preliminary contributions” were sent through, which were “very much reflective of the incredibly tight timeframes that we’ve been provided”, wrote Basham. Again, heavy redactions followed, including the preliminary contributions themselves, but the email continued, “It is not reasonable to expect that Police can provide this information yet… the success of this target is dependent on the readiness of our justice and social sector partner agencies. Some of the language throughout the document has not yet reflected this sentiment, or it’s not stated clearly under key sections.” A “collective effort from the justice sector” was required, he said.
The burden of any ‘crackdown’ approach largely falls on police – whose feedback suggested they had concerns.
Feedback from the Ministry of Health and Health NZ was also released with heavy redactions under the “free and frank opinions” provision. “Overall, we are happy to work with Justice on this target,” it began. “But we need to be clear–” (the remainder of the sentence was redacted). “Additionally, the short timeframes for response and to prepare actions make it difficult to respond–” (again, redacted). “You will know that the mental health and addiction workforce has significant shortages, particularly, but not exclusively, in some regional centres.” Amid more redacted text, there was a request to meet to discuss “how we can get more specificity to this target, and to discuss drivers and possible intervention points”, and a suggestion that “Whaikaha [the Ministry for Disabled People] needs to be part of this conversation”.
Other agency feedback was conspicuous in its absence from the OIA documents, though an email from Orange said it was “diverse”, which resulted in the focus areas of the overview “evolving” – but he noted that not all feedback was included as some of it was “conflicted”. “Concrete actions have provide [sic] difficult to land in most areas,” Orange wrote in another email.
A briefing to the minister later in May suggested the health agencies’ contribution never arrived. “We are still working with the Ministry of Health, and through them with Health New Zealand, to understand how health-led alcohol, drug and mental health services can be most effectively integrated into the delivery plan,” it read. “Health is a complex sector with a range of significant targets that also require delivery plans. Establishing clarity on actions in this space that specifically support the delivery of this target is likely to be ongoing work during the initial implementation of the delivery plan.”
‘Spiralled out of control’, or ‘no significant difference’?
Cost cutting and reconciling differences in opinion may have delayed progress on the plan, but there’s a more fundamental issue at the heart of the reducing violent crime target: how violent crime is being measured, and whether levels of it really have dramatically risen in recent years, as the government claims.
The reduced violent crime target, as announced on April 8, was for there to be 20,000 fewer victims of assault, robbery and sexual assault by 2029, a reduction from the 2023 figure of 185,000 to 165,000. The numbers come from the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey (NZCVS), a Ministry of Justice initiative that asks people about their experiences of crime in the previous 12 months. It’s widely considered to be the most reliable source of crime statistics we have, largely because it records unreported offences, which are believed to make up about a quarter of all crime in Aotearoa. The survey has been running since 2018 and releases its findings annually: a series of comprehensive reports are published in June for the findings of the year prior.
Each annual cycle of the survey follows roughly the same model, interviewing a similar number of people over a similar time period, and crucially, each cycle has shown “no significant difference” in violent crime since the survey began.
Until now, that is. With the full results of Cycle 6 (the 2023 results, based on interviews carried out between November 2022 and October 2023) only being released in June 2024, on Monday we got some brand-spanking new NZCVS data, based on interviews that cut across the Cycle 6 time period – they were carried out between July 2022 and June 2024, according to the government’s target report summary. The latest data showed a total of 214,737 victims of violent crime. “Increase of 30,000 in people experiencing violent crime, reflecting continuation of the trend over last few years, and lag with the data,” read the report summary.
The “continuation of the trend over last few years” [sic] line pointed to in the report summary is curious, given that the comprehensive reports the NZCVS has released each year clearly state there’s been “no significant difference” in violent crime rates. By the exact same measure the government has chosen to use for its violent crime target – which the Ministry of Justice itself describes as “the most comprehensive source of data on adult victims of crime in New Zealand” – the number of victims of assaults, robberies and sexual assaults actually decreased every year from 2019 to 2022. While there was an increase from 2022 to 2023, that 2023 figure of 185,000 wasn’t much higher than the 2019 one of 184,000 – so all in all, “no significant difference”.
The government’s target for 2029, meanwhile – to have 165,000 victims of violent crime – would indeed be 20,000 fewer than 2023, but what isn’t highlighted is that it would be higher than the 2022 total, which was just over 164,000. The exact figures are as follows: 177,075 victims for 2018 (Cycle 1); 183,931 victims for 2019 (Cycle 2); 178,789 victims for 2020 (Cycle 3); 174,486 victims for 2021 (Cycle 4); 162,403 victims for 2022 (Cycle 5); 184,815 victims for 2023 (Cycle 6). The new figure of 214,737 is the highest it’s ever been by some margin.
The new quarterly release of NZCVS data was signalled by Goldsmith in early July, and correspondence released under the OIA suggests he and ministry officials have known about the data showing a sharp increase since at least May. A single word in an email from a justice ministry staffer sent on May 22 was redacted under the OIA provision that exists to protect “the confidentiality of advice tendered by ministers and officials”, but we can now presume that word was “increased”.
“The lag” appears to have been what was come up with to explain the increase. The new data showed “people’s experience from up to two years ago”, emphasised Luxon’s press release, and was “further proof that the previous soft-on-crime approach has emboldened offenders and created a crime wave that will take a much tougher approach to stop”.
Despite the NZCVS showing “no significant difference” until now, the idea that violent crime increased under the previous government is a common refrain among coalition members. In his Waitangi Day address this year, Luxon said violent crime had “spiralled out of control” under the previous government. In the House, there have been regular references to a rise in violent crime described variously as “alarming”, “massive” or “huge”. Violent crime had “soared” under Labour despite a “massive government spending spree”, said finance minister Nicola Willis in a pre-budget speech in May. “All we saw was crime go up, crime go up, crime go up, and that’s all we saw,” was how National MP Cameron Brewer put it on July 30. “The incoming government inherited the worst violent crime this country has seen,” said police minister Mark Mitchell on August 22.
But it’s not all metaphor and synonyms for “big”. There’s a favoured data point too: the claim that violent crime has gone up by 33%. This stat, of course, isn’t from the metric the government is using to measure progress towards its violent crime target, because until Monday, the NZCVS hadn’t shown any significant increase in violent crime. The 33% figure comes from the police victimisations dataset “RCVS” (recorded crime victims statistics), which records all instances of reported crime (even if police take no further action) for which there is a direct victim. This dataset does indicate that, aside from a couple of lockdown-related dips, reports of crime have been increasing since 2014, when police began recording and reporting data in this way. On Monday, Luxon and Goldsmith said the new NZCVS data added “fresh weight” to this police stat.
In the House, there have been regular references to a rise in violent crime described variously as ‘alarming’, ‘massive’ or ‘huge’.
A major advantage of NZCVS over police data is that it “captures crimes that are often unreported such as sexual assaults and family violence”, as the violent crime target fact sheet itself says. This is a pertinent point: the NZCVS indicates that only around a quarter of instances of crime are actually reported to police.
That’s why police data (like RCVS) and NZCVS data are so different: reported crime doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in actual crime. As the Herald covered in this comprehensive data analysis from last year, one factor that may have contributed to a rise in police crime data is better reporting mechanisms, like the introduction of the 105 non-emergency phone line in 2019. Then there are legislative changes: two new offences were introduced when changes were made to the Family Violence Act in December 2018: assault on a person in a family relationship and impedes breathing (strangulation/suffocation). “The introduction of these new offences does correlate with an increase in reported family harm and there has been a much smaller increase in non-family harm assaults,” found the Herald. The data from 2022 showed that “family harm offences appear to have resulted in the reporting of almost 20,000 additional crimes”.
Correspondence released under the OIA suggests that in the context of the reducing violent crime target, advisers have repeatedly pointed Goldsmith towards the NZCVS stats (unsurprisingly, given the target is based on them). When the target was announced, the minister was provided with a “backpocket Q&A” so he could prepare for media questions. One of the questions was, “How do these statistics align with your past claims in opposition that there was a 33% increase in violent crime under Labour?” The provided answer skirted around the question, explaining why the NZCVS is a better measure of violent crime, but not addressing why Goldsmith – whose “past claims while in opposition” are in fact repeated by the minister regularly, including this week when the target update was announced – continues to reference the 33% figure.
The numbers game
It’s worth stating the obvious here: violent crime is bad, and any genuine attempt to reduce the levels of it in New Zealand society are good – regardless of whether it actually increased under the previous government (and if it did, whether that was because of “soft” law and order policies or for a variety of more complex reasons).
It’s also worth noting that political bluster that’s not entirely based on fact is nothing new – politicians of all stripes cherry-pick data and hammer points they feel they’re strong on (and/or their opposition is weak on) – and it doesn’t preclude those from making the decisions from having a more nuanced view. But the coalition government’s tough-on-crime rhetoric has hardly been subtle, and its policies have raised genuine concerns from many different corners, so it’s worth peeling back the layers.
According to the OIA documents released to The Spinoff, the violent crime target was originally going to be a percentage figure – a 15% reduction in the number of victims of assault, robbery and sexual assault – which would have aligned it with the youth offending target, which is also a 15% reduction. The violent crime target was changed to a numerical figure (a reduction of 20,000) for, apparently, “ease of communication”. The change wasn’t simply a language one, though: a 20,000 reduction from 185,000 (the baseline figure, taken from NZCVS data for 2022/2023) is notably less than 15%: it’s 10.8%. A 15% reduction would have equated to 27,750 fewer victims.
It’s questionable whether “ease of communication” has been achieved: the justice select committee’s Vote Justice report (which is written up after the committee, comprising MPs from all parties, is given the opportunity to examine the justice spending appropriations in the budget), released in August, refers incorrectly to the target as a 15% reduction. Goldsmith, meanwhile, has described the violent crime target as a 20% reduction on at least one occasion, as has minister for the prevention of family and sexual violence Karen Chhour (Chhour corrected her error, Goldsmith did not).
Perhaps the pair simply couldn’t get the targets of the John Key era out of their minds – Luxon’s language when announcing them was eerily similar, after all. In 2012, Key set a target of reducing violent crime by 20% by June 2017. It never really looked likely, thanks in part to stubborn family violence rates, and a month prior to the deadline, Key’s successor Bill English changed the 20% target to a reduction in the number of violent crime victims by 10,000 – but excluding victims of family and sexual violence.
English denied that changing the target to such an extent was an example of the government manipulating the numbers to make the target easier to reach, but “gaming”, as it’s known, was a common criticism of the targets of that era, and it’s an accusation the current government will be wanting to avoid. A “backpocket Q&A” sent out to officials when the new targets were released earlier this year addressed the issue. “For each of the nine targets, the government will be actively managing the risk of gaming with well-designed targets, a suite of supporting indicators, robust performance frameworks and active ministerial oversight to manage the risk.”
According to Ministry of Justice documents, one of the main reasons the NZCVS is being used for the reduced violent crime target is because “it’s immune to agency gaming or changes in reporting practices”.
The complexities of measuring family violence
It’s clear, then, that getting a handle on how much violent crime there is in Aotearoa is far from a black-and-white equation. Family violence – an umbrella term covering intimate partner violence, child abuse and violence by any other family member, which some experts argue is itself a problematic term – poses particularly thorny issues. According to research centre the National Family Violence Clearinghouse, “New Zealand doesn’t collect sufficient, comparable data (for example, from research surveys) regularly enough to know whether family violence is increasing or decreasing”, but “it is safe to say that family violence remains a very significant problem”.
The latest NZCVS report describes family violence as “a complex pattern of behaviours, encompassing a range of violent and controlling conduct”. Due to that complexity, the survey does not attempt to “directly measure family violence”, but the family offences captured by the NZCVS are used as a proxy for family violence by government organisations and NGOs. In other words, it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got.
According to the OIA documents, there was an initial plan for family violence to be measured as its own standalone target, and ministers agreed on a number in March 2024. The Vote Justice select committee report said “considerable work was undertaken to develop” the target, which was to be based on NZCVS data. But it wasn’t among the suite of targets Luxon announced in April.
Family and sexual violence minister Karen Chhour hasn’t shed much light on why this target was scrapped. Despite the fact it was based on the NZCVS, which is widely known for its inclusion of non-reported violence, she said ministers decided it wasn’t appropriate “to have a target like the number of reported rapes or sexual assaults because, actually, we know this is an under-reported issue”. In parliament, Labour’s police spokesperson Ginny Andersen has alleged that Chhour was advised that “family violence victimisation can in fact be reliably measured through the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey.” According to Andersen, however, the advice said “it was not possible to develop a government target due to public sector budget cuts possibly shifting the survey from yearly to every second year”. In response, Chhour said she couldn’t remember the details of all the advice she’d been given.
Family violence is the area where NZCVS and police data diverge most notably: it makes up a much larger proportion of RCVS violent crime data than it does of NZCVS violent crime data. As Charlotte Chambers, the director of NZ Police’s evidence-based policing unit, put it in an email on May 7, “The trends are almost oppositional eg. violent offencing [sic] in RCVS is mostly captured by family harm which is not the case in the NZCVS.” Chambers was writing to Andrew Rae of the justice ministry’s sector analysis and modelling unit to ask how much police data was being used in the violent crime target. Rae replied that “police data on family harm investigations” would be used for “supporting measures of family violence on the violent offending target”.
This, of course, would be reflected in the data as a decrease, but that wouldn’t mean family violence was actually decreasing.
It’s not clear why that would be, when NZCVS is widely considered to be the more reliable data source. Police family harm investigation data has some issues, as less than half of investigations lead to an offence being recorded, and in the past, offences have been downgraded in error. What’s more, earlier this year it was reported that police were planning a “managed withdrawal” from family harm incidents. This, of course, would be reflected in the data as a decrease, but that wouldn’t mean family violence was actually decreasing. There have been some reports suggesting that this is already happening.
Is the government shifting the goalposts?
On top of all the other difficulties with measuring violent crime, and the indications that police data will be used for “supporting measures”, the government has not firmly ruled out tinkering with the core tool for measuring progress towards the target.
A five-year evaluation of the NZCVS, commissioned in July last year during the previous parliamentary term, looked at shifting it to a biennial cycle. Its February 2024 report concluded, however, that this and other potential cost-cutting measures would “involve trade-offs that would reduce the value of victimisations survey data”. “Even small changes to the survey method have the potential to disrupt comparability with established NZCVS results,” it said.
That “disruption of comparability”, of course, would have implications for the reduced violent crime target. In a response to a parliamentary written question from Labour justice spokesperson Duncan Webb on July 5, Goldsmith said changes to the frequency of the survey were not being considered, but as a procurement process was coming up (meaning the ministry is seeking bids from providers for the contract to carry out the survey), there may be “minor technical and operational changes”.
Goldsmith’s comments to the Vote Justice committee suggest the goalposts for the reduced violent crime target might not be rooted to the spot, however. Asked by Webb if using the survey to measure progress towards the target would “continue exactly as it currently is”, Goldsmith equivocated, saying, “Yes, but I am interested in deepening and coming up with different elements to sort of triangulate to get a better understanding of what’s going on.” He said the ministry was working on developing “a robust measure of the actual incidence of crime and violent crime” and was exploring ACC figures and hospital statistics, which he again pointed to in the target update earlier this week.
This befuddling array of variables and caveats mean all sorts of claims can be made in relation to crime stats that few have the time, inclination or expertise to challenge. One who has all three of those things, however, is the public watchdog: the Office of the Auditor General, which has selected the reduced violent crime and reduced youth offending targets as the only two of Luxon’s nine “big rocks” that will get the audit treatment. The OAG’s fine-tooth comb will be run over the “quality of the underlying systems, processes and controls”, as well as whether appropriate information is gathered to measure performance and the reliability of that reported performance. “Risks of unintended incentives or consequences of implementing and reporting against targets” will also be looked at.
In the meantime, the Justice Sector Directorate limps on until early November, when the new merged team takes its place. Seven staff from the 16 employed in the directorate have been offered roles in the new team, with just five from Corrections’ 38-strong HIIP team. The process for filling the remaining roles is under way now, with opportunities for those not offered roles from both teams – that’s 42 people – to apply for the 13 roles. The new team will continue work on the violent crime target, the ministry confirmed.
Meanwhile, previously confidential budget documents released last week shed some light on the financial pressures the government’s new “tough-on-crime” measures are placing on the Ministry of Justice. While the exact figure of the new spending was withheld, a March briefing from Treasury said, “While restoring law and order is a priority for the government, this level of funding expectation presents significant affordability challenges for future budgets.”
The largest new spending initiatives were for increased prison capacity and the coalition promise for 500 new frontline police, said the briefing, which was provided to the finance minister before a meeting with justice sector ministers. It suggested Nicola Willis discuss with the ministers whether there were “policy/operational levers that can be pulled to stop people entering the criminal justice system in the first place”, and “whether there is scope to work with colleagues in the social sector on early interventions”.