No wonder Te Pāti Māori wants to abolish prisons when Māori make up most of the inmates
Te Pāti Māori says it wants to abolish prisons by 2040. Māori make up the majority of New Zealand’s prison population. Of course Te Pāti Māori wants prisons gone. It is the most self-interested justice policy imaginable.
At last count, more than half of all prisoners are Māori. Those figures are confronting, uncomfortable but let’s be honest - not really surprising. Instead of asking why violent offending, repeat offending and serious crime are so concentrated, Te Pāti Māori’s answer is to remove the very system that holds offenders accountable.
When Rawiri Waititi says “our tīpuna did not sign Te Tiriti o Waitangi for whānau to be incarcerated and continually traumatised”, he is not talking about victims. He is not talking about the people assaulted, babies murdered, robbed, gang raped or terrorised by repeat offenders. He’s just talking about the offenders.
Te Pāti Māori frames prison abolition as compassion. In reality, it is identity politics meeting electoral arithmetic. Sentenced prisoners cannot vote. Remove prisons and suddenly thousands of votes reappear. Add partners, parents and wider whānau who want loved ones out, and you have a tidy political constituency built on grievance, not responsibility.
What makes the policy even more insulting is the total lack of detail. Asked how abolishing prisons would actually work, Te Pāti Māori could not explain it before deadline. No plan. No safeguards. No answers for victims. Just chur-bro vibes and promises of “community-led solutions”.
That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting. “Community-led” sounds warm and inclusive, until you ask the obvious question. What happens when the offender does not want to engage? What happens when violence continues? What happens when someone is simply too dangerous?
Those questions are never answered, because answering them would expose the fantasy.
Even Labour, a party that literally handed millions of taxpayer dollars to gangs, want nothing to do with this. Hardly a bastion of law and order, Labour has still said prisons are “necessary”. Chris Hipkins admitted the obvious: “There will always, sadly, be a need for prisons.” He’s right.
The Greens, often accused of living in theory rather than practice, were also more grounded. Tamatha Paul warned that abolition without a solid plan to reduce harm was dangerous. When even the Greens are calling your justice policy dangerous, it should tell you something.
Te Pāti Māori claims it wants to “shift power from police and prisons to people and prevention”. That sounds noble until you realise who loses power in that equation. Victims. Law-abiding communities. People who do not want to live next door to repeat violent offenders being “restored” through endless hui.
The party also wants to reinstate voting rights for prisoners, increase release payments and repeal tougher sentencing laws. Every incentive is pointed in one direction, kindness towards criminals.
Some people cannot be safely managed in the community. That fact does not disappear because it is politically inconvenient. Abolishing prisons does not eliminate harm. It relocates it, usually into the poorest and most vulnerable communities, many of them Māori.
