Christopher Luxon. Photo: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
The prime minister says he's "really comfortable" with the public not knowing the reoffending rate for the coalition's pilot boot camp programme.
The first official evaluation of the trial military academy was released on Friday, with Oranga Tamariki confirming "alleged reoffending" had occurred.
Christopher Luxon refused to confirm the rate of this reoffending at Monday's weekly post-Cabinet media conference, saying he needed to "respect people's privacy".
Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime has been prosecuting the coalition on its pilot for months, and on Tuesday said the government was simply too embarrassed to share the statistics.
"It would be hugely embarrassing for the prime minister to have to admit that something he was warned by experts would not work has failed - and he refuses to do that, hiding behind privacy reasons."
Luxon pushed back on keeping the figure under wraps, pointing out Friday's evaluation report had highlighted successful aspects of the pilot programme.
"I'm really comfortable and I'd just love it if you could actually read the report… because there were some very good positives in that report.
"As I've said, there is going to be a level of reoffending. Under Labour there was almost a 90 percent reoffending rate with kids coming out of youth justice facilities."
Prime said programmes like Kōtahi te Whakaaro and Circuit Breaker had actually reported a 70 to 75 percent success rate.
She said she understood the coalition's pilot boot camp had a reoffending rate of around 80 percent, though she could not get this confirmed.
Willow-Jean Prime. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
"I am trying every avenue available to me as an opposition MP to hold this government accountable, and they simply will not give that information to the public.
"They should have to be able to tell the public that they have the evidence to support that their approach works because they are putting it into law - it will become a sentencing option in the future for young people with no evidence to support that."
Prime said she was concerned the prime minister did not care if the programmes worked or not, accusing him of having a longer-term agenda of locking kids up for longer.
"My suspicion is the way in which they're going to achieve their target is to simply lock them up for longer. The law allows them to increase the [time] in residence from three months to 12 months.
"You heard him yesterday at post-cab saying one of the things they've learned from the report is longer in residence. I read the report. I didn't see that anywhere. I think that was his plan all along."
Luxon reiterated the government's mantra of not giving up on these kids, saying past approaches had not worked.
"We're not giving up on these young people. They are our serious, toughest offenders that we have. We've had a very good reaction to that programme.
"The residential component I'm really, really proud of and I think there's always more things to do, but the answer is not to carry on doing what we were doing - which was not working."
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