Today, Oranga Tamariki, opened its first pilot “Military-Style Academy” (aka boot camp) – under the watchful eye of the ACT Party’s Minister for Children, Karen Chhour – fulfilling the promise of the coalition government to get tough on youth crime.
For our international readers, Oranga Tamariki is the Māori name for the Ministry for Children in Aotearoa, a central government agency responsible for child protection and working with young people who offend. The ACT Party is a far-right political party that obtained a mere 8.6% of votes cast at our national election last year. Under our MMP system, they form part of a coalition government with the National Party and NZ First. Disturbingly, some of their MPs have been given portfolios in socially sensitive Ministries. For example, while Karen Chhour (Minister for Children) is busy introducing new authoritarian youth justice measures, gun-owning Nicole McKee (Associate Minister of Justice: Firearms) is firmly focused on removing Jacinda Ardern’s 2019 ban on owning military-style semi-automatic weapons, introduced after the massacre at the Linwood and Al Noor Mosques.
Our belief is that in the right environment, with the right people surrounding and nurturing them, any child can and should flourish.
Oranga Tamariki (2024).
Chhour’s boot camp pilot will start with ten young people aged between 15 and 17, nine of whom are Māori. This year-long intervention begins with an intensive three-month “military-style” programme in an Oranga Tamariki secure unit, followed by a nine-month stage “focused on supporting the young person to transition back into the community.”
The government has set a target for a reduction in serious, repeat offending by 15% and – in spite of the prevailing weight of international evidence against the efficacy of boot camps as a crime reduction measure – they appear to consider the boot camp as a part of their crime reduction plan.
Well, we shouldn’t be surprised. Neoliberal governments never really let evidence get in the way of good old-fashioned, muscular, authoritarian rhetoric. Especially when they can cherry-pick their own “evidence” to justify mobilising the military imaginary. They are unlikely to listen to actual evidence or the views of real experts like Elizabeth Stanley, who captured the political purpose of the boot camp:
‘Boot camps’ serve only one real purpose – they allow politicians intent on ignoring evidence to propel a vision that something is being done. It’s a chance for commentators and the public to hark back to a golden age when the whip ruled and people knew their place. As a public relations exercise for a government ‘coming down hard’, it fits the bill.
Stanley, E. (2024, March 10)
The Cabinet Paper describing Chhour’s plans for the boot camp pilot states that the military-style element will be based on the New Zealand Defence Force’s Limited Service Volunteer (LSV) course, which is currently offered to young unemployed people and promoted by Work and Income.
Of course, the key element in the LSV is the word voluntary. The young people on the pilot boot camp are not volunteers and do not have anything like the same life histories as the unemployed youth on the LSV who choose to participate. In fact, the Cabinet Paper states that:
“The teenagers on the pilot are very likely to have: a history of violence and aggression; experienced high level of trauma and abuse; and high and complex needs including neurodiversity and mental health needs”
NZ Government Cabinet Paper (2024)
The Cabinet Paper proudly proclaims the key components of the boot camp “curriculum”:
- Stage 0 – Settling in – (Respect for Self –Aware and Connected)
- Stage 1 – Imposed discipline – (Respect for others – Bold & United)
- Stage 2 – Development of self and team – (Responsible for my own future – Responsible and Determined)
- Stage 3 – Self-discipline and team member – (Dare to win)
This is a typical example of what Henry Giroux (2011) has described as a penal pedagogy. A pedagogy where individual young people are construed as the problem rather than any wider institutional or structural issues; and where programme design is embedded in military discourse, practice, and ideology. For example, the “Dare to Win” epithet – referenced at Stage 3 of the programme – is the title of a book about the New Zealand Special Air Service. This is the same elite military unit that the journalist Nicky Hager claims killed civilians during a raid in Afghanistan.
Let’s remind ourselves of the true purpose of a military boot camp. The meaning of a boot camp is sometimes softened in popular discourse because of its use as a metaphor in gyms and other civilian contexts where it might mean a challenging, one-off exercise regime. However, the origins of the term lie in the practices of the US military during the Second World War, and the term is now used in military contexts worldwide. Boot camp is a term used for an intensive and highly physical training regime used to turn civilians into soldiers.
Recruits may get physically fitter and perhaps learn some combat skills in the process, but its true purpose is to test and bend the will of individuals to endure serious hardship and follow orders even when they make no sense. Military recruits are being programmed to be part of a machine, to be prepared to put their lives on the line and to follow commands to kill other people. In the context of the military, respect for authority, self-discipline, teamwork and daring to win have a very different resonance from the same ideas used in civil society.
And yet, this is the regime at the heart of the boot camp curriculum, this is Chhour’s penal pedagogy. Softened a little with some references to social workers, individual mentors and trauma-informed practices. But it is a boot camp at the core, delivered by the New Zealand Defence Force. This is Karen Chhour’s solution for young people – most of whom are Māori – with high levels of trauma and abuse, with high and complex needs including neurodiversity and mental health needs.
What makes this policy practice, this boot camp pilot, even more appalling is its announcement at the same time as the publication of report by a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the abuse and neglect of children, young people and adults in the care of State and faith-based institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand between 1950 and 1999. That report included evidence of abuse at an earlier boot camp for young people in the form of Te Whakapakari Youth Programme on Barrier Island. State support for that camp was ended by the former Department of Child, Youth and Family in 2004 “when it ceased funding of Te Whakapakari Youth Trust, citing research that ‘boot camp’ type environments do not effect positive change, especially to reduce reoffending”. And yet here we are again. When Karen Chhour was asked by journalists to guarantee that young people at her boot camp pilot would not be abused, she refused to do so.
In the quotation below, Henry Giroux (2011) comments on the relationship between Western governments and their Black and working-class youth. The same is true in Aotearoa. Nine of the ten young people compelled to take part in boot camp pilot are Māori. Boot camps are designed to discipline Māori rangatahi, nothing more and nothing less. This is a racist policy.
Against the idealistic rhetoric of a nation that claims it venerates young people lies the reality of a society that increasingly views youth through the optic of law and order, and is all too willing to treat them as criminals and, when necessary, make them “disappear” into the farthest reaches of the carceral state.
(Giroux 2011, p. 7)
Now for something you can do.
The Reimagining Social Work collective urge all of our readers to support this Action Station petition by the Criminological Society of the University of Otago.