Chris Hipkins

Oh, it totally is.

And look, the National Party, again, and the ACT Party and the New Zealand First Party, they create a bit of a sort of a legend around this that's not true.

The vast bulk of people who end up on a job seeker benefit are on the job seeker benefit and off it within six months.

Yes, there's a group of people who are on there longer term.

But we've got to look at that in a more proactive way.

And instead of saying it's all their fault, we've got to say, how can we support you to be a better version of who you are and actually create opportunities for you?

Because there's often really complex situations around those families.

And just sanctioning them or beating them with a big stick, that's not actually going to help.

They need some extra support to get into a better place.

Well, I became Minister of Police in the middle of 2022.

And I don't know if you remember, but at the time we were experiencing that peak in ram raids.

And so I got all of the different government agencies in who were dealing with those kids.

So police, education, Oranga Tamariki, health, you know, all of the different government agencies.

And I sat them in my office and I said, well, can you tell me who are these kids who are doing this?

And because there were hundreds of kids and they went away and they came back and they said, OK, well, we set a threshold at five.

So any kid who'd done more than five ram raids, we basically made a list of them.

And there are 96 kids on that list.

So at the core of what we were saying, there were 96 really troubled kids getting into trouble all the time.

And then I said, OK, well, let's do the next thing.

Let's go through these and figure out what's going on with these kids lives that they're out there stealing cars, driving them into businesses and so on.