Chris Hipkins

Well, about I think it was about 90 percent of those kids had been the subject of or witness to family violence.

about the same number had had a someone in their household who had been involved in the criminal justice system so they've been into prison or they've been arrested or they've been on home detention and when we started when we started working with all those different government agencies to say let's support those families let's figure out what's going on that means that the cycle is continuing let's do some proper support so if the parents don't have driver's licenses let's help the parents get driver's licenses

If there's drug and alcohol addiction in the household, let's get them support to deal with that.

When we did that, within a very short space of time, 75% of those kids, and bearing in mind these were the ones who were the most in trouble, they stopped reoffending.

And that meant there was still 25% that we needed to do even more to kind of get them out of trouble.

But that's a heck of a turnaround rate.

So you compare that with something like a boot camp.

80%, 90% of kids who go to boot camps end up re-offending.

Here was a program that didn't have all of the sort of sloganeering that a boot camp did, but it actually worked for 75% of those kids.

Now, I'm pleased.

They don't talk about it much, but the current government have actually continued that program on.

And that, I think, is how we make a difference.

You've got to get right into the base of the issue.

How do we turn these people's lives around?

And it's not just the kids.

Because if the kids are in trouble, there's generally, you know, it's generally a sign that there's more going on behind the scenes.

I tell you, when I was first a member of parliament, a woman from the United States came in to see me and she founded this program called Roots of Empathy.

And Roots of Empathy was about taking babies into primary schools and teaching kids around empathy, using the babies as the catalyst for that.

And she told me the story about when they first ran this program, it was in the US, and a teacher took her baby into a school.

And the baby got handed around the kids and they were learning about babies and how vulnerable they were and how you looked after a baby and all that.