Pitched as a civilisational shift in how Aotearoa New Zealand responds to wrongdoing — Te Pāti Māori proposes dismantling the monocultural foundations of the justice system and replacing them with tikanga-grounded, community-centred, and restorative approaches that serve Māori and all New Zealanders.

The Policy: Te Pāti Māori Justice Policy — September 2023 →

_Neutrality note: this page covers TPM's broader justice reform agenda beyond prisons. The pathway to abolishing prisons by 2040 is covered on a separate page. Positions are attributed to the parties and researchers who hold them; statistics are from official NZ government and academic sources where available._

What it does

• Establishes a Māori Justice Authority — a parallel, self-governing institution grounded in tikanga Māori, to oversee community-based justice for Māori, funded by redirecting 20% of the Corrections, Police, and Courts budgets to the Authority.
• Raises the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 16, removing children from the adult and youth court system and placing them in whanau-centred intervention pathways instead.
• Repeals the Bail Amendment Act — which TPM argues criminalises poverty and has disproportionately increased the number of Māori held on remand.
• Eliminates benefit attachment orders — a practice TPM says criminalises survival and poverty by garnishing welfare payments to recover court-ordered fines.
• Amends the Clean Slate Act to apply to custodial sentences, removing the permanent criminal record bar that blocks reintegration into employment.
• Treats drug use as a health issue, not a criminal one — expunging convictions for possession and personal use, and redirecting people toward addiction and mental health services.
• Establishes Māori Legal Aid Services and funds kaupapa Māori legal units within each community law centre nationwide.
• Expands marae-based restorative justice — building on existing models like Te Pae Oranga / Iwi Community Panels, which have operated since 2013 and divert offenders from courts to marae panels of community peers.
• Reinstates voting rights for all prisoners, reversing the 2010 ban.
• Increases the Steps to Freedom grant from $350 to $1,000 for people leaving prison.
• Invests in community mental health and addiction services as an upstream alternative to incarceration.

The result

Co-leader Rawiri Waititi declared: "We are asserting our tino rangatiratanga to oversee our own tikanga-based models of restorative justice — this is the only path to equitable justice in Aotearoa." The policy is deliberately framed not as criminal-justice tweaking, but as a structural response to what the party characterises as a colonial institution. The late Moana Jackson — the constitutional lawyer whose 1988 report He Whaipaanga Hou ("Māori and the Criminal Justice System: A New Perspective") first argued that an alternative Māori justice system was required — spent three decades building the intellectual foundation for exactly this kind of proposal. Jackson argued that the criminal justice system isolates both perpetrator and victim from their communities and history, and challenged the Eurocentric notion of one law for all. His framework now underpins TPM's justice kaupapa.

Critics, including National, ACT and most of Labour, argue that a parallel ethnicity-based justice system raises serious equal-treatment-before-the-law concerns and would be constitutionally contested. ACT argues restorative alternatives may not adequately protect victims or deter serious offending. The policy is unlegislated and has no cross-party support in the current Parliament. However, elements of the broader vision — the Rangatahi Courts model, Te Pae Oranga panels, and the judicially-led Te Ao Marama District Court initiative (launched in 2022 with $47.4 million of government funding) — already operate within the existing system with documented positive outcomes, suggesting the building blocks are already in use. Whether those pieces can be scaled into a parallel system under Māori governance, and whether that can succeed constitutionally, remains deeply contested.

Our suggestion: when the justice system is built for one culture, everyone in it is judged by that culture's values

The NZ justice system was built on 19th-century English common law applied to a society that was not English. Moana Jackson spent his career arguing that the system's design — adversarial, individualistic, abstracting the offender from their community and whakapapa — is not a neutral instrument; it is a specific cultural product that operates well for the culture that made it, and poorly for cultures organised differently.

Tikanga-based justice approaches are not radical inventions. Māori had developed, over centuries, sophisticated mechanisms for resolving harm: utu (reciprocity, rebalancing), muru (organised redress), and hui-based deliberation that centred whanau and hapu, acknowledged harm publicly, and sought to restore the mana of both the wronged and the wrongdoer. Colonisation did not displace those mechanisms because they were found to be inferior — it displaced them because the new state needed a monopoly on law.

The evidence from partial reintegration of tikanga into the existing system is encouraging:

• Rangatahi Courts — marae-based Youth Courts now operating in 15 locations around Aotearoa — show that those who went through them committed 14% fewer offences and were 11% less likely to reoffend. Between 2009 and 2015, Māori youth aged 12 to 16 appearing in the Youth Court fell by 47 percent.
• Te Pae Oranga / Iwi Community Panels show a 92% success rate in Wellington, a 22.25% reduction in harm, and an 11.9% fall in reoffending among Māori aged 17 to 24. Over 17,405 referrals were made between 2017 and 2023. Police Commissioner Andrew Coster described it as "fundamental to the police goal of preventing crime and stopping people going to prison in the first place."
• Te Ao Mārama — a judicially-led, tikanga-informed reframing of the District Court's criminal jurisdiction led by Chief Judge Heemi Taumaunu, now active in 8 locations — integrates solution-focused judging, plain language, revised courtroom layouts, community partnerships, and tikanga practice. It received $47.4 million in Budget 2022.

TPM's proposition is simple: if the pieces already work, why not build the system?

The honest pushback is that restorative models work best for certain kinds of offending. The serious harm end of the spectrum — family violence, sexual violence, serious repeat offending — requires a level of victim protection and public safety architecture that restorative and tikanga-based models must prove they can deliver at scale, not just in pilots.

But the starting point matters: Māori are 17% of the population and 52% of the prison muster. That is not an outcome a neutral system produces. Something in the architecture is selecting for that result. TPM's argument is that you cannot fix a cultural bias by adding a tikanga unit to a system that structurally embeds a different culture's values at every decision point — from police discretion at first contact, through bail assessment, through courtroom procedure, through sentencing guidelines. The question for voters is not whether restorative justice works — the evidence says it does — but whether the existing system can reform itself from within, or whether something structurally different is needed.

The impacts to watch

• Māori over-representation begins at police contact, not prison. Māori are 37% of people proceeded against by police, 45% of convictions, and 52% of the prison population — the disparity compounds at every stage, meaning upstream justice reform is essential for any prison strategy to work.
• Rangatahi Māori are 63% of youth court charges and 68% of youth justice residence admissions (Oranga Tamariki / Aroturuki 2023-24) — whatever is done at the adult level, youth justice is the critical intervention point where trajectory changes.
• The Waitangi Tribunal's Te Rau o te Tika inquiry (Wai 3060) is currently examining Treaty breaches across all seven areas of the justice system — police, courts, prisons, Family Court, Environment Court, Māori Land Court, civil litigation. Findings, when published, may significantly strengthen the legal basis for TPM's proposals.
• International comparisons show promise and caution. Canada's Gladue principles require judges to consider Indigenous background at sentencing; Canadian healing lodges operate in correctional settings. Both have shown benefits but also face criticism for implementation gaps and for drifting from their original decolonial intent — cautionary lessons for how NZ designs any parallel system.
• The Clean Slate Act amendment would enable employment reintegration for a large population whose older convictions currently bar them from work, housing, and professional licensing — a direct upstream driver of recidivism.
• Raising the age of criminal responsibility to 16 would remove thousands of children from the formal justice system annually. Research from the ACT in Australia and international evidence suggests this reduces the criminalisation-of-youth-poverty pipeline, but requires parallel investment in alternative services for at-risk young people.
• Drug decriminalisation evidence from Portugal (2001) and New Zealand's own Te Ara Oranga pilot in Northland — a methamphetamine harm-reduction programme — suggests health-based responses reduce use and related offending more effectively than criminal prosecution.

Helpful context

• What is tikanga? Tikanga is the Māori framework of values, customs, and protocols — the system of right action that structured Māori society before and alongside colonisation. In justice contexts, tikanga emphasises collective accountability, mana restoration, and community healing rather than individual punishment and deterrence.
• Te Pae Oranga vs mainstream court: mainstream courts remove the offender from their community and judge them individually. Te Pae Oranga places the offender before a marae panel of community peers, identifies underlying causes (addiction, trauma, unemployment), and sets a restoration plan involving whanau. The 92% Wellington success rate reflects cases where that plan was completed without reoffending.
• Rangatahi Courts are not a separate legal system — they operate under the same Youth Court Act, apply the same law, and produce the same legal outcomes. The only difference is they sit on marae, follow tikanga process, and involve kaumatua. That structural change produces meaningfully different outcomes.
• The Waitangi Tribunal inquiry (Te Rau o te Tika) covers all seven areas of the justice system and is one of the most comprehensive Treaty-based reviews of a state institution ever undertaken in New Zealand. Its findings will be a major reference point for any future justice reform government.
• TPM's justice policy is connected to but distinct from their prison abolition policy. The broader justice reform — tikanga courts, marae panels, age of responsibility, bail reform — could be implemented without the 2040 prison abolition goal. See the related promise on prison abolition for that specific kaupapa.