Two years of the Criminal Justice System - two years of the Criminal Punishment System, costs more than all Treaty Settlements paid over the past 26 years.

The Māori Party’s Criminal Justice policy calls for a complete overhaul of the justice system and the establishment of a $100 million Māori Legal Aid/Legal Defence Service to protect Māori from the Crown.

The policy includes:

· Establishing a fund for a Māori Restorative Justice System.

· Replacing punitive measures embedded within the current criminal justice system with a system of restorative justice and focusing on rehabilitation.

· Amending racist laws, legal and policing processes that have the net effect of incarcerating innocent Māori.

The Māori Party Criminal Justice policy provides compelling evidence that the current criminal justice system is racist and calls for significant shifts across all our legal systems to remedy this.

Māori Party spokesperson Donna Pokere-Phillips said everyone knows the present system is broken and government agencies feast off that failure.

“Māori are used to maintain a pakeha economy which is based on criminalising them. Governments have known this but failed to act. We will keep calling this breach of our Tiriti o Waitangi agreements out until we get sovereignty back,” she said.

Our early intervention programme, Whānau Ora properly funded would drop Māori offending, rather than the negative deficit expenditure on a brutal criminal punishment system.

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