Labour's Justice and Police Minister Ginny Andersen says National is returning to its failed policies with its tough-on-crime stance.
Andersen went head-to-head with National's justice spokesperson Paul Goldsmith over crime on AM on Tuesday.
National plans to bring back Three Strikes which aims to tackle repeat offenders by automatically handing maximum sentences to criminals who commit three serious crimes. A critique of the law was that offenders were being sentenced to disproportionately harsh terms and it was successfully repealed last year by the Labour Government.
National also wants to limit the amount a judge can reduce an offender's sentence by by 40 percent.
But Andersen said National is rehashing its previous failed policies.
"You're going to talk a big game, you always do this, pretend to be tough on crime but you don't back it up with funding and you don't enable it to happen," Andersen told co-host Ryan Bridge.
"That was exactly the problem you got stuck in the last time you were in Government, a ballooning prison population, quadruple bunking, people in boarding houses."
However, Goldsmith defended his party's policies, claiming it would bring a lower crime rate. He also took aim at the Government's goal to reduce prison populations by 30 percent.
"We aren't going to let people run around creating crime in the community because the Government can't find corrections officers, you've actually got to get out and find them," he said.
Goldsmith said National's primary focus in justice is to reduce the number of victims of crime.
Andersen said Labour's policies are evidence-based and work better than National's policies such as boot camps.
She said the Government has made some sentences longer by introducing new aggravating factors and created new criminal offences such as ram-raiding.
"There has not been one reduction of a sentence. Murder is the same, rape is the same," Andersen said.
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