The Opposition is fired up over the Government's plans to crack down on youth offenders, calling them "cruel", "inexcusably shallow" and "likely to increase reoffending".
On Sunday, Children's Minister Karen Chhour announced the Government is introducing a new young serious offender sentencing category to ensure they face tougher consequences.
Under the new category, young offenders could be sent to a military-style academy or face greater use of electronic and judicial monitoring. Police will also have the power to arrest a young person without a warrant for non-compliance with conditions of an order or a breach of their bail conditions.
However the Green Party warns labelling children as serious offenders sets them up to fail.
"Most of them have already had extremely harsh lives where they have never known love or care, all they have known is abuse and punishment," said the Green Party spokesperson for justice, Tamatha Paul.
"Labelling children as young as 14 as serious offenders will only aggravate the vulnerable situations many of our youth find themselves in."
Paul said the Government's announcement ignores the drivers behind youth crime, such as backgrounds of abuse, trauma, mental health problems, learning disabilities and lack of support.
"When we ignore these drivers, we merely feed the cycle of intergenerational trauma that devastates families and communities," she explained.
"Despite the Government's rhetoric about serious offenders, evidence suggests most of the teenagers who will be subject to these orders will have already had a life of difficulty, worlds apart from the privileged and comfortable lives of Government Ministers.
"Throwing these kids into boot camps is inexcusably shallow politics, and if anything it's likely to increase reoffending."
And Labour's children's spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime accused the Government of "rejecting decades of evidence and expert advice", which suggests boot camps may cause further harm.
"Forcing these kinds of children into boot camps is cruel and takes our youth rehabilitative system backwards," she said.
"To spend more than $5 million on a pilot for 10 kids, when we're in dire need of more youth-aid officers and social workers, is simply another example of the Government making the wrong choices yet again."
Prime said while she's glad at the repurposing of Labour's 'wraparound' model of support for youth offenders, slapping boot camps onto it only serves the Government's 'look tough, sound tough' brand.
"We need common-sense, evidence-based wraparound programmes that we know work. I worry the Government is losing sight of who's being put at risk, when it comes to their baseless experiments."
