Thanks for this. I know nothing about NZ but you could replace just a few nouns to translate this to many other countries, sadly. Not to pick on you, but I'd l

Thanks for this. I know nothing about NZ but you could replace just a few nouns to translate this to many other countries, sadly. Not to pick on you, but I'd like to add that I think it's helpful to disentangle three things which often get rolled up together: 1. "commit over 50% of the nation's violent crimes" is a fact, today. The criminal justice system has to respond to each individual crime, for the usual mix of retribution / discouragement / removal. Every one of these violent crimes has a victim, on whose behalf we act. And very often the victims are similarly skewed towards some group -- such victims are no less deserving of our protection. 2. "is occurring because of" is a theory about past causes, which historians can argue about. There are many theories. But we don't need to wait for them to reach a consensus. It makes no difference to an individual's guilt or innocence of some crime. 3. "be addressed ... Starting with improved early childhood ..." is a theory about the future effects of policies we might adopt. This is also independent of the other things: a policy that improves outcomes for children of a crime-prone demographic isn't going to depend on whether #2 decides the group is of the oppressed-by-colonisers variety or the unassimilated-post-asylum variety. But whether it works or not is an empirical question, not a moral one.