ACT Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour says repeat burglars should face a minimum three-year prison sentence with no parole, arguing the cost of locking them up is nothing compared to the cost of letting them keep offending.

The policy would apply to anyone convicted of burglary more than three times, and Seymour told Chris Lynch News it was a response to victims who felt abandoned by the justice system.

“We’re just hearing from people who feel violated, and they feel that there’s no consequence,” he said.

He pointed to the case of one offender responsible for a staggering number of break ins.

“They see how many burglaries one guy got away with, 200 burglaries. I just think he should have got a tougher sentence after the first three. That might have saved a lot of people. And then if he does another three, put him away again.”

Seymour said the coalition could point to a strong record on crime, with ram raids down 85 percent, youth crime down 25 percent, three strikes reinstated and taxpayer funding of cultural reports scrapped, but gaps remained. ACT has already announced policies on retail crime and on including family pets in domestic violence protections, because abuse of pets often traps victims in violent relationships. Burglary in the home, he said, was the next gap to close.

He reserved some of his sharpest criticism for the judiciary, arguing too many repeat burglars still avoided custodial sentences.

“People in the judiciary tend to live in nice suburbs with big walls and security, and they tend to be very thinking and reasoning people, so they say, oh well, he had a bad childhood so he had to burgle someone. I can understand why lawyers and people that become judges think that way, but for the rest of us, we just don’t want to be burgled.”

Asked about critics who say the policy would require more prisons without addressing the root causes of crime, Seymour was unapologetic.

“Best money that we’ll ever spend. There’s 180,000 odd burglaries a year. We estimate that this policy would increase the prison muster by about 950. That would cost about 200 million a year, basically $1,000 a burglary. If we could get rid of burglaries for $1,000 a burglary, I reckon that’s a good deal.”

“Sure, it may cost money to lock people up, but not as much as it costs to have them going through your drawers and stealing your jewellery.”

Benefit numbers and government doctors

The Deputy Prime Minister also defended ACT’s push for government appointed doctors to assess sickness and disability beneficiaries, as claims driven by mental health continue to rise.

Pressed on what evidence ACT had that GPs were rubber stamping medical certificates, Seymour conceded there was none, because none was possible.

“Nobody could have that evidence, because you’d have to be in the examination room. But here’s what we do know. Economy goes up, more people are on sick leave. Economy goes down, more people are on sick leave.”

He described the pressure facing doctors in busy practices.

“You’ve got somebody who may be a bit abusive, maybe on a bit of meth, comes in and says, sign this so I can stay on the benefit because I’m sick of going along to meetings about getting a job. And you as a GP have a choice at that moment. You can be a warrior for the taxpayer, no matter if it takes more time and puts you at some risk, or you can say, you know what, I’ve got a whole lot of patients that actually need me. Sign this thing, get this guy out of here.”

Seymour acknowledged many beneficiaries had genuine physical and psychological conditions, and said for that group the country probably did not do enough. But he questioned the broader trend.

“It can’t be that people are increasingly mentally unwell in this country, and if it is, I suspect one of the reasons is that more and more people are removed from the social contact, the routine, the regularity and the purpose that you get from actually having a job.”

He argued the numbers made the case for government appointed doctors on their own.

“Let’s say you get 10 people a year who would have stayed on a benefit back into work. That’s 200 grand right there. You could pay a GP salary just like that.”

He also relayed what employers had told him.

“I get employers who say to me, look, I’m going to hire a Filipino. You know why? Because their government doesn’t pay them a thousand bucks a week to stay home, so they want to work.”

School lunches

Seymour dismissed the latest complaints from Haeata Community Campus, where principal Peggy Burrows says daily lunch orders are being cut from 480 meals to 400 because the Ministry of Education found only about 61 percent were being taken up. Burrows says students are not refusing lunch because they do not need it, but because they do not want to eat what is provided.

“Peggy likes to go to the media and bag on about the school lunches,” Seymour said.

“I think people could make up their own minds after the last outing, where their claims were never substantiated, and they said they were going to do their own investigation and that never came back. If they want to come out and play games and run off to the media again, they can, but I’m focused on the programme nationwide.”

He said some schools had been over ordering and then complaining about surpluses, when the system allowed them to order exactly what they needed.

Social media ban a “red line”

On National’s proposed social media ban for under 16s, Seymour confirmed ACT would not support it, and revealed the party’s frustration at reports the Government had been looking at restricting VPNs.

“The party has been very clear that VPNs are a red line for us, and within hours of us saying that, Erica Stanford’s come out and said that it’s not happening, and the Prime Minister said, oh, it never was happening. So who knows. They didn’t consult us on it. We were pretty annoyed to hear about it through the media, but we’ve stopped it.”

He said the VPN saga exposed the fundamental flaw in the whole policy.

“If you want to make it strong enough to stop a motivated teenager, you probably have to make it draconian enough to invade the privacy and freedoms of all internet users. Even Radio New Zealand makes fun of China and Russia and North Korea for their bans on VPNs. We don’t want to be banning those here.”

Seymour said Australia had already shown a ban would fail because children simply found ways around it, and the better answer was education.

“There’s a lot of useful knowledge out there about how social media companies work, how the algorithms work, how they get you, how they amplify a small number of people that are extreme, how they keep feeding you more of what you want to hear. These are the sorts of things that we should be teaching hard, so that people can be resistant and understand the dangers, and I don’t know that we’re doing that at the moment.”

He acknowledged parents needed help, saying it was hard to simply opt children out when all their friends were online and peer pressure kept them there. But the digital world, he said, “ain’t going away,” and the Government’s job was to equip people to navigate it.