ACT has announced a Three Strikes regime specifically targeting burglary, under which a third burglary conviction would carry a mandatory minimum sentence of three years' imprisonment with no parole. Deputy leader Nicole McKee unveiled the policy RNZ.

McKee said 184,000 New Zealanders were victims of burglary in 2025, and that around one in four burglary victims had been burgled before RNZ. She said the majority of people released from prison after a burglary sentence are back inside within two years, and that nearly three-quarters of burglary offenders are resentenced.

Framing the policy, McKee said it was not primarily about deterrence. "This is about prevention," she said, arguing that removing repeat burglars from the community through incarceration, rather than relying on the threat of punishment to change behaviour, was the point of the mandatory third-strike sentence RNZ.

The burglary-specific proposal sits alongside the broader Three Strikes sentencing regime, which the current government reinstated in late 2024 after the previous Labour government repealed it in 2022 RNZ. The vehicle for that reinstatement was the Sentencing (Reinstating Three Strikes) Amendment Act, which received Royal assent on 17 December 2024 Ministry of Justice.

Under the original Three Strikes framework as reinstated, qualifying violent and sexual offences trigger escalating consequences: a warning on the first strike, a further warning and restrictions on parole eligibility on the second, and, on the third strike, the maximum sentence for the offence served without parole unless a court finds that outcome manifestly unjust. ACT's burglary announcement extends that strike logic to a property offence rather than a violent or sexual one, and sets the mandatory minimum for a third strike at three years rather than the offence's statutory maximum.

That distinction matters for how the policy will be assessed by officials and by other parties in government. Burglary is typically treated as a lower-tier property offence for sentencing purposes, with the current maximum term of ten years' imprisonment rarely approached in practice; most sentences run well below that ceiling. A mandatory three-year floor on a third conviction, applied without judicial discretion to depart from it, would represent a considerable jump for many offenders whose starting points would otherwise sit in the range of home detention or short custodial terms.

McKee's recidivism figures go to the core of ACT's justification: if close to three-quarters of burglary offenders reoffend and are resentenced, and most released prisoners are back in custody within two years, the party's argument is that the existing sentencing and parole settings are not incapacitating a cohort responsible for disproportionate harm. Where the policy will face scrutiny is on the proportion of burglary convictions that would actually reach a third strike under current charging and sentencing patterns, and on how "conviction" for strike-counting purposes would be defined across historical and future offending.

The 184,000 victim figure McKee cited for 2025 is a large jump from the picture ACT itself painted when the original burglary-specific Three Strikes push was floated in 2022, when the party's polling claimed 75 per cent public support for Three Strikes generally ACT. That earlier support figure predates the 2022 repeal and the 2024 reinstatement, so it should be read as background rather than a current read on public opinion for this specific burglary extension.

Any change to burglary sentencing would need to go through Cabinet and then Parliament, most likely via an amendment to the Sentencing Act 2002 rather than as a standalone bill, given the reinstated Three Strikes framework already sits within that Act. As a coalition partner rather than the lead minister on justice policy, McKee's announcement functions as a policy position ACT wants adopted rather than a government commitment; whether National and New Zealand First back a mandatory minimum for a property offence, as opposed to the violent and sexual offending the current regime targets, will determine whether this becomes law or remains a coalition negotiating position ahead of any refresh of the government's justice work programme.