The Law Commission has released its final report on hate crime laws in Aotearoa New Zealand, concluding that the current system is not working well enough and should be improved rather than replaced with entirely new offences.

The report, published on 22 July 2026, makes 12 recommendations. It follows a review that began in early 2024, when the coalition government stopped a separate review of hate speech and asked the Commission to focus instead on hate crime. The Commission published its Terms of Reference on 30 September 2024 and a consultation paper on 4 February 2025.

The Commission's central finding is that giving longer sentences for crimes motivated by hate remains the best approach. It decided against recommending new standalone hate crime offences, because it believed offenders would be unlikely to be consistently charged with or convicted of them. RNZ

Hate speech was explicitly excluded from the review. So was making behaviour illegal that is not already an offence. The review was limited to how the criminal justice system handles crimes where hostility or prejudice toward a group is a motivating factor.

What the Commission wants to change

The main legislative change proposed is amending the Sentencing Act and the Criminal Procedure Act so that charging documents — the paperwork that starts a criminal case — state when hostility or prejudice should be treated as an aggravating factor. That means a factor that makes the offence more serious and can lead to a longer sentence.

The law already allows this. Section 9(1)(h) of the Sentencing Act lets judges treat hostility toward a group with a shared characteristic as an aggravating factor at sentencing. The Commission wants that flagged earlier, at the charging stage, so the issue is visible to the court throughout the case rather than only at the end.

The Commission also recommended repealing part of that provision — section 9(1)(h)(ii) — which currently requires the offender to believe the victim had the relevant characteristic. Removing that element would simplify the threshold for the aggravating factor to apply.

Another recommendation is adding "sex" to the list of example characteristics in the legislation, to make clear that targeting someone based on their sex should be treated as a hate crime.

On transparency, the Commission recommended that police publish annual data on hate crimes and that the Ministry of Justice publish annual court data on hate crime cases. It also recommended that judges receive training and guidance on the law changes through the Institute of Judicial Studies.

The Commission recommended that courts be required to state publicly when a crime was motivated by hate toward a group with a specific characteristic. It did not recommend using the terms "hate" or "hate crime" in the legislation itself, preferring the formulation "hostility to groups of people."

The political backdrop

The previous Labour government had planned to introduce hate speech laws in response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terrorist attacks. The coalition government halted that work and instead asked the Law Commission to look at hate crime — the narrower question of how the system treats crimes already on the books when hostility is a factor.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith's response has been sought by RNZ. RNZ

What it means in practice

For practitioners, the most consequential recommendations are operational rather than ideological. Flagging the aggravating factor on the charging document would change how Police and Crown prosecutors frame these cases from the outset. Repealing the section 9(1)(h)(ii) requirement removes a legal element that has been a point of friction in applying the provision. And the data recommendations, if adopted, would give the first systematic picture of how often hate-motivated aggravation is raised and upheld in New Zealand courts.

The Commission's preference for "hostility to groups of people" over "hate crime" in legislation is a deliberate framing choice. It keeps the law anchored to an established sentencing principle rather than importing a label that carries contested meanings in public debate. That may reduce the political temperature around implementation, but it also means the legislation will read differently from how advocates and the media describe these offences in practice.