Shield or weapon? Why the new stalking law arrived already broken
- Grant McLachlan
- 11 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Today, 26 May 2026, a new stalking offence comes into force. The bar has been lowered, the police given new powers to dispose of complaints without a court, and the records kept selectively. What could possibly go wrong?
At 10pm on 21 February 2022, a local police sergeant emailed me. He said he had been informed I had made public comments about an illegally parked car somewhere near where he lived.
The post didn’t name him.
It didn’t name his street.
It didn’t name his suburb.
He learned of it because his neighbour — the same woman who would later sit at a picnic table filming me, who rode an e-bike past me six times in half an hour, and who told mutual acquaintances I was “violent and brain-damaged” — relayed it within minutes.
The email is reproduced in Appendix F to my March 2022 police complaint, and the surveillance pattern is documented in Chapter 28, titled "The Crazy Sewing Lady", of Unleashed.
I should be clear about my role in this. I am an investigative writer. I keep notes. I record incidents involving public officials, public bodies, and conduct of public concern. That is what investigative writers do, and it is not stalking under the 1997 Act, the 2025 Act, or any reasonable reading of either.
The sequence in my case is documented in Unleashed: I published research exposing dubious behaviour by named local figures and elected officials. The response was not litigation, rebuttal, or correction. The response was surveillance of me, coordinated false complaints to police, and a sustained campaign to have me criminally charged on fabricated evidence.
The conduct that the new Act calls stalking — watching, following, damaging reputation and relationships, interfering with third parties — was directed at me, not by me. And the police response, far from de-escalating the criminal conduct of the people doing it, materially escalated it. Every dismissed complaint, every off-the-record warning to me to stop making waves, and every refusal to record what was being done signalled to the network that they could continue without consequence.
I mention all of this because, as of today, the Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Act 2025 is in force. It creates a new offence of stalking and harassment in the Crimes Act 1961, with a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.
The Justice Minister called it “a victory for a wide range of New Zealanders.”
Survivor advocates fought for it for years.
None of that is in dispute. What is missing from the public conversation is the second question: In whose hands will it be a shield, and in whose hands will it be a weapon?
The bar has been lowered
Under the Harassment Act 1997, a civil restraining order required two specified acts within twelve months. The criminal offence under section 8 was a substantially higher bar: the offender had to intend to cause the victim to reasonably fear for their safety, or know the conduct was likely to cause that fear. Maximum penalty: two years.
Fear for safety was the gateway. Bad behaviour, social distress, public embarrassment, reputational damage — none of those, on their own, met the criminal threshold.
The 2025 Act sweeps that distinction away.
The new offence at section 216Q requires only a pattern of behaviour — any specified act on at least two occasions within two years — that the offender knows is likely to cause fear or distress.
The word safety is gone.
Distress is the substitute, and it sits in the statute as an undefined ordinary-language word, calibrated entirely to the complainant’s claimed reaction.
The maximum penalty more than doubles to five years. The civil restraining order’s two-acts-in-two-years pattern threshold is imported into the criminal offence.
The two tracks of the 1997 regime have been merged at the lower of the two bars.
The old bar was not enforced either
That would matter less if the higher 1997 bar had been rigorously applied.
In my case, it wasn’t. On 13 March 2021 and 26 June 2021, Beth Houlbrooke and Aaron Stephenson provoked physical confrontations with me at a Warkworth bar. The bar manager intervened on both occasions. After the second, Houlbrooke shouted “the police will believe me — I’m Beth Houlbrooke!”
I filed an application for a civil restraining order on 2 July 2021. Houlbrooke and her co-respondents lodged no defence and did not appear at the call-over hearing on 17 August 2021. Instead, she sent a letter to the police (which the police won't disclose), and the harassment was escalated by her colleagues involved with Neighbourhood Support.
The network openly discussed on social media forums ways to twist their conduct into criminal complaints against those they stalked:
I withdrew the application in March 2022 to pursue a criminal complaint — which I filed on 25 March 2022 against seven named individuals, with documented modus operandi, witness affidavits, and an explicit pleading of section 115 of the Crimes Act 1961.
Houlbrooke continued in her role as Deputy Chair of the Rodney Local Board. Months later, at an event held in honour of local police, she filled the officers’ glasses.
The day before that event, my complaint of criminal harassment against her was, in her phrase, fobbed off.
The 1997 Act’s higher bar — fear for safety, two years’ maximum — was on the books. What it did not survive was a complainant whose social capital with the receiving station was greater than the respondent’s.
The intake problem
Every operational feature of the new Act is calibrated for a frightened victim reporting a persistent stalker to a neutral constabulary. None of those features is calibrated for the inverse case, where the complainant is the harasser and the receiving station is captured.
The new section 216Q warning power makes that calibration worse, not better.
A constable who believes on reasonable grounds that specified acts have occurred and are likely to cause fear or distress may notify the alleged offender in writing.
The warning is not a charge.
It does not require evidence to a criminal standard.
It is unlikely to be appealable in any meaningful sense. And critically — this is the feature being undersold in every press release — it lets police dispose of the matter entirely without it ever reaching a court.
That is the second lowering.
The first was substantive: distress, not safety.
The second is procedural: a constable, not a judge.
Together they give the same constabulary that has demonstrated capture a discretionary power to make a binding finding-shaped record against a named individual on the basis of one officer’s belief on reasonable grounds, with none of the safeguards that attend a District Court restraining order or a criminal prosecution.
From my experience, the Police at every level can act unreasonably.
Records kept selectively
The National Intelligence Application — NIA — is the database police consult before acting. It holds, in police’s own words, records about offences and incidents reported to Police as well as intelligence notings.
The threshold for inclusion is “cause to create a record” — far below proven offending.
Nearly two million New Zealanders have an alert against their name, generally flagged without their knowledge. The training documentation, obtained under the Official Information Act, confirms that complainant framing flows into free-text narrative attached to the named person.
Misuse is endemic: one Counties Manukau officer conducted 83 unauthorised searches on neighbours and an ex-partner; another did 889 checks off-duty, treating it as social media.
But the more revealing point is what the system does not record.
Of the multiple complaints I have lodged against the network of complainants documented in Unleashed — including the 25 March 2022 complaint with its 22 pages of evidence, named individuals, and explicit section 115 framing — there is no record in the system at all.
The database is not merely over-inclusive in the direction of the alleged offender. It is selectively under-inclusive in the direction of the complainant whose complaints the station chooses not to action.
The new offence creates fresh categories of NIA-fileable report — “he watched me”, “she followed me”, “he damaged my reputation” — that are easy to make, hard to disprove, and entirely dependent on the complainant’s framing. The mirror-image complaint, filed by the person on the receiving end of the harassment, may not be recorded at all.
The law the Police won’t use
Map the new offence’s specified acts onto the natural activities of a captured station — the Mahurangi Police Station at Snells Beach was, as I have documented at length, operated by unvetted Neighbourhood Support volunteers who were neighbours and friends of the same group that orchestrated the false complaints against me — and the asymmetry comes into focus.
Watching.
Following.
Recording observations about a named person.
Sharing those observations on closed channels.
Damaging reputation through coordinated commentary.
Under the 2025 Act, those are the conduct elements of the offence. But the same people who would meet that definition are also the source of complaints under it. They file. They are not filed against.
There is already a law for what coordinated false complainants do. Section 115 of the Crimes Act 1961 — “Conspiring to bring false accusation” — carries a maximum of fourteen years’ imprisonment. The fourteen-year figure is not anachronism. It reflects a principle the common law has recognised since 1304: that orchestrated false complaints strike at the foundation of criminal justice.
I have written about why Police won’t prosecute it.
So today, on the day the new Act takes effect, the asymmetry is this:
A five-year offence with a lowered bar,
A pre-court police warning power,
An automatic ten-year firearms-licence disqualification on conviction, and
A richer set of fileable allegations is handed to constables — including those operating in stations that, in documented cases, are captured by the very people whose conduct meets the new offence’s definition.
A fourteen-year offence aimed precisely at those people sits unused. One is being wielded. The other is being ignored.
What actually works
If the formal mechanisms cannot be trusted to operate evenhandedly — and the record in my case is that they cannot — then the only remaining instrument against organised stalkers and the officials who condone them is exposure.
Not a complaint.
Not a court application.
Not an internal review.
Public, named, evidenced disclosure of who is doing what to whom, and which institutions are looking the other way.
The evidence for that proposition is empirical. Years of formal complaints about the Mahurangi Police Station volunteer arrangement produced nothing. The Commissioner’s response, as he himself confirmed, was to investigate me rather than the conduct I was reporting.
Then on 20 September 2024, 1News published “Police ‘aghast’ unsupervised volunteers opened community station to public”, based on Official Information Act emails showing senior officers — Senior Sergeant Roger Small and Sergeant Dan McDermott, relieving the regulars — discovering what had been happening and shutting it down.
The station was closed effective 22 February 2024. The Police Minister (who was the local MP and the volunteers were his supporters) claimed that he learned of the situation when 1News asked him for comment.
The morning after the story ran, the station was emptied.
The principal stalker — the self-described "Crazy Sewing Lady" who was the Neighbourhood Support local coordinator who boasted about being the neighbour of the local police sergeant — changed her behaviour and her appearance within days.
Years of due process: nothing.
One news story: behavioural change overnight, an emptied station, and a Minister briefed by a journalist rather than by his own commissioner.
That is the only mechanism that has worked.
The Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Act adds a five-year offence, a warning power, and a fileable-allegations regime, but it does not add what was actually missing — accountability for the gatekeepers.
While that gap remains, the practical defence against organised harassment is the one the formal regime cannot provide: name them, evidence them, publish, and let the embarrassment do the work the warrants did not.
The Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Act has been described in every press release as a shield. For many victims, in many communities, it will be exactly that. But where the receiving station is captured, the only shield available to the target is the one Parliament did not legislate and the Commissioner cannot suppress — the published record.
The press release version of the new Act assumes the gatekeepers are neutral. The empirical record says they are not. Until the gatekeepers themselves face the same scrutiny they apply to the people they file against, exposure is not an alternative to justice. It is the closest thing to justice the system still permits.
Years of formal complaints achieved nothing. One news story emptied the station and changed the stalker’s behaviour overnight. That is the only mechanism that has worked, and until the gatekeepers themselves face the same scrutiny they apply to the people they file against, it is the only one that will.
