In our work, we wanted to show not just that fears of youth crime are an unfounded moral panic, but why.

"We started with police crime statistics, showing that there's been very little change in youth offending. We wanted to go deeper, so we looked at some of my co-author Kendra Cox's archival research into what Christian missionaries said about Māori youth during the colonisation of Aotearoa.

"What we see is that these racist, land-grabbing missionaries talk about Māori youth in much the same terms as modern right-wing political and media figures do. The ideology of the Māori youth delinquent is a way for the state and the capitalist class to try to give a veneer of necessity to their self-interest, whether they're stealing Māori land or cutting Pay Equity to fund landlord tax cuts.

"The panic over ram raids had little to do with commerical burglary, and a lot to do with blaming working class Māori and Pacific communities for the social conditions that four decades of neoliberalism has created.