Move-on orders are being pitched as a way to “reclaim” town and city centres.
The Government is proposing a law which would allow police to order someone rough sleeping or begging to leave a public space for up to 24 hours.
If they don’t, they could be fined up to $2000 or face three months in jail.
Critics say that does nothing to create homes, risks criminalising poverty and simply shifts people – and the problem – from one street or suburb to another.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has defended the policy, pointing to the “bigger issue” of “Chuck and Mary coming in for their once-in-a-lifetime trip to New Zealand on a cruise ship walking around downtown and getting intimidated because someone’s sitting on the doorstop of a shop they’re trying to get into, threatening, shouting at them, abusing them”.
The law change comes despite police data showing public disorder offences are at a 10-year low, including in Auckland, although the data is not broken down at the central-city level.
Community Housing Aotearoa chief executive Paul Gilberd told The Front Page that these kinds of orders only displace people and their unmet needs.
“Legislation and enforcement-led approaches don’t work. They haven’t anywhere in the world.
“Take a look at the USA right now, where they have mass encampments of people outside of town centres who’ve been dumped in a field somewhere.
“We have the beginnings of one of those in the Red Zone in Christchurch now, where a lot of streeties and homeless people are beginning to build an encampment.
“Is that the sort of society we want to be and want to live in? I think it’s important for all New Zealanders to understand that homelessness is a political choice.
“We made a bunch of choices over the last 35 years in terms of our policies and funding settings, and this is the fruit of those choices that we’ve made.”
Gilberd said there’s no better example of a programme that works than Housing First.
“It’s a philosophy which says that if you’ve got people who are in need, you put them in an adequate, warm, dry home first and then you have a stable platform upon which to deliver other services that may or may not be needed.
“Housing First started in North America many years ago. We, Community Housing Aotearoa, and other providers were involved in bringing those who set it up in Canada and the US to New Zealand.
“It’s been operating here very successfully for a number of years as a programme.
“In fact, this Government has acknowledged it’s working because they’ve just invested more in it quite recently. That money’s now been deployed, admittedly only across Christchurch, Hamilton, Wellington and Auckland. But it’s been delivering really great outcomes.
“Another example is in Wales. It started with the Housing Wales Act 2014, so they’ve got years of solid data now to show the permanent reduction and sustained reduction that really puts the onus on agencies of the state not to discharge or release people into homelessness.
“It’s called ‘duty of care’ and a ‘duty to assist’ ... If you’ve got someone in hospital, prison or in a residential psychiatric healthcare, for example, don’t discharge them into homelessness.
“At the moment, what’s happening in New Zealand is the paddy wagon turns up and releases prisoners with a few hundred bucks in their pocket and no accommodation, nowhere to live. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise what’s gonna happen in that situation.
“The Welsh have built a really robust system that has proven to work now over a period of more than 10 years of getting a housing plan in places if they’re gonna discharge people from hospital who are really sick, otherwise we’re just gonna have to treat them again.”
Gilberd said those people will turn up back in A&E “or they’ll turn up in Corrections, and that’s between $500 to $1000 a night”.
“Why wouldn’t we do the sensible economic thing, and the ethically correct thing, and get a housing plan in place, which is a much lower cost – and it’s also the right thing to do.”
It’s estimated that about 43,500 people – about 0.9% of the population – were homeless or experiencing “severe housing deprivation” at the last Census in March 2023.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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