Comment: The audacity of it, to be poor in a downturn, and worse, to be poor somewhere that the rest of us must see it.
That, in plain terms, is the behaviour our latest law sets out to correct. The Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill, which passed its first reading on May 21, hands police the power to order anyone aged 14 or over out of a public place for up to 24 hours. The triggers include the disorder you’d expect, but also begging, rough sleeping, and “behaviour indicating an attempt to inhabit a public place.” Ignore the order and our most vulnerable people face a fine of up to $2,000, or three months in prison.
We are proposing to fine people who can’t afford a place to sleep, and to jail them when they can’t pay.
A fine for being unhoused
Begging and rough sleeping aren’t crimes of disorder. They’re symptoms of an under-resourced, under-performing security net. The threat of being told to go somewhere else and fining someone who sleeps in a doorway isn’t a deterrent, it’s a burden they will never clear.
If the fine is unpaid, it hardens into a warrant, then a conviction, then one more barrier between that person and the job or tenancy that might have ended their homelessness. We’d be using the courts to manufacture and lock-in the very problem the bill claims to address.
The 2023 Census counted 112,496 people in severe housing deprivation, up from 99,462 five years earlier. The number sleeping rough rose from 132 in 2018 to 450 in 2023. Auckland Council found homelessness climbed 90 percent in a single year.
This isn’t a nuisance to be tidied away, but a growing part of our population. And we know exactly why.
Cutting every exit
The Government has spent two years dismantling the things that get people off the street. It stopped funding new social housing through Kāinga Ora, and the last money for new state houses ran out in June 2025. It closed the emergency motels, and the number of households living in them fell more than 84 percent in 18 months, after its own officials warned, in writing, that doing so risked “increased levels of homelessness, rough sleeping and overcrowding”.
But it didn’t stop there. The Government also ended a raft of public transport subsidies, the cheapest way to help someone with little money keep a job, and redirected nearly $10 million from frontline mental health, a system already short some 650 staff, into a new fund.
Then on May 19, two days before this bill passed its first reading, Nicola Willis, the Minister of Finance, Economic Growth and Social Investment announced the Government would cut around 8,700 public servants, with artificial intelligence pencilled in to replace them. Some of those roles sit in the very agencies that house people, treat them, and keep them out of a jail cell.
‘One of the most generous in the world’
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says we needn’t worry, because New Zealanders have “access to one of the most generous welfare systems in the world.” The line sounds nearly as comforting as it is untrue.
By the OECD’s own accounting we spend about 19.4 percent of GDP on social support, below the OECD average of around 21 percent. On the issue of how much of a lost wage the benefit actually replaces, Treasury’s own analysis puts us second or third from the bottom of the entire OECD.
Jobseeker Support for a single adult is $412.51 a week before tax, and the Government’s own 2019 review called our benefits “seriously inadequate,” before they were squeezed further and sanctions doubled.
A truly generous system wouldn’t be producing a record number of rough sleepers. Ours is, because it’s better than nothing, but worse than adequate.
The Government already knew
None of this took the Government by surprise. Police told ministers law enforcement “was not an effective way to deal with homelessness or poverty”. Justice officials warned of a “lack of empirical evidence” the orders would cut crime, and that they were “highly likely” to simply shift rough sleeping elsewhere.
The Attorney-General’s Bill of Rights Act review found the begging and rough-sleeping grounds unjustifiably limit the freedoms of expression and movement, citing a person moved on from the only shop in a small town and locked out for 24 hours from food, a prescription, or a doctor.
The Government was told, by its own people, that this wouldn’t work and might be unlawful. It proceeded anyway.
The most expensive way to look away
Every move-on order is police time, every breach a court file, and every breach can end in a jail cell. Three months inside a jail costs the public far more than three months in the $273-a-night emergency motels this Government has closed, and a fortune compared with the price of simply giving someone a home. We are choosing the most expensive and inhumane response to homelessness on the menu, and the only one that makes the issue worse.
We would also be importing this idea just as others throw it out. Britain is repealing its 1824 Vagrancy Act, a law that made sleeping rough a crime, after what its own ministers called “nearly two centuries of injustice.”
Finland went the other way: its Housing First approach cut long-term homelessness by 68 per cent and saved the state between €15,000 and €52,000 for every person it housed. Housing people, it turns out, is cheaper than policing them.
We, on the other hand, are tearing out housing, defunding health services, nixing transport subsidies and the public-sector capacity that can lift people off the street, while criminalising the people left behind. Police will have the power to tell our vulnerable people to move on, but we’ll offer them nothing they can move on to.
