City Mission challenges plan to “move on” rough sleepers

Report from RNZ
The Wellington City Mission is again questioning the scale of proposed legislation to move on rough sleepers: the Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill, which had its first reading in Parliament today.

It will give police the power to issue move-on orders to people who are displaying disorderly, disruptive, threatening, or intimidating behaviour. It will also apply to people who are obstructing or impeding someone entering a business, breaching the peace, begging, rough sleeping, or displaying behaviour indicating an attempt to inhabit a public place. After being issued with such an order, the person has to leave a specified order for up to 24 hours, and what the officer deems to be a “reasonable distance” away.

Murray Edridge told Morning Report he could understand the need to keep people safe from threatening behaviour but he is raising questions about the scope of who is targeted.

“The legislation deals with behaviour that responds to disorder, you know intimidation, threats, disruptive behaviour, impacting on people’s businesses and that’s fair enough.

“What I don’t understand is why the government chose to go further and said actually people who are just getting on with their lives but struggling represent such a hideous or embarrassing thing to us as a community that they have to be captured by this legislation as well.”

He said no one chose to sleep rough.

“They’re choosing to sleep between the unpalatable or the unsafe options that are available to them and if sleeping on the streets in our city centre is as good as it gets for them in that moment in time then so be it.

“But why would we as a society say ‘that’s not okay’ unless we’re embarrassed to see them there.”

Everyone should be embarrassed to see people sleeping on the street because it meant that “we as a community had failed them”, he said.

As well as struggling with economic challenges, people are also struggling with complexity in their lives such as addiction, mental health challenges, family breakdowns and violence, he said. The fact that there are people with nowhere appropriate to sleep was a symptom of a system that was not doing well enough, he said.

The Attorney-General has found that removing rough sleepers and beggars did not appear to be justified, while opposition parties have slammed the proposed legislation.

Edridge said people are just trying to survive.

“Since when did we want to say to people ‘go away cause we don’t want to see you’ when actually they’re not people who are breaking the law or creating disorder they’re just trying to do the best they can.”

Edridge said he was not an apologist for bad behaviour and if people were behaving in a disorderly or threatening way it needed to be dealt with.

The government should modify the legislation to remove one section at the end of it “which applies the law too far and then takes it to people who are just demonstrating what government agencies describe as survival behaviours”, he said.

People are just sleeping or begging are not being disruptive or disorderly but just trying to get on with their lives, he said.

“So my advice to the government is, and I hope that this happens in the select committee process, take that piece out of the legislation. Yes get tough on bad behaviour – do not penalise people who are just trying to do the best they can in the circumstances they find themselves in.”

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said it was not a criminal offence to be homeless but it was a criminal offence to refuse a move on order.

“What we’re doing here is giving the police an extra tool to deal with what I don’t think anybody denies is a serious problem.”

Town centres should be places where people wanted to visit and felt safe doing so, he said.

Asked why the proposed law should make people who might be asleep or begging a criminal nuisance, Goldsmith said they wanted to give the police an extra tool to deal with “what creates an atmosphere over time in our town squares”.

“We’ve got to a situation where people don’t want to go to those places because they don’t feel like it’s an environment that’s safe and where there is a sense of law and order.”

There were services available to help homeless people, he said. “But we don’t have sufficient tools to deal with a small group of people who don’t want to take that and think it’s their right to occupy the streets of our town squares.”