Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill

In my electorate of Rongotai, we have a vibrant and diverse area. It’s not a city centre, but it’s a suburb that has a very vibrant heart. It’s called Newtown. I invite all members of this Parliament to go visit Newtown, where you can get some of the best kai in the city. You can see people from all walks of life coexisting with a whole lot of compassion for each other. When this bill that we’re debating right now was first indicated by the Government, there was a huge outcry from my constituents, people across Wellington, lots of people involved in front-line services, and lots of people involved in churches. In fact, I went to a kind of sleep-in protest—a sit-in—that was held at the cathedral just across the way here from Parliament, where people from all different denominations of Christian faiths and probably others were getting together to protest this proposed legislation, because it is not the solution we need. I think this legislation tells us everything New Zealanders need to know about the values of this coalition Government. They are totally lacking in compassion and understanding of the complex issues that lead to the disturbances we see in places like Newtown.

As the local MP, I have brought together a group of stakeholders right across Newtown who are dealing with the fact there is increased homelessness and antisocial behaviour on the streets of Newtown. I have spoken to constituents who say their children, who are in primary school, used to be able to walk on their own to the library in Newtown and no longer feel safe to do so. The answer to this is not police coming and moving people on to a different part of the city. In fact, more likely than not, it will be police moving on people begging or needing help here in Wellington City, and they’ll end up in Newtown, where we’re already seeing the consequences of this coalition Government’s—Luxon’s Government’s—decision to cancel State house builds. There were hundreds of State houses that should have been delivered by now here in Wellington, that were cancelled by this Government, in my electorate. I work all the time with people coming into my shared office with my colleague Tamatha Paul, where we have constituents needing housing, and they’re unable to get it.

At the stakeholder meeting that we pulled together to deal with the increased issues affecting our community in Newtown, someone who works for the City Mission suggested that there had been a solution brought forward in Auckland last year, called immediate-access transitional housing, and that enables the providers, like the City Mission or the Salvation Army, to do the assessment and provide people with immediate-access transitional housing. That could be a solution. Everybody at the meeting was in agreement. At this meeting, we had three city councillors, we had the Salvation Army, the City Mission, the Downtown Community Ministry—right across the board. There were all kinds of big leaders and players and people who are trying to solve real problems in our community, and the local supermarket, who has been probably the most affected, besides the residents of Newtown, by this increase in homelessness, which is a direct result of Luxon Government policies.

Also, since the Minister for Mental Health is in the Chamber, I should say there is insufficient support out there for people struggling with serious mental health difficulties, and this is getting raised by everyone out there, including the police and including people in the health sector. We need public investment in mental health support, addiction support, and housing. That is what we need, not Paul Goldsmith’s lifelong dream of using the police to bully poor people or people who are suffering from the failures of his Government, which clearly he has had on his agenda since he was a city councillor in Auckland City.

We wrote to the Ministers. They wrote back and said, “Oh, we’ve already done some stuff with the City Mission, and we’re not going to give you the immediate-access transitional housing.” So here we are, with this cruel Government creating problem after problem for the most vulnerable people in our society and then saying they’re going to punish them with fines and prison and threaten them with police. It tells New Zealanders everything we need to know about this elitist Government of the wealthy and sorted who want to punch down on the poor.

I’m really proud of the work we as a collective Justice Committee did, and I thank Camilla Belich for her earlier remarks, and all members of the committee. There were over 7,000 submitters on the bill. We spent over four days of full oral hearings, hearing from people up and down the country on this piece of legislation. We, as a select committee, engaged and listened to it, and I think we actually made really pragmatic changes to the legislation, which we agreed. I’m really proud of the work we did collaboratively and cohesively as a team working across Parliament. I think that’s the part that most people in the general public may not get the opportunity to see—that we, as members of this Justice Committee, did a fantastic job. I commend the bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Well, it is a sad, sad day in Parliament today under urgency as the Government pushes through another terrible piece of legislation that does not support vulnerable people in Aotearoa New Zealand. I’ve just heard the Government speaking to bills that will create and extend boot camps for young people. After this bill, we’re going to be talking about how the Government is removing references to Te Tiriti o Waitangi out of 18 pieces of legislation. Again and again, pushed through urgency, this Government is making decisions that punch down on our most marginalised communities. This bill today, as many times as the Government would like to say that it doesn’t target homelessness, targets rough sleeping and begging, and the majority of our people who are rough sleeping or begging, believe it or not, are homeless.

There are already offences—legislation that creates law against disorderly behaviour, obstruction, and intimidation. Those offences are already illegal in our towns and cities, which leads me to believe that the only change this bill is making is to allow to discriminate and legislate against people who are begging and rough sleeping—aka our very vulnerable homeless people.

I want to make mention of all of the thousands of submissions that were received and processed by the select committee: 98 percent of New Zealanders opposed this bill, yet the bill continues to be rushed through Parliament under urgency—a mihi to those in the House who work in our communities every single day supporting our homeless people and those in need for being in the gallery to hear this bill today.

I want to make a note of the changes that were made in select committee, especially the parts around begging. The law will now refer to begging that unreasonably interferes with the use of enjoyment of a public place. This does not change who ends up being moved on; it is still at the discretion of the police to move people on if they think that the person unreasonably interferes with the use or enjoyment of a public place, which could be rough sleeping in a doorway or begging that might be slightly louder than a police officer would like.

One of the major issues of this bill is that there is nowhere to move to. We have very limited transitional housing beds nationwide in this country, thanks to the Government reducing the number of transitional homes that we can offer people. The key also is that that immediate transitional housing is housing and beds that are available for homeless people when they need it, if you need a night to stay—a place for you to go. The problem is that there are only 65 beds available for this immediate access, but under the Government, where homelessness continues to grow, that is not enough.

Those 65 immediate beds are all based in Auckland. I’m from Hamilton—Kirikiriroa. There are no immediate transitional housing beds there to take in our homeless if they need somewhere to stay. The conversations, the kōrero, and the listening that I’ve been doing in Hamilton over the last three years has spoken to one thing, and that is that homelessness is growing in our cities. There are more and more people needing places to go who do not have a home to live in.

I wanted to talk about particularly the women that are facing homelessness on our streets. There are a very small number of beds in Hamilton, particularly a women’s shelter. So they are not readily available for any woman who may need a place. Being a woman living on the streets brings significant safety risks, and they don’t have anywhere to go, they’re going to choose a place which seems like the most safe for them, and that would most likely be a town centre, a city centre, where there are more people around and where there are lights. Under the move-on orders, a vulnerable woman living on our streets could be pushed into an area that is not well lit, that does not have people around, which puts her at significant danger. Until we have the spaces for these women to go where they are protected, this is just not good enough, and it’s putting their safety at risk.

No one disputes that we want our city centres to be safe. Every single New Zealander wants enjoyment of public places. There’s nothing to dispute there. But the answer is not legislating against homeless people. The use of our public space is important. It’s incredibly important that our businesses and our workers feel safe, but when you move someone on, where are they going? Well, where they could be going is into the suburbs to sit outside private residences and make residents feel unsafe—or they could be going into the suburbs to sit outside another business, a corner dairy. Is that corner dairy less important than the city centre business? I don’t think it is.

What this Government fails to understand is that the root cause of the problem isn’t the fact that these people need to be moved on; the root cause of the issue is that the cost of living in New Zealand continues to grow under Christopher Luxon. The number of people living on our street continues to grow, and they have done nothing—this Government has done nothing—to address the cost of living; it is putting real pressure on our people. When rents, food, and the basics keep going up, more people can end up without a safe place to call home. And this Government’s answer is to give power to police to just move them on to the next space.

What I find really interesting about this legislation is nothing in it requires the police to provide any support for the people they are moving on. There is no requirement for them to have social support or housing support; it is just the goodwill of the police officer doing the work.

What we need in this country is access to safe State housing. This Government has invested nothing in increasing the number of State houses we have. They have taken a lot of credit for the houses the previous Labour Government built, but they have done absolutely nothing to continue to create homes for those in need. They’ve reduced transitional housing and now more people are on our streets. We need access to affordable food so people can actually put food on the table, and we need access to affordable healthcare.

The homeless people in our communities are often struggling with mental health and addiction issues; that’s the state of affairs. There is no requirement for police to ensure these people get the help that they need. In fact, the number of addiction and mental health community services that this country offers continues to decrease.

Advice against this bill has been substantial. The Ministry of Justice said that there was no evidence that this would actually reduce crime. The Police opposed criminalising rough sleeping and non-aggressive begging. Treasury costs would outweigh the benefits of this cruel law. The Government’s own Attorney-General said that this bill was inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in terms of freedom of expression and freedom of movement.

In my conversations with those in Hamilton, more and more help is desperately required for our people, and this bill goes in the wrong direction to address that. We need access to good housing and good community services for all the people living in New Zealand, and this bill does not do this. This bill is not who we are as a country. We are not a country that sees someone in need and tells them to move on. But that’s what this Government is prioritising—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The member’s time has expired.

For all the so-called care the Opposition has for our migrant communities, I wonder if any of them went to our migrant shop owners and managers in South Auckland, like I did, and asked them what they thought about this bill. But, no, they just pontificate all the time. But like Retail NZ as well, they spoke about the retailers that are against this but didn’t speak to one retailer in South Auckland. Our communities in South Auckland, along with me, commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): This is a split call. I call Dan Rosewarne.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s no surprise that Labour will be opposing this bill. Like most New Zealanders, I want our public spaces to be safe, I want our people to be comfortable walking through our town centres and taking the kids to the park and going shopping and going to work and things like that. But after listening to the evidence, I’m simply not convinced that this bill will achieve what the Government says it will.

Over the course of the select committee process, we heard from thousands of New Zealanders: we heard from lawyers, churches, charities, and homelessness advocates, and also homeless people themselves. A couple of members of the homeless community took the time out to discuss the daily challenges that they face, and that was particularly valuable for our select committee to hear those voices firsthand.

While the submitters came from different backgrounds, there was a common theme running through the evidence, and that was that this bill doesn’t solve homelessness; it actually moves homelessness somewhere else. One of the most powerful submissions, which has already been discussed in the debate today, came from Wendy Proffitt, who shared the story of her daughter Caitlin, and it was a reminder that homelessness is about real people, real families, and real hardship. Her message was simple: before we decide to move people on, we should understand how they got there in the first place.

A number of submitters pointed us to overseas experience. We heard evidence from Denver, where similar laws were introduced. And what happened? People weren’t housed. They weren’t helped. They were simply pushed into less visible locations. And as Madison Kilworth pointed out, many ended up sleeping in places where they were more isolated and less safe. The homelessness challenge didn’t disappear; it just became harder to see.

That concern came up again and again throughout the submissions. If someone is sleeping rough in a place where support workers know where to find them and where community groups can regularly check on them, that allows them to feel safe in those well-lit areas of the town. The evidence that we heard was that they often become harder for support services to locate when they’re pushed to the outer edges and less well-lit areas of our townships, and then it’s a lot harder to connect people with housing and healthcare services. And it is not a step forward in many cases, particularly in a lot of our rural communities; it is a step backwards.

One question kept coming back to me throughout the hearings—where are these people meant to go? If Parliament is going to give the police the power to tell someone to leave, surely Parliament should have an answer to that question. If someone has no home, no available emergency accommodation, no place to stay with friends or family, and nowhere else to go, what does that move-on order actually achieve? It doesn’t create a house or a safe haven for that vulnerable person. It doesn’t create a bed or a pathway out of homelessness. It simply tells someone to sleep somewhere else tonight and that problem just remains.

A number of submitters spoke about the complex issues that often sit behind homelessness—poverty, mental health issues, addiction, family violence, and trauma throughout their life—and we heard about people facing all those challenges at once. The evidence was overwhelming that fines and enforcement measures don’t address those underlying problems. The reoccurring theme throughout all these submissions is that housing actually addresses homelessness, mental health services address those mental health challenges, and addiction treatment at the forefront is very important.

One of the submissions that also stood out for me personally was when we were told that most of us can survive one setback, maybe two, maybe three, but when they pile up on top of each other, any one of us can end up homeless relatively quickly, and that’s something we need to remember when people find themselves in this situation. There are a lot of unaddressed challenges, so I don’t commend the bill to the House.

I rise in support of the Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill. The Government is providing police with the power to issue move-on orders as a tool to deal with disorderly behaviour in public places. It does not make homelessness illegal, as people have been alleging. Police have expertise in assessing whether support is required or not. They do this every day. Therefore I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s quite a sad day today, as this Government once again is making life harder for those whose lives are hard already. We’ve heard the story of Caitlin mentioned a number of times, and we sat through many, many submissions, but it’s fair to say that that one was one of the most touching and troubling submissions.

When Caitlin’s mum, Wendy Proffitt, finished her submission, I went outside and spoke to her. She gave me this, and she asked me to show it here today. This is a photograph of Caitlin in happier days. Caitlin suffered from some health issues. She was actually a recipient of a kidney transplant, and the prognosis was very good. The prognosis was that she would live a pretty long and healthy life if she was well looked after. But her health and immune challenges weren’t the only challenges she had; she did have mental health challenges, and her mum was upfront about that. But Caitlin, as we now know, died in Christchurch on a cold night, homeless and alone. She, essentially, chronicled her own journey to the bottom, really, and put it on YouTube, and you can see that. You can see that she was troubled. You can see that she needed help and assistance. It’s fascinating—not fascinating, but it’s more to the point and it’s something we need to know: her mum, Wendy Proffitt, didn’t come from some troubled background. The line between a flourishing life and ending up as Caitlin did is a narrow one indeed, and it was interesting to hear that Caitlin’s mum, Wendy Proffitt, was in fact a clerk of the Justice Committee many years ago. She is an educated woman who knew what was going on. But we can’t always protect our children from everything, and she couldn’t protect Caitlin from that.

New Zealand has failed Caitlin and those other people—who have died on our streets. They have died on our streets—died of cold, of hunger, and of illness—because we haven’t helped. And what is the solution we hear? What is the solution that this Government has come up with? The solution is to just move the problem on—move it to where they can’t see it; move it out of sight and out of mind.

Caitlin’s mum asked me to bring this photograph here and wanted Caitlin’s story to be told. She recognises that we failed Caitlin but she points out that moving on people like Caitlin would make things worse, and that is what this bill does. It simply makes things worse.

I was concerned to hear one member in the House say that she’d talked to retailers, because we had retailers in the 3,000-odd submissions. Retail New Zealand was very clear that their members didn’t want this piece of legislation. They didn’t see the solution to this problem as being just to move people on and then if they don’t move on or if they come back, they have a fine issued to them, because that doesn’t solve the issue.

Of course we want streets that are accessible to everyone. The other thing to point out is that if we look at what’s going on here, other than people not having a place to live, all the other things that we’re looking at are pretty much illegal already. So the only thing we’re really making illegal is not having somewhere to sleep, not having a roof over your head. As for behaving in a manner that is disorderly, intimidating, or threatening, anyone who knows the Summary Offences Act knows that disorderly behaviour is an offence. Intimidating behaviour is an offence. Making threats is an offence. So all of those things, the law already deals with. If someone is doing that already, the police already have the powers to intervene.

Again, behaving in a manner that’s disruptive, that’s disorderly, is already able to be dealt with. Once again, here we are in the dying gasps of this Parliament and the Government is sending a signal that it’s tough; but you know what it’s doing, really? It’s dividing our community. It’s saying that people like Caitlin and the other homeless people who are on the streets, people living in tenuous circumstances—and I speak to them as well—they’re not us. They’re the opposite of us. They’re them, and we’ll move them on. We’ll get them out of sight. Well, that kind of “them” and “us” governance is exactly the sort of governance and Government I want no part of, because they are us. They are our children. They are our brothers and sisters. They’re our family. You look at the least of these people, those people who struggle most, and you are the least kind to them. This is the most heartless Government I have seen in here. I’m a lawyer, and I could talk about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act aspect of this, that we are going to make it illegal to ask for help, to sit on the street corner and say, “The original draft of this bill made it illegal to say I’m hungry, will you give me a dollar?” It made it illegal. Can you believe that?

Now, to the credit of the members of the Justice Committee and the many submitters, we realised how unreasonable that was and how counter to any sense of human justice and kindness it was. Now, with the Minister of Justice’s further amendment, we’ve got that it has to be “unreasonable begging”; so maybe someone who’s not hungry enough is unreasonably begging—I don’t know what that means. But that’s the other thing about this legislation. It’s pretty much unworkable, because, if you think about it, talking about what is and what isn’t unreasonable begging is problematic. Then, of course, we’ve got the removal orders so that you can move someone on. Of course, they are allowed to come back but just not to beg. They can come back, for example, if they need to pick up a prescription at the chemist in the main street. Now, of course they can, but it’s not that the law is being improved by the select committee by allowing them to come back. Instead, it’s that it was a stupid suggestion in the first place to exclude them from the high street of our towns and cities.

The other thing is this: we hear from the other side as if the police want this. The police don’t even want this. The police, to their credit, do a fantastic job in managing these people, some of whom we accept are difficult—they have addiction and mental health and other issues—and the police are both firm and compassionate. I admire them, and I admire that they gave great advice to the committee, but they don’t even have the required tools to do this. This is an infringement notice system. The police do not have a system that can cope with new infringement notices. They’re not equipped to do it, and they look at this and they have an expectation that, if someone is sitting in an empty doorway and the shop next door doesn’t like it, they’re going to get a call, and they’re going to be like, “You’ve got the tools now, move them on.” The police are experts at knowing what the risks are, how to engage with people, and how to get the best outcomes and keep our communities safe. They don’t even want this. I’m looking forward to the committee stage and asking—

💬 Carl Bates: Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The member’s time—

Point of order. I just want to make a point of order that I was finishing my speech and I had about four seconds left and up he jumps. There is a bit of an issue here when you’re concluding your speech and a member—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Well, you’ve just used your four seconds arguing about it.

Point of order. Speakers’ Rulings are very clear—I think it’s 30/4—that a member isn’t able to take the call until the previous speaker has resumed their seat. I’ve seen it three times already this afternoon where the National Party MPs continue to do the same thing, and I want you to address that.

Madam Speaker, move-on orders are part of this Government’s focus on restoring law and order, and contrary to the Opposition’s continued barrage regarding this, they do not criminalise homelessness. I was proud to be part of the Justice Committee that moved the age from 14 years to 18 years, and I commend this improved bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The question is that the amendments recommended by the Justice Committee by majority be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Ayes 67

New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 52

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 12; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Committee of the whole House

Clause 1 Title

CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Members, the House is in committee on the Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill. We come first to clause 1, which is the “Title”. The question is that clause 1 stand part. The Minister has asked for some opening remarks.