Media release: Move On orders an overreaction

New Zealanders have an inherent right to be in public places. The people who wrote New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act never imagined that anyone would question that everyone has a right to be in public. But neither freedom of movement or liberty of the person can exist without a right to be in public places, and it is difficult to imagine freedom of peaceful assembly or freedom of expression under laws which do not guarantee freedom to be in public.

The government’s proposed new ‘move on’ law change is an attempt to remove that right for homeless people whose greatest crime is that they have no money and nowhere to sleep. Rather than providing help or resources, the government will empower Police to order people to get out of sight.

“We already have laws that enable the police to arrest people for violent and disorderly behaviour. This proposed law change smacks of penalising people for being poor in public. There’s no way we can justify limiting our civil liberties simply because some people feel  uncomfortable.” – NZCCL chair Thomas Beagle.

The rights in our Bill of Rights are not absolute and can be overridden when this can be justified. But when even Auckland Minister Simeon Brown’s media release admits that other policies are already reducing crime and making the city centre safer, it’s very hard to understand how this new rights-limiting law can be justified.

Giving Police the power to arbitrarily issue move-on orders to people as young as 14, with no apparent oversight or chance to appeal, is unacceptable in a rights-respecting society. It will also surely lead to even more discriminatory behaviour against Māori (as documented by the Understanding Police Delivery report in 2024).

“Moving on homeless people for trying to sleep in public when they have nowhere else to go must surely count as cruel and degrading punishment, which is also forbidden by the New Zealand Bill of Rights. This cruelty  is compounded when existing resources for homeless people tend to be in the city centres they’ll be moved on from.” – Thomas Beagle.

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties opposes this proposal.