Just caught up with last Sunday's edition of MediaWatch, which surfaced some pretty disgraceful comments about our homeless whānau, in defence of "move-on orders";
https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/mediawatch?share=12ce8006-34c4-490e-b8be-1defeb93f740
As @norightturnnz's excellent piece on this pointed out, move-on orders don't just give the Police the power to arbitrarily evict people from public space, even if they're doing nothing except looking excessively poor. Which is bad enough.
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Move-on orders also further criminalise various common forms of peaceful protest. For *both* reasons, they're an attack on our fundamental human rights to peaceably assemble in public places. Even right-leaning people who value civil liberties are criticising this, and so they should.
This policy is contemptible victim-blaming, investing public resources in harassing homeless people rather than getting them homes. Another thing we all have an inalienable human right to.
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If Labour won't commit to taking this law off the books in the first 100 days of any new government they lead, they deserve to be ignored. In favour of opposition parties who are actually taking the country's problems seriously, along the our civil liberties.
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As a friend pointed out over the weekend, a huge proportion of the people currently homeless in Aotearoa are young people. Bounced out of the foster system with no support or follow-up.
Others are people in serious mental health crisis, unable to access the services they need to get well. Even more so while living rough.
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Still other are elders who've fallen on hard times. Unable to maintain stable housing on a pension that provides about the same in-the-hand income as unemployment benefits. A benefit that is openly and intentionally kept below a reasonable standard of living, supposedly to motivate people living on them to job hunt harder.
Forcing any elder to live out their autumn years in squalor and desperation is appalling. We should all be shocked and horrified by a society that allows this.
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There's an old saying that a society can be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. At the moment, anyone judging NZ on that basis would find it wanting. Move-on orders just add insult to injury.
I truly believe that we can do better, and we must. Starting with kicking the economic vandals off the government benches, and replacing Chippy and his crew of spineless Starmerists with a real left wing party, willing to offer a policy vision for actually fixing things.
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Strypey