While tourists dine under stars, the homeless sleep under them

Sunday, 9 November 2025

Andrea Vance is National Affairs Editor for The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: It’s the poverty, stupid.

And yet the Government seems oblivious - perhaps wilfully so - to why more people are sleeping rough.

Auckland’s rough sleeper numbers have doubled in six months. The same pattern is emerging in Christchurch and Wellington.

It’s no mystery, nor is it a law-and-order problem.

Try a collapsing economy, policies that make it harder to get emergency accommodation, a housing system that punishes the poor while rewarding investors, overwhelmed food banks and mental health failures.

The problem isn’t anti-social behaviour - it’s that people can’t afford homes.

And yet. This Government’s solution is to move the symptoms out of sight. Ministers are mulling ways to move on rough sleepers from Auckland’s city centre.

Property owner, landlord and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon thinks the streets look bedraggled and with the City Rail Link and the convention centre about to open, he needs the city to “look its best.”

At the same time, Tourism New Zealand is spending $6.3 million to bring the Michelin Guide to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown. Officials think the gourmet stars will light up the economy by drawing an estimated 36,000 high-spending tourists to our shores.

The government is moving fast: clearing the slums for the sommeliers.

Last week, Police Minister Mark Mitchell and Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith confirmed work is under way to empower law enforcement – police, Māori Wardens, or other agents – to ask homeless people to move on from public spaces.

Luxon insisted no Cabinet decisions have been made. But Mitchell, caught letting the cat out of the bag, confirmed that Goldsmith is drafting a bill with input from a retail advisory group.

That group isn’t dominated by social workers or housing advocates; rather dairy owners, liquor store operators, Michael Hill managers, and lobbyists Retail NZ.

Mitchell says the aim is to take them to a place of safety.

But funding cuts means that place doesn’t exist. Emergency housing is full and mental health and addiction services are stretched.

I get the political calculation. A move on law is easy to sell: a tidy fix to make inner cities feel safer and more orderly, with just enough punitive scapegoat-ery to satisfy the base.

It’s the kind of cheap idea governments turn too when they’ve run out of them. Like the policy that kicks in this month, targeting young people, the very demographic hardest hit by unemployment.

From November 2026, many 18-and 19-year-olds will be ineligible for Jobseeker Support if their parents earn above $65,529 a year.

It’s meant to incentivise them to find work, despite youth unemployment hitting 15.2% and the NEET rate rising to 13.8%. The policy could affect over 4,000 teenagers.

The logic is perverse. The Government punishes young people for being unemployed while presiding over an economy that cannot generate enough full-time work.

Meanwhile, rents – at least on paper – are finally softening. (Although, Median weekly rents remain eye-watering: $650 in Auckland, $567 in Wellington, $532 in Christchurch.)

But rents aren’t falling isn’t because we’re all suddenly feeling flush. It’s largely a result of young people leaving cities, a cooling rental market, and slow wage growth. Even with tiny dips, the vast majority of people struggling to find shelter cannot suddenly afford a home.

As Labour leader Chris Hipkins put it bluntly in Parliament last week, making it illegal to be homeless doesn’t make someone not homeless. Auckland City Mission’s Helen Robinson was as plain: the enforcement approach would be “totally and utterly ineffective”.

“All it simply does is either delay or literally move the person, and therefore all the needs associated with that person down the road, both literally and metaphorically. The answer here is more homes and more support,” she said.

Still, it will be attractive to voters because it makes the problem invisible to the people who can afford to look away.

And we do look away. Homelessness makes us uncomfortable, because we feel unsafe while shopping or going out for brunch.

But we should be forced to confront it because it is a mirror of our society. And perhaps that is what makes the government so uncomfortable: it reflects how the failing economy is failing people in the worst way.

England and Wales are showing how to do it differently. The Labour government there is scrapping the 200-year-old Vagrancy Act, which criminalised rough sleeping and replacing it with measures to target organised begging and structural support.

Luxon wants a world-class Auckland. Fair enough.

But you can’t square that with scraping the poor off Queen Street while paying millions to import fine-dining inspectors.

A city’s success isn’t measured by how well the rich dine under Michelin stars but whether its rough sleepers have a roof, or even just a safe place to lie down, under the same sky.