Public health researchers and the Public Health and Community Care Society have told the Government that its proposed move-on order regime will criminalise children and young people experiencing homelessness, worsening outcomes for some of the most vulnerable people affected by the policy.

The Government's proposal, announced in February, would allow police to direct a person to leave a specified area for up to 24 hours. Non-compliance would carry a fine of up to $2,000 or a prison sentence of up to three months, according to RNZ. The orders are framed around targeting disorderly behaviour in public spaces.

The Public Health and Community Care Society issued a briefing on 14 June arguing that the proposal fails to distinguish between antisocial conduct and survival behaviour — rough sleeping and begging being the clearest examples. For a young person with nowhere safe to go, a move-on order does not resolve the underlying situation; it relocates it, and adds a potential criminal liability on top.

Researchers at the University of Otago went further, saying the orders risk pushing homeless youth towards criminal activity and long-term state dependency. The pathway they describe is a familiar one in the social policy literature: early contact with the justice system, even through relatively minor infringements, is strongly associated with entrenched disadvantage and repeated system involvement.

What makes the expert critique sharper is that two government ministries appear to have reached a similar conclusion internally. Both the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and the Ministry of Social Development recommended, in OIA-released documents, that survival behaviours associated with homelessness — including rough sleeping and begging — be explicitly excluded from the scope of the orders. That recommendation does not appear to have been adopted in the publicly announced proposal.

The gap between ministerial advice and Cabinet's chosen settings is the operational question practitioners will want answered. The February announcement framed move-on orders as targeting disorderly behaviour, but the legislation as signalled does not carve out the conduct HUD and MSD flagged. Whether that exclusion can be achieved through regulations, operational guidance to police, or requires primary legislation is not yet clear from publicly available material.

For those working in community services, housing policy or youth justice, the concern is not abstract. Move-on orders directed at a rough-sleeping teenager do not extinguish the need for shelter; they generate a compliance record that complicates future interactions with Work and Income, housing registers, and the courts. The PHCC briefing is explicit that children with nowhere safe to go face the sharpest exposure under the proposed settings.

The Government has not publicly responded to the expert criticism as of 15 June 2026. The select committee process — if the bill has been introduced or is introduced shortly — will be the natural forum for the ministries' advice and the public health evidence to be tested against the policy rationale. Submitters will have grounds to press for the HUD and MSD carve-out to be written into the bill.