Grumpy Granny here again! This time I’m talking about the government’s Move On orders and the shameful list of government policies that have destroyed so many social supports and increased homelessness by unprecedented amounts. Let’s vote these heartless bastards out!
Transcript:
Kia ora, I’m Mandy Hager, a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. I’ve started posting out of desperation and fury at our current government, whose tone-deaf decisions, human-rights backsliding, and punishing policies are a disgrace to any fair-thinking person.
There’s a quote often attributed to Gandhi that says “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” If this is the case, our National-led, Act and NZ First tail-wagging government, fails at every turn. Their policies have created severe harm for many, especially our most vulnerable, who our charming PM described as ‘bottom-feeders’ – the same PM who said, with no apparent shame “Let me be clear: I’m wealthy, I’m sorted.”
I want to talk about the ‘Move on’ orders legislation, their latest attack on our most vulnerable people. But first, lets take a quick look at some of their other heartless, venal actions to date. My thanks to Action Station for compiling this list.
- They tampered with free school lunches, changing a system that delivered tasty, healthy lunches to our most vulnerable children to a budget version that delivers inedible slop – while Luxon told kids to ‘make a marmite sandwich’ when this programme started to fail due to their funding cuts
- They cancelled rural school bus routes, making it harder for families to get their kids to school
- They claim they want to improve education standards but reversed plans to extend 20 hours free ECE to two year olds and rewrote curriculums without teacher input
- They disestablished the Māori Health Authority and removed the responsibility of Oranga Tamariki to work in partnership with iwi and hapu and keep Māori children in state care connected to their whakapapa – as well as cutting Oranga Tamariki’s early intervention services intended to protect children
- They axed universal free prescriptions
- They cut health funding, causing staff shortages, building failures, forcing the rationing of treatments such as dialysis
- They cut funding for disabled NZers and their carers without any consultation and disempowered the Ministry for Disabled People
- They changed the rules so welfare payments are indexed to inflation rather than wage growth, effectively holding down increases in income support
- They introduced ineffective and punitive money management for those receiving income support, restricting flexibility – and introduced punitive sanctions for beneficiaries
- They introduced legislation overturning a court decision, which would mean people receiving ACC payouts are forced into MSD debt if they have been receiving other benefits while they wait for a decision
- They raised public transport costs, ending subsidised fares
- They made the lowest minimum wage increase in decades (just 1.5%)
- They funded and implemented military boot-camps for young people, despite international and local evidence showing they don’t work
- They scrapped prisoner reduction targets and boosted our prison population to a record high – as well as removing prisoner’s right to vote
- They cut funding for Section 27 reports that give more context to offending and that helped address the drivers of crime
- They pushed through the three strikes law, despite evidence of ineffectiveness and inhumane outcomes
- They rejected independent Law Commission recommendations to better protect transgender and intersex people against discrimination
- They scrapped the construction of thousands of state homes during an escalating housing crisis
- They slashed access to emergency housing without providing any alternatives and simultaneously cut funding from frontline services providing critical support for families living in emergency housing, increasing barriers to access emergency housing, which means more people are being denied immediate shelter.
- They paused and then cancelled the construction of over 50 Kāinga Ora housing developments across Tāmaki Makaurau alone, which would’ve provided hundreds of decent and stable homes to people who need to pay lower rent, including in the city centre.
- They cut millions tagged to providing housing to rangatahi experiencing homelessness.
- They introduced no-cause evictions for renters
- They scrapped first home grants
- They reintroduced pseudoephedrine, vastly increasing methamphetamine problems
And now they have legislated for ‘Move On orders’, effectively criminalising the poor people forced to sleep on the streets as a result of the kinds of actions just mentioned, including kids as young as 14. Paul Goldsmith, it’s reported, has been wanting to do this since his time in local government and ignored the advice of the Housing and Justice Ministries, neither of whom backed the plan.
Without appropriate supports, or places for these people to ‘move on’ to, they are criminalising them – saying if they don’t ‘move on’, they’ll be fined up to $2000 or imprisoned. And, given they’re hardly likely to have two grand in their back pockets, what they’re essentially saying is that they’ll imprison them. It’s utterly disgraceful.
To justify themselves, they claimed that they were targeting the people ‘who choose’ to live on the streets – a ‘blame the victim’ example if ever there was one. Our facile Prime Minister justified it by saying he wanted to clean up the streets so tourists from cruise ships didn’t have to see them. He said: “The bigger issue is like Chuck and Mary coming in for their once-in-a-lifetime trip” and “getting intimidated because someone’s sitting on the doorstep of a shop they’re trying to get into, threatening, shouting at them, abusing them.”
Fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with these people? They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They made a big show of saying it was also about lowering crime in inner cities, yet according to The Herald, data shows public offending is significantly lower than seven years ago.
Meanwhile, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, these government actions are directly linked to more Aucklanders sleeping on our streets, in parks, and in their cars. Over the past year, rough sleeping in Auckland has increased by 90% from 426 people recorded by Auckland Council in September 2024, to 809 in May 2025 – and this number has likely grown since then.
At the same time, Northland rough sleepers face more than 800 day wait for home through Housing First. Bay of Plenty has the next longest median wait time of 566 days. In other regions 9except Waikato) it’s between 100 and 300 days.
Stats NZ reported this government has done nothing to lower our shameful child poverty statistics, reporting that in 2025, there has been no statistically significant change in the percentage of children living in households experiencing material hardship (measure (c)), at 14.3 percent. Yet, in February 2026, it was reported in Stuff that 47,500 more Kiwi kids are now living in material poverty – enough to fill Eden Park – with disabled children and tamariki Māori more likely to be in material hardship than the general population, with about a quarter of Māori and disabled tamariki in material hardship.
This coalition government has no heart, no morals and offers us no future. Let’s vote them out.
Mandy Hager 