Manufactured Hardships, Accelerated Force: Poverty, Policing and Bad Policy

Across Australia, a clear pattern is emerging in how governments are responding to poverty, displacement and social abandonment. Rather than addressing the conditions that are forcing people into homelessness and insecurity, they are investing in systems designed to control, disperse and punish those living through it. The language used is familiar: “community safety”, “compliance”, “connection to services,” but what is unfolding on the ground is something far more direct: an expansion of state-sanctioned force against people who have already been failed by every other system.

Policing visibility, not solving harm

The City of Melbourne’s instruction to its newly established Community Safety Officers not to be afraid to use force when moving on people begging or sitting in the CBD makes that shift explicit. This is not an unintended consequence of the program; it is embedded in how the role is being understood and operationalised. The whistleblower account, alongside reporting that interactions were being inflated through low-level engagements, points to a model more concerned with visibility and control than with any meaningful notion of safety or support. What is being produced is not care, but a street-level enforcement presence directed at people whose only “offence” is being poor in public.

The conditions are not accidental

This escalation is taking place at a time when the material conditions of people’s lives are becoming increasingly untenable, not by accident, but through sustained political choices. The housing situation currently being described as a “crisis” is, in reality, the predictable outcome of policy decisions that have eroded public housing, entrenched unaffordability and abandoned people to the private market. In Adelaide, the consequences are stark. Services are reporting an 81 per cent increase in women seeking support over the past year, with many now sleeping in cars through winter. For those women, the rising cost of fuel is not an inconvenience but a daily calculation about whether they can afford to stay warm overnight. Catherine House is already at capacity, with women reaching a point where they can no longer endure the conditions they are being asked to survive.

Against that backdrop, the turn toward force becomes even more disturbing. Rather than responding to this level of deprivation with housing, income support or structural reform, governments are increasingly focused on managing the visibility of poverty. Melbourne’s directive sits within a broader national trend in which the presence of people in public space is treated as a problem to be solved, rather than a signal of systemic failure.

The domino effect across Queensland

The developments across south-east Queensland illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity. When the City of Moreton Bay criminalised homeless camping in March last year, it triggered a chain reaction across neighbouring jurisdictions. Brisbane moved away from what it had previously described as a “compassionate and flexible” approach, citing concerns that people displaced from Moreton Bay would relocate into the city. The Gold Coast followed shortly after, abandoning a welfare-first model in favour of a “compliance-led” strategy. What might appear as local policy shifts are, in reality, part of a coordinated tightening of control over where and how homeless people are allowed to exist.

Consent through coercion

What is particularly significant is how these councils have implemented these changes despite clear legal limitations. Under Queensland law, councils do not have the authority to issue enforceable move-on orders; that power sits with police. Yet police have indicated a reluctance to exercise those powers in this context. The result has been the emergence of an informal system of enforcement that operates through verbal directions, implied authority and the strategic use of presence. People are “asked” to leave. They are told to move on. Their compliance is recorded as voluntary.

The Supreme Court case against the City of Moreton Bay exposed the reality of how this operates. Homeless people were given a short window to collect what belongings they could before the remainder were seized and destroyed. The council argued that this was lawful because individuals had effectively consented by choosing which items to keep. The Court rejected that argument, finding that such consent was neither free nor voluntary. It is difficult to conceive of a clearer example of coercion: when people are faced with the immediate loss of everything they own, under the direction of officials often accompanied by police, the idea that they are making an unconstrained choice collapses entirely.

The myth of “refusing help”

What emerges from this is not simply a legal issue, but a deeper distortion of how power is being exercised. “Consent” becomes a mechanism through which enforcement is sanitised, allowing authorities to act without formal powers while avoiding accountability. At the same time, the narrative that people are being offered support, and are choosing to refuse it, continues to be repeated. Yet the evidence presented in court tells a different story. Referrals often led nowhere. Some individuals were placed on waiting lists without receiving any actual offer of housing. Others were offered only a few nights of temporary accommodation, sometimes conditional on requirements such as surrendering pets or producing identification documents they did not have. In many cases, there was simply no viable alternative presented at all.

Despite this, the framing persists that people are “homeless by choice”, a claim that serves to justify increasingly punitive responses. It obscures the reality that the demand for public housing far exceeds supply, and that moving people on from public spaces does not resolve homelessness but merely displaces it. As the Court itself acknowledged, the effect of these actions is to deepen hardship and further disconnect people from community and support.

Legislating displacement

In South Australia, laws allowing police to declare certain areas as “declared public precincts” and “declared public places” give police broad powers to order a person to leave a designated zone for up to 24 hours. This can be triggered where a person is considered to be “posing a risk to public safety”, behaving in an “offensive or disorderly manner”, or suspected of committing or about to commit an offence. These declarations apply to some of the most heavily used public areas in Adelaide, including the CBD, shopping precincts and public transport hubs: spaces that are also disproportionately occupied by people experiencing homelessness, poverty, and social exclusion, including Aboriginal people.

While framed as neutral public order measures, these laws function in practice as tools of displacement. They allow police to remove people from shared spaces not because of proven harm, but because of perceived risk, visibility, or presence. In doing so, they extend a broader pattern in which access to public space is increasingly conditional, particularly for those already subject to heightened surveillance and intervention.

There are clear historical echoes in this approach. South Australia’s earlier legislative frameworks, including the Aborigines Act 1934 (SA), authorised the forced removal of Aboriginal people from towns and cities. Section 17(1) empowered the Chief Protector to “cause any Aboriginal or half-caste… to be removed to and kept within the boundaries of any reserve or Aboriginal institution.” These powers were used to systematically displace Aboriginal people from public life, enforcing racialised control over movement, presence and belonging.

Contemporary “declared precinct” laws do not specify race. However, their application cannot be understood in isolation from that history. Laws that enable the discretionary removal of people from public space continue to fall most heavily on those already marginalised, Aboriginal people, people experiencing homelessness, and those living in poverty. In that sense, while the legal language has shifted, the underlying function of displacement remains.

Arming the response

At the same time as these forms of soft coercion are expanding, more overt forms of force are also being introduced. In Darwin, the Northern Territory government is preparing to deploy armed Police Public Safety Officers across the public transport network. The justification offered is that a visible and armed presence will deter antisocial behaviour and create safer public spaces. However, there is no evidence to support the claim that arming officers in this way reduces harm. What does exist are longstanding concerns about the disproportionate impact of policing on Aboriginal communities, and clear warnings from community organisations that such measures are likely to increase the risk of violence and deaths in custody.

This is not safety

Taken together, these developments point to a broader shift in how governments are choosing to respond to social conditions they have played a central role in producing. Rather than investing in the infrastructure required for people to live with dignity: secure public housing, adequate income, accessible services, they are expanding the reach of enforcement into everyday spaces. Public transport, city streets, parks and community areas are becoming sites of intensified control, where the presence of poverty is managed through displacement and, increasingly, through force.

It is often argued that these measures are necessary to maintain safety. But this framing collapses under scrutiny. Safety cannot be meaningfully achieved by instructing officers to use force against people who are homeless, nor by coercing individuals to leave public spaces without offering genuine alternatives. Nor is it created by introducing armed personnel into environments already shaped by inequality and distrust. What these approaches do produce is a heightened risk of harm, particularly for those who are already most vulnerable to state intervention.

There is a well-established pattern in how such policies unfold. Expanded powers lead to increased contact between authorities and marginalised communities. Increased contact raises the likelihood of escalation. Escalation, in turn, produces harm, sometimes serious, sometimes fatal. This is not a hypothetical trajectory but one that has been repeatedly observed across different jurisdictions and contexts.

If these policies continue to develop along their current path, the consequences are foreseeable. The use of force in Melbourne, the coercive displacement practices in Queensland, the legislated displacement in South Australia, and the arming of officers in the Northern Territory are not isolated initiatives but interconnected expressions of the same underlying approach. They prioritise control over care and visibility over resolution, addressing the symptoms of social failure while entrenching its causes.

What must change: Force will not keep people safe

A different approach would begin from a recognition that homelessness and insecurity are not problems to be managed through enforcement, but conditions to be resolved through material support and structural change. That would require a significant reorientation of resources and priorities, moving away from punitive responses and toward investments that enable people to live safely and securely. Until such a shift occurs, the current trajectory is likely to continue producing the very harms it claims to prevent.

What is being constructed in its place is not a safer society, but one in which the consequences of inequality are increasingly policed rather than addressed. And history suggests that when force becomes the primary tool for managing social distress, it does not lead to safety, it leads to further harm, deepened exclusion, and, ultimately, to preventable loss of life.

A petition to stop the Melbourne CSO program has been launched and you can support it here: https://www.change.org/p/city-of-melbourne-stop-the-cso-program-now