Govt ‘can’t see people for the tents’
THE man dubbed the Mayor of Martin Place says some residents being forced to leave a homeless camp in the centre of Sydney don’t have anywhere else to go, and he attacked the NSW Government for focusing on the tents rather than the people inside them.
After more than six months camped outside the Reserve Bank building in Sydney’s CBD, the homeless community moved on peacefully yesterday after police asked them to leave.
Legislation passed NSW parliament on Thursday empowering police to tear down the tents if it was deemed there was a “public safety issue”.
But the tent city’s leader Lanz Priestley said the homeless residents would never have let it come to that.
“My first responsibility is to make sure the people in the space are looked after,” he said. “Yesterday one of the local cops asked us to go and I thought that was quite a reasonable request and we’re leaving.”
Mr Priestley said some camp dwellers would move to friends’ homes. But some, he said, “don’t have anywhere to go”.
Mr Priestley said he would have preferred to stay until everyone had somewhere safe to go and the issues leading people to sleep rough were properly addressed.
“But they (the state government) are not interested in that. They’re not looking at the people – they’re looking at the tents,” he said.