The causes of begging run deep

Sir Bob Jones thinks beggars are a ‘‘disgrace to the human race’’. He says that he wants the practice outlawed, and various other tiresome and objectionable things. The spectacle of a wealthy property magnate castigating those on the very bottom of the heap, people who commonly suffer from mental health and addiction problems, and who expose themselves to what most of us regard as a public humiliation, is the disturbing one.

It doesn’t matter what one beggar says he earns (an Auckland man claiming to pocket $150 daily was apparently the spark for Jones’ tirade). It doesn’t matter what beggars have told Jones about their pride in not having a benefit or anything else.

This sort of outburst, especially with its repeated emphasis on beggars’ ethnicity – for what purpose? – pollutes the national talk.

This is not to say that begging is not a problem. It is. Individual beggars can sometimes be aggressive and antisocial, in which case police interventions can be appropriate.

Most often those who beg are quiet and passive, but their resort to public pleading for money, in a country that is supposed to offer a decent social safety net, is still troubling.

Worst of all, surely – and here Jones is right – is that there seems to be a growing number of beggars on the streets of Wellington. (Certainly Wellingtonians have noticed it; three-quarters of residents called begging a problem in a 2014 survey, compared with only a third of people in other communities across the country.) But the question is how to turn the trend around. Further abusing those whose lives have often been long sequences of abuse and addiction is no answer.

A ban is not a solution either. Wellington City Council rightly rejected that option last year. Bans are a harsh and temporary fix at best – with substantial police and city resources required to move beggars along, or arrest and hold them, before presumably quickly releasing them again.

The causes of begging are much deeper than a lack of ‘‘get up and go’’, as some people always seem to think.

Last year’s council report had a far more convincing list of the sorts of things that start people begging – ‘‘a lack of suitable housing options; chronic unemployment; lack of positive and purposeful activity; drug, alcohol and cigarette addictions; mental health issues; and criminal convictions. The people we spoke to all came from difficult or abusive childhoods and were usually disconnected from their whanau.’’

Of course, if the concern is merely over the spoiling of the streetscape, then a punitive approach makes a cold-blooded sort of sense.

But if people are more deeply troubled by the plight of their fellow New Zealanders – those alienated from government welfare agencies as well as the ordinary rhythms of home, work, and family – they need to look to more generous, ambitious plans for stopping begging.

No-one will ever get rid of begging entirely. But if it has become more common recently, it ought to be possible to reduce it again.

That is the challenge.

Wellington rightly rejected a begging ban.