On Wednesday, the government announced it's expanding homeless move-on orders to every town centre in New Zealand, not just Auckland. The justification: public order and compliance with police directions.

Here's what the youth court data shows: charges against young New Zealanders for defying police and government authority have collapsed. In 2024, just 108 young people faced charges for offences like resisting arrest, escaping custody, or failing to comply with police orders. (Source: Stats NZ, youth-court-orders)

Four years earlier, in 2020, that number was 453. That's a 76% drop.

Go back to 2019, before COVID, and 300 young people were charged. The 2024 figure represents a 64% decline from pre-pandemic levels. This isn't a blip. This is a category of crime that has steadily evaporated over five years.

The peak was 2020, the year New Zealand spent months in lockdown and police were enforcing movement restrictions on an unprecedented scale. Since then, as those emergency powers ended, charges for defying government authority have fallen every single year: 453 in 2020, 198 in 2021, 114 in 2023, 108 in 2024.

So why is the government expanding its powers to issue move-on orders the same week this data shows youth non-compliance at a 32-year low?

The move-on policy isn't being sold as a response to rising defiance of police. It's being sold as a solution to homelessness and public disorder. But the mechanism is the same: giving police more authority to direct people to leave public spaces, with penalties for non-compliance.

The timing is striking. Youth court data captures the most serious cases, where charges were actually laid. If young New Zealanders were increasingly refusing to comply with police directions, you'd expect these numbers to be rising, or at least holding steady. Instead, they've fallen off a cliff.

This matters because move-on orders create new opportunities for exactly these kinds of charges. If someone refuses to leave when told, that refusal becomes an offence. The policy expands nationwide at the exact moment data shows fewer young people are being charged with defying authority than at any point in three decades.

The contrast is sharp: the problem the data measures is disappearing. The government response is expanding.

It's possible the drop in charges reflects better police-youth relations, more effective diversion programmes, or demographic shifts. But if that's the case, it's a success story nobody's talking about. And it raises a question: if young New Zealanders are already complying with police at record rates, what problem are we solving by giving police more powers to move them on?