Courts should stop bailing aggressive beggars to streets, say Melbourne leaders

MELBOURNE leaders have called for courts to stop bailing aggressive beggars onto city streets as two CBD encampments are shut down.

Melbourne leaders have called for courts to stop bailing aggressive beggars onto city streets. Picture: Eugene Hyland

MELBOURNE leaders have called for courts to stop bailing aggressive beggars onto city streets as two encampments are closed.

Police, Melbourne City Council workers and Salvation Army volunteers this week shut down encampments outside 555 Collins St and the former Palace Theatre in Bourke St after reports that passers-by were being “harassed”.

At least one of the rough sleepers is believed to have been recently bailed.

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Lord Mayor Robert Doyle and Salvation Army major Brendan Nottle called for courts to bail aggressive beggars into homelessness accommodation, not onto city streets.

“If they are released it should not be simply straight back to the streets,” Cr Doyle said.

“You’ve got to release them back into a place where there’s a roof over their head and services to surround them, otherwise we’re back at square one.”

Cr Doyle added that some of those moved on were “not simply vulnerable homeless people”.

“They were people who had behaved in ways which were socially unacceptable, dangerous and certainly impugned on other people’s enjoyment of the city’s streets,” he said.

“In the end, mums and their kids coming in for Christmas have to feel that the city is a welcoming and safe place.”

Melbourne’s latest count showed the number of homeless people sleeping on the street had soared 74 per cent in the past two years.

Major Nottle said welfare services believed drug use had caused some of the issues near the former Palace Theatre.

“Melburnians have a tremendous heart for those doing it tough but we don’t want anything to damage that.

“People that are acting in an anti-social way on the streets need to remember that in doing that they are actually damaging people’s goodwill to those doing it tough.”

Bourke St resident Graeme Plumridge wrote to Cr Doyle calling for action outside the former theatre.

“It really has been an issue for anybody that walks up that side of the street from our iconic Grossi Florentino to Pellegrini’s — really well-known establishments — so to walk past that is terrible,” he wrote.

“We’ve got a social conscience and people don’t have to live like that.”

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@moniquehore