Just last week, PNG parliament passed the Vagrancy Bill (2025) into an Act. The Act empowers courts to issue exclusion orders requiring certain offenders to leave an urban area, district, or province and remain out for at least six months. It is designed in part to facilitate the repatriation of offenders to their place of origin as a way of dealing with urban crime.

It is a mechanism of spatial exclusion. Note that PNG’s supreme court once declared this Vagrancy Act unconstitutional.

Not only that, this Act has a flawed economic reasoning. Urban disorder in PNG is a result of narrow formal employment, limited labor absorption, weak urban management, and the concentration of opportunities in few urban centres. When law moves people out of cities rather than expanding opportunities for them, it misreads location and causation. Repatriation cannot reduce the underlying forces of hardships and struggles of living in cities. It only moves the offender out. This is not a durable solution; it is a coercive attempt to sanitize urban space without expanding lawful opportunities. Its a punitive stopgap measure simply.  

In development economics, Lewis model shows that part of development involves movement of labor from low-productivity traditional sectors into higher-productivity modern sectors. Rural–urban migration, in that sense, is not an aberration. Rather, it is part of structural transformation of a developing economy. The real question is therefore whether the urban economy is creating enough productive jobs to absorb that movement. If it is not, then the problem lies less in migration itself than in the weakness of the modern sector.

Harris-Todaro model of migration reinforced the same point. People migrate not simply because jobs already exist, but because they respond to expected income opportunities. People move when the perceived chance of earning more in town exceeds what they expect to earn in rural areas. From that perspective, migration to Port Moresby, Lae, or other centres is not irrational behavior to be criminalised. It is a predictable economic response to uneven opportunities across space. So, excluding people from urban areas does not eliminate that underlying incentive. It instead suppresses the daylight visible manifestation of it.

These concerns are confirmed in the Vagrancy Act’s structure. Exclusion orders are not limited to serious offences. The Act contain provisions that extends to indictable offences, summary offences, and breaches of provincial and local by-laws, including unlawful vending, littering, and betelnut-related regulation. In other words, the state is designing itself a tool that can respond to a wide range of urban disorder by exclusion from place. That is a significant shift in how economic and social stress is managed.

Vagrancy laws are not unique to PNG. Countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan still retain named vagrancy laws, while England and Wales have kept the Vagrancy Act 1824 in their books even as repeal proceeds. But the broader trend is moving in the opposite direction. Canada repealed its vagrancy offence in 2019, Uganda repealed some rogue-and-vagabond offences in 2023, and Kenya has debated repeal of its “idle and disorderly persons” provision. PNG is therefore, not reviving this kind of law in a vacuum. It is going against the wave of wider international movement that are increasingly regarding vagrancy laws as vague, discriminatory, and economically misguided.

Also, from perspective of urban economics, the Vagrancy Act is hard to defend. Cities exist because they generate agglomeration economies. Firms, workers, markets, and services become more productive when located near each other. Urban areas allow better matching between employers and workers, lower transaction costs, and greater opportunities for small enterprise. A law that treats urban presence primarily as a threat, rather than as a source of potential productivity, misunderstands the economic purpose of cities.

To be fair, Act is not legally crude. It requires court involvement, recognizes constitutional rights, adopts a broad definition of “home,” and allows variation for employment, study, medical treatment, and family hardship. But those safeguards do not solve the economic problem. They merely regulate the process by which exclusion occurs. The Act treats movement and presence in urban space as something to be controlled, instead of asking why the economy and its cities are failing to absorb its own citizens productively. We should be asking questions around how to address poverty that drives fellow citizens to stand on the street for survival purposes. Not relocating them to places where hardships has once forced them out to cities.

But of course, PNG needs safer towns/cities and needs stronger law enforcement. However, exclusion orders are not a substitute for jobs, skills, housing, transport, policing capacity, and functioning urban institutions. A development strategy should increase the supply of lawful opportunities which in themselves will reduce the supply of desperate survival tactics. In contrast, this Act leans toward relocating the symptoms of the deeper problem. That can produce short-run visibility. But less likely for longer term economic order. At the higher level? We just criminalize poverty.

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(1) The featured image is taken from Pacific Cycle.