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I am a fulltime carer
for my disabled son. For families like ours, care is not an
abstract policy question. It is the structure of every day
and every night, the organising principle of our work, our
finances, our health, and our future.
That is why the
Disability Support Services Bill feels so frightening.
Despite the language of “fairness”, “transparency”,
and “stability”, this bill would give the government
sweeping power over disabled people’s lives while
stripping away many of the ways families can challenge
discrimination and unfair treatment.
The bill says it
is creating a “foundational legislative framework” for
Disability Support Services and that it is intended only as
the first phase, with other important matters such as
appeals, complaints processes, safeguarding, and information
gathering to come later.
It also says one of its
purposes is to “mitigate litigation risk, and related
fiscal risk, to the Crown” after the Supreme Court
decision in Fleming v Attorney-General. In plain
language, this is not just a bill about improving services.
It is also a bill about protecting the government from the
consequences of disabled people and family carers winning in
court.
One of the most disturbing features
of the bill is the way it shifts responsibility away from
the State and back onto families. The explanatory note says
the bill “clarifies that responsibility for care of
disabled people rests in the first instance with their
family and whānau, where
appropriate”.
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Clause 8 then requires
decision makers to take into account the principle that
families, whānau, and other culturally recognised family
groups have responsibility “in the first instance” for
the wellbeing of their members, and that an eligible person
should, where appropriate, use their own resources and other
support available from family, community, and other publicly
funded sources before receiving DSS-funded
support.
For families like mine, this is terrifying.
It takes the reality many of us already live with, filling
the gaps of an underfunded system with unpaid labour,
exhaustion, sacrifice, and constant advocacy, and turns it
into a legislative principle.
It tells disabled people
and their families that support is not something they can
rely on as a right, but something the State may contribute
to only after family resources have been absolutely
stretched first.
The bill also gives the Minister
enormous power through secondary legislation. Clause 10 lets
the Minister give written directions to the Ministry, and
clause 11 lets the Minister establish programmes that can
set eligibility criteria, funding criteria, conditions on
use of funding, exceptional circumstances processes, and
other rules for administration.
These programmes are
not small technical details. They go to the heart of who
gets support, and on what terms.
This is why it is
fair to describe the bill as giving the government a blank
cheque over disabled people’s lives. The Act sets up the
structure and the principles, but much of the practical
power is pushed into ministerial directions and programmes.
At the same time, the bill sharply limits the ways disabled
people and carers can push back.
Schedule 1
extinguishes certain proceedings in the Employment Relations
Authority and Employment Court, bars future proceedings
relating to past circumstances, and blocks complaints to the
Human Rights Commission and the Health and Disability
Commissioner that are based on specified allegations of
discrimination connected to DSS funding and paid family
carers. It also says neither the Human Rights Commission nor
the Health and Disability Commissioner may take further
action on relevant complaints already made.
That means
this bill is not only about who gets support. It is also
about who gets justice. It would take away existing and
future pathways to challenge unlawful discrimination and
employment unfairness in disability support. Families are
told to carry more responsibility, but the legal mechanisms
for resisting that burden are being closed off at the same
time.
The Ministry of Justice’s own Bill of Rights
advice makes this even more disturbing
(https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/20260522-Disability-Support-Services-Bill.pdf).
In paragraph 26, the advice says: “The legislative
framework for DSS funding in the bill discriminates on the
basis of disability for obvious reasons. That is to be
expected and is clearly necessary and justified.”
In
paragraph 27, it says the framework also discriminates on
marital and family status because it is guided by the
principle that families and whānau have responsibility in
the first instance for wellbeing.
The Government’s
own legal advice admits rights are at stake, then
justifies discrimination to protect its budget and legal
position.
In paragraph 29, the advice goes further and
says that the legislative framework “invites and
encourages discrimination based on marital/family status”,
but argues this is still lawful because it does not compel
unjustified discrimination and because future programmes and
directions could, in theory, be drafted consistently with
the Bill of Rights.
That should alarm every New
Zealander. The government’s own legal advice acknowledges
discrimination, then tries to normalise it by calling it
justified. Legally, the Ministry of Justice is using the New
Zealand Bill of Rights Act framework that allows
“reasonable limits” on rights if they are considered
demonstrably justified in a free and democratic
society.
But for families like mine, this feels like
our equality and dignity are being weighed against Crown
cost and political convenience and found
expendable.
This bill is terrifying because it tells
families like mine three things at once: that we are
responsible first, that the government will decide later by
programme and direction what support it feels like
contributing, and that our ability to challenge
discrimination will be curtailed if we object.
That is
not a stable or fair system. It is a concentration of power
over disabled people’s lives with too few checks, too
little scrutiny, and too little respect for the people most
affected.
Disabled people and their whānau deserve
better than a law that treats rights as obstacles to be
managed and litigation as a fiscal problem to be
extinguished. They deserve a system built with them, not
done to them. And they deserve laws that protect them from
discrimination, not laws that admit discrimination and then
call it justified.
If you believe that all New
Zealanders have the right to freedom from discrimination,
please sign the petition to stop this discriminatory bill
and help keep us safe from our own
Government:
https://our.actionstation.org.nz/petitions/stop-the-discriminatory-bill-removing-disabled-people-s-rights-ensure-fair-due-process
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