Dr Rebekah Graham on Government Services

Kia ora, I'm Rebecca Graham and I am the National Director for Parents of Vision Impaired New Zealand.

If I think about government services, which most disabled people have to interact with, one thing that government services could do is they could do regular accessibility audits, and this would identify the barriers. It would also identify what could be done about it, and create a timeline for improving it. A regular audit would ensure that there was some kind of measure, that we are measuring accessibility, that we're measuring how accessible government services are, and then we could see over time what progress is being made.

It would be great to have some accountability built into it too and an expectation of what will be solved when, but even just that regular measuring of how accessible things are, and what is needed, would clearly identify what could be done.

A flow-on benefit from it is that it creates wider understanding of what accessibility barriers are, and how we could implement them and change them, so that people who have access needs are able to communicate that in a way that's then understood by non-disabled people.

Right now, children who live in a household with a disabled family member are three times more likely to live in material deprivation and hardship. Material deprivation means being unable to afford everyday essentials across six different types of measures. And by that we mean being unable to afford enough food to eat, being unable to heat the house to be a suitable temperature, being able to afford warm clothing or sensible shoes, those kinds of everyday measures. Material deprivation is when you cannot afford six or more of those measures, and severe material deprivation means nine or more of these measures.

At the moment, we have nearly 36,000 households in New Zealand with people with a disability that are living in material hardship. The big contributor there, so demographically, the only difference with these households is disability. And so, this creates this intersection between disability and poverty.

One of the main drivers behind that is accessibility or lack thereof. Disabled families -people with a disabled family member - are having to pay extra in order to transport themselves to places. They're having to pay extra for goods and services. They're having to pay to meet those accessibility needs that aren't existing. And so, there's a whole raft of additional expenses that occur and families are having to carry that cost themselves.

Also, the lack of accessibility means that opportunities for employment, for paid work, for income generation, are far more limited and far more difficult.

So, you have this double whammy of additional costs and reduced ability to gain income.

And so, what we could do right now to make a difference to those 36,000 households is we could increase their income. Recent research has established that an amount of $8,000 per annum, and $24,000 per annum, is what is needed to lift these households - for each household - to lift them out of material deprivation and poverty.

That doesn't create wealthy households. It creates households that are just able to afford the basics. So, we could do that right now if we wanted to. We could increase the payments to these households. Specifically, if we think about increasing payments to households with a disabled family member, at the moment, right now, we have the child disability allowance. So, we could double that. That would make a difference.

We also have the disability allowance which is means tested and is quite an administrative process. We could make the disability allowance more like the child disability allowance in that it's not means tested and people can just apply for it in a far more simplified fashion. We could also double or triple the disability allowance. That would make a difference.

A lot of disabled persons who have a significant disability, that means they cannot work for more than 15 hours a week, they get the supported living payment. And the supported living payment is also means tested. So, if you have a partner who earns more than around $60,000 a year, you no longer get that support. We could remove that requirement.

We could make the supported living payment more like the pension and that people who meet the requirements - and they're fairly extensive requirements - people who meet those requirements, they get the supported living payment and it’s treated like the pension. We don't means test it. We don't abate it. We don't do any of that administrative work, and that would make a massive difference for a number of people.

And lastly, we could index benefits to wage increases, not inflation.