Disability Support Services Bill

I move, That the Disability Support Services Bill be now read a third time.

Today marks an important milestone in strengthening disability support services, or DSS, in New Zealand. This bill is about making the current system clearer. It creates a solid legal foundation for future improvements to services that support some of the most vulnerable disabled people in our communities. For too long, DSS has operated without a dedicated statutory framework. The absence of a clear legislative basis has created uncertainty and risk. It has meant the system is not transparent. People should be able to understand what the DSS system does and what they can access.

The Supreme Court decision made the Crown an employer in circumstances that were never intended. That case highlighted the need for Parliament to provide greater clarity about the roles, responsibilities, and relationships within the DSS system. This bill, therefore, also affirms that it is the Government and Parliament that set policy and funding, not individual court decisions.

I want to acknowledge and thank every one of the 3,000 people who took time to make a submission during the recent process. Your contributions have helped shape this important legislation. The bill makes it much clearer that choice, individual needs and circumstances, safety, and outcomes for disabled people are important elements that the responsible Minister must take into account when developing a support programme. The bill has been clarified and strengthened through the House process. Changes have been made to provide greater assurance and certainty for families who play such a critical role in supporting disabled people.

In my first reading speech, I made a commitment to consult on support programmes while I am Minister for Disability Issues. I am pleased that changes made during the House process have formalised my commitment. The bill now includes a consultation provision that reflects the language of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I would like to thank the members of the Social Services and Community Committee for their careful consideration of the legislation. Their scrutiny has improved the bill and helped ensure that it better reflects the needs and expectations of those who rely on DSS.

I also want to put on record my thanks to the officials who have worked incredibly hard on these improvements. DSS funds essential supports for some of our most vulnerable disabled New Zealanders. The bill continues to reflect current practice and settings. It clarifies that the key purpose of DSS is to contribute towards disabled people being able to live their everyday life. A key premise of DSS is that disabled people have different needs and circumstances. I know that disabled people want choice, control, and independence. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all system but one that needs to be flexible. Under this bill, the principles of choice, safety, and dignity are at the centre of all decisions about disabled people’s disability support services.

A 2024 independent review confirmed longstanding issues with DSS, and the Government took action to stabilise it. All recommendations from that review have been implemented. In the last two Budgets, we have invested $2.1 billion over five years to address DSS demand and cost pressures. Through this bill, we now need to lay the foundations for a better future. There is more work to do. I intend a further phase of legislation that will consider matters such as review and appeal processes and other aspects of the DSS system. Those issues are important, and they deserve careful consideration and consultation with the disability community. They will form part of a longer-term, wider programme of DSS improvements.

But, today, we should recognise the significance of what this bill achieves. This legislation represents a step change for DSS. It moves the system from a series of ad hoc arrangements to a clear and transparent framework. It provides greater certainty for disabled people, their families, providers, and Government. Most importantly, over time, it will make it easier for those who use DSS to understand, and engage with, the system.

I want to respond to remarks made during the committee of the whole House that suggested this bill merely reflects the status quo and is not transformative. I respectfully disagree. While this bill reflects the way the system currently operates, it also represents a significant step forward. It provides a legislative framework with clear statutory principles, a higher level of oversight, and the formal requirement to consult with disabled people through their respective organisations.

Waiting for a perfect bill would mean leaving the current system exactly as it is, which I’ve not been prepared to do. My intention with the bill is to provide greater clarity. Creating greater clarity and certainty does not mean we reduce opportunities for flexible delivery of disability services. Through secondary legislation, we will lock in significant improvements made to DSS, such as the removal of purchasing rules from flexible funding to enable disabled people to choose the supports that work best for them.

Over the next five years, I look forward to developing more support programmes that can maximise flexibility in the supports and services that DSS provides. It was said that the bill is not aspirational or person centred, and, again, I disagree. It puts disabled people front and centre. It clearly reflects the Enabling Good Lives principles. For example, the purpose of the bill is to provide support to disabled people to live their everyday lives. It also makes it explicit that decisions must take into account a person’s choice, safety, and dignity.

I agree that more work is required. This bill gives Disability Support Services (DSS) the legislative foundation necessary to support eligible people and a platform to improve that support. It is intended to be the first step in a broader legislative and policy programme to strengthen the system. The bill provides clarity where there has been uncertainty, transparency where there has been ambiguity, and a stronger basis for the delivery of essential supports. It has been strengthened by the voices heard during the select committee process. I commend this bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.

We’re here for the third reading of a bill that has been rushed through Parliament with a truncated select committee process. Despite that, over 19,000 people made their voices heard, over 3,000 in submissions to the bill and over 16,000 to a petition to scrap the bill.

I want to acknowledge everyone who submitted to this bill: written submissions, oral submissions, those who signed petitions, organised the Disability Support Services Bill day of action events across the country. I also want to take a moment to acknowledge that many of the oral submissions that the select committee heard contained very deeply personal and painful accounts of peoples’ lives. It wouldn’t have been easy for them to share that, let alone within a short period of time or with short notice. So I want to acknowledge them for that. The depth and the breadth of submissions reiterated just how diverse disability communities are, but how united they are when it comes to calling for a better disability support system—one that promotes their rights and enables them to live with dignity, like their non-disabled counterparts, and when it comes to calling for a society that stops disabling them.

The Minister has consistently said—and she has reiterated in the House today—that her intention with this bill is to provide clarity, to provide certainty, and transparency to disabled people. I would argue and have throughout the passage of this bill through this Parliament that it does none of that. In fact, it provides disabled people and carers with less certainty. I will lay out how.

She has also said that this bill reflects current practise through her contributions in this House. That is the problem. So back in the 2020 to 2023 term when Labour was in Government, we had progressed work to transform the disability support system. To align it much more closely with the Enabling Good Lives (EGL) principle that gives disabled people greater choice and certainty over the services that they access. Through Budget 2022, there was $100 million budgeted for that work programme. This Government had a choice when they took office: to continue that work, which was a step change towards transforming a system that gives disabled people more choice and control, but they chose not to. They chose, instead, to stop the transformation work that would have shifted us towards Enabling Good Lives principles and to use that money for other things instead. That would have been a significant step towards a national rollout of EGL that disability communities have been calling for. Instead, the direction of travel has been derailed.

At the committee of the whole House stage, the Minister said it was just a different approach adopted by this Government. I would argue it is a substandard approach that is adopted by this Government. It is unambitious, because what she has chosen to do is instead to codify into law a system that is fragmented and wasn’t working for disabled people and carers. It provides less certainty because there is too little detail in primary legislation and too much of a reliance of detail in secondary legislation. She has argued that that is because it will then afford future Ministers greater flexibility because one size doesn’t fit all, and I accept that; however, it also allows future Ministers to tighten eligibility criteria, for example.

I asked the Minister during the committee of the whole House stage why basic details like who’s able to access this funding, who is eligible to access this funding—this is criteria that has been in place since 1996—why wasn’t that then written into this legislation if it is meant to reflect the current state of play? She didn’t respond. I put to her that that allows a future Minister to tighten eligibility criteria for certain types of disability funding. She neither confirmed that nor denied that. I believe that that speaks volumes. Even if it allows a future Minister to widen eligibility criteria for certain types of disability support funding, if that is not matched with funding uplifts, then that does a disserve to disabled people as well. We have seen that happen in the past when autism was included into eligibility criteria back in 2013, from memory.

This is in the context of a constant state of flux due to changes, pauses, and freezes that this Government has put into place, to the point that disabled people and carers came to select committee and talked to us about the state of exhaustion that they are in and the fact that they are living in a state of anxiety because they don’t know what changes are coming next. This bill does nothing to give them certainty that there will not be further changes that will take away funding from them.

It also has the potential to expand income and means testing beyond current settings. That was a worry for many who came to select committee. It legislates that families have a duty of care, without including any safeguards or complaints mechanisms or appeals mechanisms. That is leading to a heightened state of anxiety as well.

Submitters were clear that they are exhausted and worried about the bill’s emphasis on family supports without safeguards. While the select committee did suggest some changes that the Minister and that the Government have adopted, because of the significant outrage to these particular clauses, there is no clarity in the bill that states explicitly that family support is complementary to funded support and that it will not be relied upon before funded support is provided.

The bill does not reference Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Enabling Good Lives principles, or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Changes made by the select committee just lift and shift some words from the UNCRPD and EGL, but it does not change the fundamental bill to make it a rights-based foundation for disability support services. As CCS Disability Action notes, “The Bill rewrites the relationship between disabled people and the Government, and it does it without asking Māori.” In fact, it didn’t ask anyone. Nothing about us without us was out the window, because there was no consultation on the changes to legislation at all.

Going back to means testing is problematic anyway, but doing so in a context where so much has been taken away from disabled people that then increases their cost of living is incredibly problematic. We have an abundance of evidence that shows that both household and individual incomes are lower for disabled people when compared to their non-disabled counterparts. We know that they are disproportionately represented when it comes to both unemployment and underemployment.

We know that the Government has reduced their contribution to the Total Mobility transport scheme that so many disabled people rely on to get around their communities. That means that they have to pay so much more from their pocket to be able to get around. That means that the blind woman who told me that she now has to make a decision between picking up her kids from school or going to work, or another person who said to me he relies on Total Mobility and has asked his family members to bring forward his birthday money so that he can use that to get around and meet his obligations. Bringing back prescription fees adds about $60 or more to a disabled person’s cost of living worries.

Food insecurity: food prices have gone up for everyone, but we know that a household with a disabled person is 82 percent more likely to be food insecure and struggle with that. Housing: having removed Kāinga Ora’s target for accessible housing, stopping My Home My Choice that would have provided alternatives to young people in their 20s and 30s from living in aged care residential homes.

So much that this Government has done has taken away from disabled people and has meant that the amount they have to fork out just to live with some level of dignity is obscene. For a Minister to then say at the committee stage—and I quote—“At no time did I ever make any comment about disabled people being a financial burden to the State and I find that offensive.”, actions speak louder than words. So many changes that this Government has made—conscious political decisions made by this Government—have meant that disabled communities are going backwards and are struggling even more than they ever have.

None of us can afford another three years of a National Government. Disabled people cannot afford three more years of a National Government that has just taken away from them, that has made their lives harder, and that has not done anything to make the society that we live in one that is more accessible. We will change that.

Debate interrupted.

Local Government (Rates Capping) Amendment Bill

Recording of Party Position