The New Zealand Disability Strategy is Government's commitment to improve the lives of disable people in New Zealand. Since the Disability Strategy was launched in 2001, a great deal has been done to realise its vision and achieve its fifteen objectives.

This year's progress report, Work in Progress 2008, contains selected highlights of government agencies' achievements against the fifteen objectives during the year from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2008.  The full report from each agency is available to read on the Office for Disability Issues website www.odi.govt.nz.

Some notable achievements in this year's report include:

• A government-private sector partnership to establish an Employers' Disability Network - an employer owned and run organisation to support employers' understanding of disabled people, help more people into work and improve services to disabled customers.
• Changes, as part of the Working New Zealand programme, to increase the rates of employment for disabled people and people with ill health on benefits.
• Launching of the Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline, which provides a firm evidence-base for effective services and support for people with ASD.
• Sustained and increasing effort across government to make buildings, websites, services and information accessible for disabled people, including staff.

For future reports we will move to documenting achievements against multi-year plans. To achieve this, work is underway on developing a framework for longer-term planning and reporting against the Disability Strategy which makes targets and achievements more transparent in priority areas. Information and data from the Disability Survey and other sources will feed into this work as we strive to report on real changes in life outcomes for disabled people.

Jan Scown
Director
Office for Disability Issues