The New Zealand Disability Strategy

The New Zealand Disability Strategy, launched in 2001, has the vision of an inclusive society that highly values disabled people and continually enhances their participation. The Disability Strategy was developed from consultation between government and the disability sector. It has been endorsed by both the disability sector and the government as the way forward for action on disability issues, providing a framework for government actions to remove barriers.

The New Zealand Disability Strategy and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities guide government’s actions towards disabled people. The focus of both documents is that disabled people have the same rights of citizenship as everyone else, including the same opportunities to participate in society and to lead lives similar to those of other people.

While departments’ effective implementation of the Disability Strategy is not the only factor in improving outcomes for disabled people, it is a crucial factor. All government departments are required to report annually on their plans for implementing the Disability Strategy and the progress they have made over the last year.

Progress to date

An independent review of departments’ implementation of the New Zealand Disability Strategy, released in August 2008, found that central government agencies have undertaken a significant level of activity to implement the Disability Strategy.

However, progress had not been as fast as disabled people wanted, and had tended to focus on departments gaining a greater understanding of disability issues. The review recommended, among other changes, that departments focus more on activities that will make a real difference to disabled people.

Other sources of information have also indicated that much more needs to happen:

• the September 2008 report of the Social Services Select Committee’s inquiry into the quality of care and service provision for disabled people said the overall implementation of the Disability Strategy had been unsatisfactory
• information from the three Disability Surveys conducted by Statistics New Zealand – in 1996, 2001 and 2006 – found that, for each of the survey years, disabled people continued to have poorer outcomes than non-disabled people.

Future directions

The first actions of this government included its decisions to establish the Ministerial Committee on Disability Issues, and to create the position of Associate Minister for Disability Issues. These decisions were made to increase leadership and accountability for disability issues, and to help make sure all departmental work affecting disabled people focuses on what will make a real difference in their lives. The Committee first met in June 2009.

In September 2009, the Ministerial Committee decided that the best opportunities for making rapid and effective progress on implementing the Disability Strategy would result from focusing explicitly on those things that influence disabled people’s ability to undertake the basic activities necessary for their participation in society.

This approach is based on the outcomes framework developed by the Office for Disability Issues to help departments implement the Disability Strategy, as presented in the diagram below:

The outcomes framework is based on the principle that, if disabled people are to get access to opportunities to participate in the areas of life appropriate to their age and stage of life, they must be able to undertake the basic activities required to do so. Whether they can undertake these activities will depend on a number of things: their personal circumstances, and those of their whānau and friends who support them; the accessibility of the world we live in, in relation to both its physical environment and its social environment, including the services it provides for everyone; and the degree to which specialised disability supports work for them.

The Ministerial Committee therefore wants departments to make sure their actions to implement the Disability Strategy are focused on these areas of influence:

• resourceful citizens
• accessible New Zealand and
• modern disability supports.

What this report does

This report provides an overview of government departments’ achievements over 2008/2009 in implementing the New Zealand Disability Strategy, and the actions they have planned for 2009/2010 and beyond. The actions are organised according to their relationship to the areas of resourceful citizens; accessible New Zealand; and modern disability supports.

Not all achievements and planned actions are included in this report. Furthermore, this report does not refer to actions which departments initiated earlier and which are now incorporated into departmental work plans as ‘business as usual’ actions. However, the full versions of all the departmental reports will be published on the Office for Disability Issues’ website.