Legislative and Cabinet mandates

The Disability Strategy is mandated under the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000. Under this Act the Minister responsible for disability issues is required to report to Parliament each year on progress in implementing the Disability Strategy.

When Cabinet released the Disability Strategy in April 2001 it directed 11 key government departments to prepare annual work plans to implement the Disability Strategy, and to report against these plans, beginning with the 2001/2002 year. This requirement was applied to all other government departments, and ACC, beginning with the 2002/2003 year. Agencies were expected to re-allocate resources and, if necessary, submit bids through the annual budget round for additional funding to implement the Disability Strategy.

Also, in August 2001, Cabinet agreed that papers submitted to the Cabinet Social Development Committee, and other Cabinet committees as appropriate, should include a disability perspective. Government agencies must, therefore, explicitly consider what impact, if any, their proposals will have on disabled people and their families and whānau before submitting a paper to Cabinet.

At the same time, the Government directed chief executives of public service departments to ensure their staff were familiar with the vision, objectives and actions in the Disability Strategy.

Outside of central government, District Health Boards have been required, under the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000, to have Disability Services Advisory Committees since 2001. While these committees have no responsibility under the Act for implementing the Disability Strategy many are driving this at District Health Board level.

Lead implementation agency

The Ministry of Health led the development of the Disability Strategy, including preparing draft documents, undertaking extensive public consultation and finalising the Disability Strategy with guidance from a sector reference group. The Ministry of Health was responsible for leading its implementation from April 2001 to June 2002. This responsibility transferred to the Office for Disability Issues from July 2002.

Participants suggest this shift had significant support from disabled people and the wider disability sector. This reflected beliefs that the Ministry of Health should not be the lead agency as the Disability Strategy uses a social model, not a health model, and when disability and health are considered together disability issues are often subsumed within health.

In July 2002, the Office for Disability Issues was established with three key functions:

• Developing policy advice:
  • leading strategic policy development regarding disability issues across the whole of government
  • contributing a disability perspective to policy development led by other government agencies
• Leading the Disability Strategy, promoting and monitoring its implementation across central and local government, the disability sector and the general public, and working closely with government agencies and other agencies to:
  • shift people’s thinking and increase disability awareness by developing a range of disability perspective material and information-sharing activities
  • actively assist government agencies to develop implementation plans and focus on actions that result in positive change for disabled people
  • measure the results of the above actions
• Supporting the Minister for Disability Issues.

Within central government, formal reporting requirements have meant that a clear picture exists of how implementation has evolved and developed since the launch of the Disability Strategy.

Each year the Office for Disability Issues invites government agencies to provide information on what their agency has done to implement the Disability Strategy that year, and their plans for implementing it over the next year. The approach taken by the Office for Disability Issues has evolved over time in response to government agencies’ plans and the Office’s own understanding of how to effect change.

Direction - earlier years: output and human resource focussed

When the Disability Strategy was launched in April 2001, the 11 central government agencies required to submit work plans to the Ministry of Health had already prepared their annual budgets and overarching plans for the year. For this reason, the focus of implementation from July 2001 to June 2002 was on extending or enhancing work already planned within existing budgets.

The 2002/2003 government agency implementation plans contained a strong orientation towards outputs. Often, the plans reflected a human resource/EEO focus, as their co-ordination was mainly the responsibility of government agencies’ human resource divisions. For some government agencies, a human resource approach continues to be the mechanism for implementing the Disability Strategy.

In May 2003, the Office wrote to departmental chief executives, suggesting that they give responsibility for implementing the Disability Strategy to one of their direct reports to ensure that all facets of their organisation were included in their implementation work plan, and asking that their plans include “targeted actions that will result in a real difference for disabled people who use the products and services of your department”. The letter was followed by a seminar for the staff responsible for writing the departmental plans.

Direction - later years: focus on priority areas, moving towards multi-year plans

Between 2004 and 2007, the Office’s promoting of the Disability Strategy progressively moved towards educating about and fostering a disability perspective amongst government agencies. This has been achieved through many strategic mechanisms undertaken by the Office, specifically:

• Inviting government agency officials to seminars offering a broad context for the Disability Strategy and outlining expectations for completion of work plans. These seminars also provided an opportunity for topical issues (e.g. website accessibility) to be presented and for participants to ask questions.
• Establishing relationships beyond human resources divisions to other areas within government agencies (e.g. corporate services divisions), which have greater reach within agencies.
• Using the forewords in the progress, reports from the Minister for Disability Issues and the Disabled Person’s Assembly, as leverage when communicating with government agencies.
• Redesigning the work plan template, with specific prompts relating to outcomes for government agencies to consider when completing their work plan and when reporting.
• Establishing a Disability Advisory Council to provide advice, from the perspective of disabled people, and their families / whānau, to the Office and wider government on the implementation of the Disability Strategy and action needed to progress this. The Council’s first meeting was held in May 2005.
• Streamlining and prioritising implementation work into two core groups:
  • ‘accessible government’ (i.e. being a good employer, having accessible buildings, services and information), which applies to all government agencies; and
  • ‘social policy priority areas’ (i.e. disability supports, transport, housing and the built environment, employment and income, education, health, sport and recreation, promoting knowledge about and visibility of disabled people, and public broadcasting), which involves a smaller number of key government agencies.

The Office for Disability Issues’ current approach is to:

• Ask all government agencies to plan for and report on their promotion of accessibility in relation to their public information, services, buildings and employment practices.
• Ask government agencies with social policy responsibilities to include a disability perspective in policy and service development, and to report on work they lead that makes a difference in the lives of disabled people.
• Encourage agencies to undertake multi-year planning, to enable more clarity about goals and steps to reach these, and to make progress towards these goals easier to measure.