Published September 2020

Crucial to ensuring a good quality of life is income adequacy for all whānau. However, the welfare system has been chronically underfunded since the benefit cuts of the early 1990s, and income support mechanisms for people with disability are particularly inadequate. There is a strong relationship between poverty and disability in Aotearoa; disability brings its own expenses, and yet people with disability sometimes receive such meagre incomes that they would consign even people without disability to material hardship. The greatest burden of disability-related unmet need and hardship falls disproportionately on Māori, despite Te Tiriti obligations, and Pacific peoples. Children with disability are doubly vulnerable to income inadequacy: both as children, and as people with disability. According to the 2013 New Zealand Disability Survey, parents of children with disability are 1.5 times more likely to report not having enough income than all parents (of both disabled and non-disabled children). There are various direct and indirect costs associated with raising a disabled child, including medical and therapy bills, and difficulty engaging in paid work.

This report reviews mechanisms of income support administered by the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Health, highlighting how allowances are far too low and difficult to access. Families and whānau must dedicate significant time and energy to receive what little financial support they are entitled to, creating a system that privileges those who have networks, disposable time and resources, and navigational knowledge of Pākehā systems. Given that Māori and Pacific peoples are disproportionately represented among those with disability, the status quo of an underfunded disability support system is worsening gross inequities in health and economic outcomes.

The authors are therefore calling for a review of the disability income support system in Aotearoa.

The recommendations centre on the need to make evidence-based decisions about income support mechanisms, with the goal of reducing socioeconomic deprivation among disabled children and among children who live in households with disabled adult/s. (From the Executive summary). Record #6933