Speeches

Address to the National Residential Intellectual Disability

Ruth Dyson

19.10.2007

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to speak at your Conference today.

20/07/2006

Address to the National Residential Intellectual Disability Conference 2006

11.30am Dunedin Centre, Dunedin

Rau rangatira maa,
tenei te mihi ki a koutou i runga i te kaupapa o te ra.
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa.

[Distinguished guests, greetings to you gathered here for this purpose today. Greetings once, twice, three times to you all.]

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to speak at your Conference today.

As Minister for Disability Issues, taking part in events like this is a very enjoyable part of my job. I always welcome the chance to share Government’s thinking and progress on disability issues, to meet with people from the sector, and to learn more about what’s happening around New Zealand.

I strongly endorse this year’s conference theme of ‘Being the Best; Supporting the Supporters’. Your organisers have done a wonderful job of securing an impressive array of workshops, and I look forward to seeing what develops from the ideas and examples you will gather here.

Towards best practice

In thinking about what constitutes best practice, it’s useful to look at the themes of the New Zealand Disability Strategy. These themes guide the work of government agencies in achieving the Strategy’s vision of a fully inclusive society.

The first theme is upholding citizenship. People with disabilities are entitled to the same rights as other New Zealanders, and must not be denied these rights through institutional or attitudinal barriers. This is the social model of disability: that people are disabled through the barriers society creates, not through their impairments. As a society, our responsibility is to identify and remove those disabling barriers.

The next theme is building government capacity. To achieve the vision of the New Zealand Disability Strategy, the Government should be leading by example. This requires agencies to be responsive to and aware of the needs of disabled people and the wider disability sector; and to gather, share, and use good information to guide their decisions.

The third theme, improving disability support services, requires us to create a flexible and co-ordinated environment for services to operate within. Systems must be centred on the individual’s needs and be easy to access.

The fourth theme is promoting participation for disabled people in the community. This encompasses education, employment, quality living in the community, recreation and culture. As people with intellectual disabilities so plainly stated in the 2003 report To Have an Ordinary Life, this theme is very much about just that – enabling disabled people to have the ordinary life the rest of us take for granted.

The fifth theme of the Disability Strategy is addressing diversity of need. There is as much ethnic, cultural, personal, and geographic diversity among people with disabilities as among any other group in our society. We must be aware of and ensure we accommodate that diversity. One size does not fit all.

The five Strategy themes provide a framework for changing attitudes and promoting best practice. April this year was the fifth anniversary of the Strategy’s launch, so this is a good time for us to recap our significant achievements for disabled people since 2001.

Achievements under the Disability Strategy

We’ve continued to close big institutions for people with intellectual disabilities. Eighty people who were living at Nelson’s Braemar Hospital moved into the community in December 2004. In April this year, more than 170 people at Levin’s Kimberley Centre had moved into the community. The Kimberley Centre will close soon, and the rest of the people living there will be in the community by this September.

We’ve launched Pathways to Inclusion, the government’s direction for a strong employment environment for disabled people. Pathways set out our goals for moving away from a sheltered workshop environment to one of real work for real pay for disabled people – and it’s achieving that goal. At the end of June 2005, almost 9,000 disabled people had moved into part-time or full-time jobs since we launched Pathways.

We’ve developed the New Service for Sickness and Invalids Benefit clients within Work and Income. The New Service gives much stronger support to people with disabilities who want to work. We’ve also removed anomalies like the 15-hour rule, which was a disincentive to work, and we’ve made more funding available for people who are employed under the State Services Commission’s Mainstream programme.

In 2002, we established the Office for Disability Issues. The Office provides advocacy for the disability sector, supports me as Minister, and monitors government agencies’ implementation of the Disability Strategy.

In 2004, we launched the Telecommunications Relay Service to help people with hearing and speech difficulties use telephone services.

In 2005, we established the Disability Advisory Council to provide advice on implementation of the New Zealand Disability Strategy, and on emerging disability issues. The Disability Advisory Council is made up of people with disabilities and their carers.

In April this year we passed the New Zealand Sign Language Bill, making NZSL an official language. The Bill places requirements on government agencies about how they communicate with the Deaf community, and gives Deaf people the right to use their own language if they have to go to court.

These are, if you like, a few of the highlights under the Strategy. Equally important is that each year, the progress reports show a steadily growing awareness and understanding of disability issues across government. It’s important to emphasise that reporting is more than a compliance exercise. Each year, the reports record and build our knowledge and understanding of disability issues and of the strategies needed to address these issues.

Improving service provision

The provision of long-term support services as one such issue. The Office for Disability Issues is currently leading a review of long-term disability supports to find ways for the system to work better for disabled people and their carers. Clearly, what we want is a system that supports disabled people to be independent and to take part in their communities.

Running parallel with this work is a Social Services Committee inquiry into the quality and care of services provision for disabled people. Submissions to the committee close on 25 August this year, and I strongly encourage people involved with the sector to have their say.

I don't want to comment on the origins of this inquiry but there has been an unfair perception created by people outside the supported living sector that people who have been moved out of institutions and who are now living in supported care are being abused and neglected. In my view this perception is wrong and it is a perception that I urge you to address. But please don't allow yourselves to be used for political purposes.

Accessible government

Another focus within Government is on the accessibility of government information online. Last year we conducted a two-stage review: checking government websites against international accessibility guidelines, and testing websites with a user panel comprising people with sight, hearing, intellectual, and mobility impairments.

I’m glad to report that the review found many agencies were making excellent progress toward meeting the international guidelines, and were making an effort to make their online information more accessible.

We’ve already seen improvements in several government websites, and the Office for Disability Issues is working with departments to further develop and improve the accessibility of their websites. Another survey will be conducted this year, with the aim of making it a regular event; and the State Services Commission is reviewing the e-government web guidelines to increase their emphasis on accessibility.

Conclusion

Until very recently in New Zealand’s history, disability issues were not on the public or political agenda. Just 30 years ago, people with disabilities were shut away from the rest of society. Change began in the 1970s, when funding started to filter out from institutions, more people moved into the community, and new services were developed.

Something that was even slower to change was social attitudes towards disability, particularly ‘hidden’ disabilities such as some types of intellectual disability.

When the fifth Labour Government took office in 1999, it was clear new thinking was needed to help reverse a number of widely held misconceptions that underpinned the prejudices confronting many disabled New Zealanders. These misconceptions included:

· that disabled people couldn’t work and had nothing to offer employers;
· that disabled people didn’t want the same things as other people – that they were content with, or certainly had to tolerate, a much lower standard of wellbeing and participation;
· that having a disability was a matter for embarrassment and exclusion, both for family members and for the disabled person themselves.

Today, the emphasis is on inclusion, on promoting opportunities for every New Zealander to lead good and fulfilling lives, on ensuring that every New Zealander enjoys the same fundamental rights. We have only really gathered that momentum towards inclusion over the past five or so years, and we fully intend to keep up the pace.

For we are now at a defining point on the continuum of change. Five years on from the launch of the Disability Strategy, five years on from the launch of Pathways, we have effectively reached the end of the transition period. Looking back, the transition has produced good results - support and services available to disabled New Zealanders today is markedly different from the late 1990s. However, as we have yet to realise a truly inclusive society, we must keep striving for change.

Continuing the progress is the motivation behind the establishment of the sector working party that met in April. Seventeen representatives from sheltered and supported employment, community participation and cross-sectoral services throughout the country attended. The role of this working party is to develop and implement projects that will address the issues identified by vocational services providers and the Ministry of Social Development. Their focus is to build the quality of services to improve the support provided to disabled New Zealanders.

This initiative will ensure all of us working in the disability sector continue to move forward in our journey of achieving the vision we set five years ago in the Disability Strategy. With each step we are closer to that truly inclusive society; a New Zealand where a person with disabilities can say “I live in a society that highly values my life and continually enhances my full participation.”

As your conference continues, let me encourage you to be inspired, to be determined to grab hold of new ideas, and to apply them in your own circumstances. Because it’s really the efforts of people such as you and the organisations you represent that will see our vision realised.

Thank you.

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