Cash over care: Waikato group urges major rewrite of disability bill

Tuesday, 30 June 2026

A Waikato advocacy group has slammed a proposed Bill it warns could leave disabled people - and their families - in the lurch.

The Waikato Enabling Good Lives submission on the Disability Support Services Bill argues that the Bill should ensure any family or community support couldn't be used to axe entitlements.

While acknowledging that families often provide valuable support, the submission said the proposal could reduce access to funded services and create obligations that did not apply to other New Zealand families.

'It gives decision-makers a statutory basis to reduce or deny funded support on the assumption that a disabled person's family should be providing more,' the submission said.

“It fails to account for the reality that many disabled people have complex, strained, or absent family relationships. It risks entrenching dependency on unpaid family care rather than supporting disabled people to build the self-determined lives they choose.”

Submissions on the bill are now being heard by the select committee, which will report back in August.

It was introduced by Minister for Disability Issues Louise Upston in May, and if passed into law, will overturn last year’s Supreme Court decision recognising parents caring full-time for disabled adult children as government employees.

The bill introduces the principles that, where appropriate, families have responsibility for their whānau in the first instance, and that before being provided with Government support, “an eligible person should, where appropriate, use their resources and any other support that is available to them”.

Upston has commented that there are no plans to means-test disability support, but the group is concerned about the future direction of disability support under the bill.

The submission said Waikato hosted one of the original EGL demonstrations, which gave disabled people greater choice over where they lived, who supported them, what they did during the day and how they purchased their own supports. It argues the proposed legislation moves away from that vision.

The group existed because when disabled people were genuinely placed at the centre of their own lives and support, “it works”, the submission said.

The bill was primarily shaped by the need to protect the Crown’s financial interests and it showed.

“We are not asking the committee to ignore fiscal reality. We are asking it to insist that disabled people are treated as rights holders with mana, not as risks to be managed. Those two things are not incompatible — but this bill, in its current form, chooses one over the other.”

Rather than opposing the bill outright, the submission urged Parliament to make substantial amendments before it became law.

Among eight recommended changes, it called for the bill to be written to ensure that, while family and community support could be considered in a needs assessment, it could not be used to reduce the support a disabled person would otherwise receive.

It also urged evidence of “genuine co-design — not merely consultation — with disabled people” before the Bill progressed.

Other recommendations included a Te Tiriti o Waitangi provision consistent with recent health sector legislation, better complaints and review mechanisms, explicit definitions, and references to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.