A shock announcement about service cuts from the Ministry of Disabled People, delivered via social media, caused panic and grief. That was just the beginning of a chaotic few weeks, involving condemnations of the move from outside and inside the Government and an apology from the ministry – but crucially, not a reversal of the changes.
Today’s episode of The Detail explains how it unfolded.
“Whaikaha [Ministry of Disabled People] put a post on its social media pages and updated its website to say that the purchasing guidelines had been changed,” says Newsroom journalist Emma Hatton.
“The purchasing guidelines are a list of criteria that people who receive certain disability supports can use to guide whether they are able to purchase something … what Whaikaha did is they changed that criteria and they made it more restrictive so they narrowed what people could purchase.”
Dr Rebekah Graham, the national executive officer of Parents of Vision Impaired NZ, says the funding stream most parents receive is called Carer Support.
“Traditionally you could only use it to pay for a support worker,” she says.
But that changed over time and became more flexible, to allow families to meet their individual needs.
“Instead of just being for a care worker, you could actually start using it for things that gave you, as the carer, a bit of a break.”
This could include things like going overseas to attend a specialised programme, a tablet to keep a child engaged while a parent had a moment to sit down, or devices used to monitor a diabetic child’s blood sugar overnight so that parents don’t have to wake every few hours to make sure their child doesn’t die in their sleep.
Graham says that, as she understands it, these changes will get rid of those options.
“It hasn’t been this grim in such a long time. Because as parents we’re so enmeshed in the system, it’s so familiar to us, we recognise the language. As soon as we read the announcement, we knew that all of our supports were gone… some parents were really distressed.”
Emma Hatton says the ministry told their minister, Penny Simmonds, about budget issues on February 22.
“They said that they were getting really close to spending more than what they had been allocated in the budget, and so in order to make it to the end of the financial year, they would need to stop spending. One of the ways they decided to stop spending is by restricting what disabled people and their carers could purchase.”
What happened between then and the announcement remains a bit of a mystery, Hatton says.
However, Finance Minister Nicola Willis has said the announcement caught her by surprise. The budget will be topped up to get through the end of the year, but “that doesn’t change what has been adjusted with the purchasing guidelines, so that doesn’t actually help real people on the ground,” Hatton says.
“Willis has confirmed that Cabinet has decided that any further decisions now that this ministry makes about changing its criteria or its funds or anything that like needs to be properly consulted, properly sequenced.
“So basically, if this ministry wants to do anything from now on, it’s going to have to get its minister Penny Simmonds to take a paper to Cabinet and then Cabinet will have to sign off on it.
“That’s quite a level of oversight, quite a step up.”
Willis has promised the ministry will get “vast orders of magnitude more” in frontline service funding – but how much remains unclear.
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The “investigations” never seem to get to the “why” question. This funding was already available through the Department of Health via the DHB’s, and has been for some years. Presumably, when the new ministry was set up the transfer of funds from MoH was much less that it should have been; or the administrative costs for the scheme incurred by the MoH were not identified and transferred; or the MoH knew the programme was already unsustainable and thus was cross-subsidised within the Department budget. Whatever, there was a shortfall. The question is whether that was “an oversight” ( poor accounting?) or a deliberate attempt to scuttle the new ministry. Being New Zealand, nobody is likely to investigate let alone be held accountable. And yes, I used to be a senior manager in a Department, and yes, I also have a “high needs” spouse so I know how it works.