Services & Advocacy

Submissions

Submission to the Courts Matters Bills

This Bill makes a number of amendments to the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988. In particular, sections 136, 141 and 142 in the amendment Bill lower the threshold for courts to appoint more than 1 welfare guardian and to extend personal order to 5 years. The amendment Bill does this by removing the term exceptional circumstances from the criteria for these two actions. By lowering the threshold, both actions are likely to happen more often.

We believe further changes are needed to the Bill to make the lowering of these thresholds safe and practical.

Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill 25

Accessibility and universal design is a major focus for our organisation. CCS Disability Action runs the Mobility Parking Scheme. We have a nationwide network of access coordinators who work with local governments as well as the building and transport industries. We are rolling out a new accessibility app called Access Aware. We are a member of the Access Alliance, which is pushing for a new Access Law. We founded Lifemark, which is helping to increase the number of accessible houses. We have developed ways to collect data on accessibility, including the Measuring Accessible Journeys project and the Street Accessibility Audits.

Submission on the Child Poverty Reduction Bill

Requiring the publishing of regular statistics on child poverty is a positive step. Unfortunately, the current norm in New Zealand is to not collect data on the rate of child poverty amongst disabled children or the children of disabled parents/carers. As a result, we are concerned that disabled children as well as the children of disabled parents/carers will be invisible within the statistics required by this Bill. This in turn will result in policies that do not take into account the experiences of disabled children as well as whānau with disabled parents/carers.

We strongly believe that the Bill should explicitly require the inclusion of disabled children as well as the children of disabled parents/carers in reporting and target-setting.

Submission on the Living Standards Dashboard

We need more data on the experiences of disabled people. This data needs to be respectful, however, and value the lives of disabled people. We were concerned about how the Living Standards Dashboard proposal from the Treasury suggested using disability data. Our submission focuses on why the proposal was inappropriate.

Please Contact Us for access to specific submissions.

 

Briefings

We do briefings to a wide range of Ministers. These briefings introduce ourselves to the Minister and raise a few key issues. You can check out our briefings in the resources section. How would you bring about positive change, if you were a Minister?