Delahunty Catherine: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10176. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Thank you Mr Chair; I appreciate that. I would just like to hold up the picture of what it all means. As Kris Faafoi my colleague said this is what it all means. If you want to understand clause 3 of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2) this is it. It is almost matching the suit of the Minister of Health. It is a great little diagram of what we are really trying to achieve here and what it all means.I think it is really important to talk about the principal Act in relation to the amendment. That is what this clause is about. There is a fundamental issue here around what other Acts have or have not been considered in amending the principal Act. Others have referred to the Human Rights Act. I would also refer us back to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act which has been breached in this case; Te Tiriti o Waitangi given that Whānau Ora is about the principle of families being able to work together and this bill attacks that when it limits who can actually receive this funding; and the Employment Relations Act which maybe should have been amended to include a recognition of what is about to be done to people by giving them less than the minimum wage.These are fundamental principles but the real issue I just wanted to touch on is the problem that is built into the principal Act and that we are entrenching in this clause 3 and this amendment bill. That is the idea that disability is a health issue. That is a fundamental problem that both of these pieces of legislation are entrenching. My partner has a lifelong disability. He is not sick. He does not have a health issue. Many many people affected by the carers’ issues are not sick. Making them sick and categorising them in the health budget means that they are treated as if they are sick and they might get better instead of treating them as citizens with permanent conditions that are manageable providing they have their human rights. It is not the same as being sick. It is very discriminatory what is happening in the clause and what is happening in the principle. For many people such as my partner the lifelong categorisation of being invalid—invalid or “in-valid”—has been problematic.What we need to do is recognise that an independent bill should have been created to recognise the rights of family members to choose carers because this is an issue of rights. In amending the principal Act what we have done is entrench the idea that it is about sick people being looked after. This is in many ways a disempowering model both for the carer and for the person who has chosen the family member to care for them because they are not sick; they are actually people who want full participation in every aspect of society. They perhaps have a lifelong condition that means they have particular challenges but they are not ill. They are not necessarily ill and going to recover. So you get these limitations of caring packages and you get these misunderstandings about the nature of rights entrenched in this clause and entrenched in this relationship with the principal Act. What that does is undermine both the self-determination of the person living in a disabling society and the carer who is trying to support that person in their self-determination.I know that is very complex for people who have avoided this issue and who just lump it all together into “health and disability” a tidy little package: “People with something wrong with them. What can we do to fix them?”—a disempowering model not a 21st century model and not appropriate.If I had spoken on the commencement I would have talked about another name for the bill which would have been “Too Little Too Late Too Bad Shut Up” because that is actually the real name of this bill. [Interruption] Shall I say that again: “Too Little Too Late Too Bad Shut Up”. That is what this clause does when it does not recognise its impact on the Human Rights Act. It fixes itself in a bill in a law that has not been set up with the right order in terms of health and disability which is what I am talking about. The principal Act is amended and what it does is entrench a definition of people’s rights as carers and as people needing care that is problematic.I would like to think about the dark room where all of these decisions got made a dark room that has been dark since 2000-and-something where they have been talking about amending the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act and they have come up with this clause. How did they do that? They did not do that by consulting with the people most affected because otherwise we would not be here today with this mess inclause 3. We would actually be in a clear situation where we had a decent piece of legislation before us that was a facilitator of the rights-based approach that is necessary to empower people.