Turner Judy: Disability (United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Disability (United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Bill — First Reading 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak in support of the first reading of the Disability (United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Bill. United Future believes it is a good thing that New Zealand joins with other countries and that we benchmark ourselves against international best practice and against international standards. 
United Future believes that New Zealand is a world leader in its thinking and its philosophy towards the disability sector but we also believe that New Zealand is currently underperforming when it comes to meeting its own standards let alone any international ones. Let me give members some examples. Currently schools in my area are dipping into their general operational grant to meet the shortfall in Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Scheme funding for students with special needs. This is unsustainable and unacceptable. Any Government that is serious about changing outcomes for people with impairments needs to look seriously at new money for that part of the education sector. 
In some areas in New Zealand we have a chronic shortage of appropriate respite carers for children with high and complex needs for teenagers with high and complex needs and for adults with high and complex needs. However I suggest—and United Future would suggest—that if we were actually supporting families better with their impaired family members the need for respite may drop significantly. 
Previous speakers have talked about the need to increase and improve the services around supported employment opportunities and about the general ability for people to participate in things that are happening in their community. We need to upgrade the needs-assessment protocols here in New Zealand and we need to make sure that needs-assessments are kept separate from those who fund and provide services so that honest and true assessments are done even if we have to admit that we cannot currently meet the level of service that those needs require. We also believe that New Zealand is falling behind in some areas in providing services in a timely way and that people are waiting far too long for an upgrade of essential equipment to help them participate in everyday New Zealand society. 
United Future supports the call from the sector to have a much greater level of individualised funding. We have too few people—we could count them; it is fewer than 100—who are currently receiving individualised funding. This is the only sector in New Zealand society whose members get told how to live their lives who is going to walk in the door and who is going to clean their flat. They have so little say so little power and so little autonomy over their own lives. 
We also believe that the way in which we audit service providers needs to be fixed up. Currently we are very focused on compliance and safety standards. We have very little focus on service development an area that would be hugely welcomed by people who are reliant on those services. We do very little to include the clients themselves in the audit process. 
United Future agrees with the Green Party that currently this sector does not enjoy proper parliamentary scrutiny. We would welcome the establishment of either a commission or a ministry that focused solely on the needs of this sector in a holistic way so that clients are not having to get needs-assessment for every little pottle of money around Government departments that they need to access. We would also like to see parliamentary scrutiny of how that money is spent because one of the things that concerns us is that there is a huge amount of wastage currently. That alone if it were tidied up could provide some much-needed resources to people who currently go without. 
Our approach to accommodation within the community needs to be reviewed because what we have done is close down institutions and in many cases we have established a lot of mini-institutions with similar philosophies and similar protocols. We need to change that so people have homes to live in not an institutions. 
It is unacceptable to United Future that there is a huge gap in services between those with trauma-based disabilities and those with non - trauma-based disabilities. I think we have to be honest about the fact that this is going to be costly and that the money is not going to be easily found in current budgets. So we need to be looking at new funding models to discover how we are going to address the complete inequity that currently exists for people with non - trauma-based impairment. 
I think greater acknowledgement needs to be given to those who enjoy a different culture because of the world they live in due to impairment. I think the deaf community is a classic example of a group of people who enjoy a specific culture of their own and that needs to be recognised acknowledged and celebrated here in New Zealand. 
In the last couple of weeks my family has welcomed into our ranks a new little girl who has Down’s syndrome. We are very excited to have her as a member of our family. I have spoken to her grandparents and parents and said this is a great time in New Zealand for a special child like this to be born into our family. I believe that the types of things we are setting in place by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities will be building for her a future that 20 years ago families would not even have been able to dream of. So our commitment to this is at a very personal level. We are also committed to all those we have spoken to over the last few months who live with impairment and who because of the constraints and barriers we place as able-bodied people on their inclusion are therefore labelled disabled. United Future is happy to support this first reading.