Aotearoa voted for a new government. Here's what life could look like for us

Aotearoa has voted in a new government. The preliminary results show National with 38.95% of the party vote and are likely to form a coalition with Act, which got 8.98%, to form a majority in Parliament. 

Political parties play a crucial role in designing policies that affect our lives - whether it’s for better or worse. Although this is not an extensive list, here’s a few key policies promised by National and Act prior to the election that could impact our communities in the next three years.

Health

National

• Repealing the free prescription subsidy and capping total annual prescription costs for an individual or family at $100. Free prescriptions for over 65’s and those on low incomes.
• Use targets to focus the health system on improving outcomes across five priority areas: shorter stays in the emergency department; faster cancer treatment; improved immunisation; shorter wait times for first specialist assessment; shorter wait times for surgery.
• Investing $724 million over four years in Pharmac
• Introduce the Mental Health Innovation Fund, which will see up to $20m in matching funds being distributed to community mental health organisations

Act

• Establish a separate stand-alone entity called Mental Health and Addiction New Zealand (MHANZ), which would give patients the right to choose between a range of providers instead of the current system of accepting what their DHB offers.
• Publicly subsidise more of the common elective surgeries in private hospitals through competitive tender.
• To seek an independent review of Pharmac’s operating model for greater transparency and timeliness in decision making, a more strategic focus, and a productivity perspective based on real lives.
• Abolish the Māori Health Authority.

Social Welfare and Benefits

National

• No commitment to increases to the Child Disability or Disability Allowances.
• Reinstate indexing benefits to inflation rather than wages, ensuring that beneficiaries’ support adapts to real changes in living expenses while maintaining a reasonable gap between benefits and potential earnings. This would also impact the Supported Living Payment.
• Introduction of the Job benefit traffic light system for benefit sanctions with sanctions ranging from frequent check-ins to benefit suspension and community work. The existing rule that jobseekers with children can only receive a maximum 50% benefit reduction sanction of their benefit payment will be maintained.

Act 

• Require Ministry of Social Development case managers to consider whether all reasonable treatment options have been pursued before deciding whether a medical condition should be accepted as permanent.
• Expand the roles of regional health advisors and ‘designated doctors’ to pick up on fraud and ineligibility, ensure people are on the correct benefit, and are supported to meet any job seeking obligations.
• Enable doctors to complete work capacity certificates privately to avoid having to provide advice under duress.

Accessibility

Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 9, accessibility is to “enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life” and that “States Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure persons with disabilities access on an equal basis with others”. 

National

• On the CCS Disability Action Scorecard, National answered that they were undecided about committing to a rewrite of the Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill that includes codesign with disabled people and includes enforceable accessibility standards; will not commit to introducing regulations to ensure public housing and private residential new builds to meet Lifemark Universal Design standards.

Act

• On the CCS Disability Action Scorecard, Act answered they were undecided about committing to a rewrite of the Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill that includes codesign with disabled people and includes enforceable accessibility standards; will not commit to introducing regulations ensure public housing and private residential new builds to meet Lifemark Universal Design standards. 
• Completely abolish the Human Rights Commission.

* Thanks to CCS Disability Action for this analysis of parties’ policies. It has been re-published with permission.

p.s. Sign up to our newsletter below to receive your weekly dose of disability joy straight to your inbox!