Goodbye Lotteries: the Government is cutting our disability funding, again

Major changes are coming to the Lottery Grants Board. The Individuals with Disabilities fund is being cut for good, with funding being prioritised to organisations providing services to the broader disability sector instead.

Applying for a Lottery Grant has been a rite of passage for many disabled people. Just like voting for the first time or getting your driver’s licence, applying for a Lottery Grant involves research, paperwork and a fair dose of anxiety.

We should never have had to, but many of us relied on the Lottery Grants Board – $12,467,540 which was allocated for disabled individuals in the 2025/26 financial year – to help fund mobility vehicles, assistance dogs or equipment essential for our daily lives.

Often these items are expensive (i.e. up to $150,000 for a mobility van) and it’s nowhere near the same cost non-disabled people pay for an equivalent that meets their needs.

The importance of this funding avenue has been underscored for decades, with even a dedicated page on the Disability Support Services website instructing us to apply for a Lottery Grant to fund things like modified vehicles.

With our underfunded public health and welfare systems, many of us have had no choice but to depend on Lotteries to fund the resources we need to live a good life and access the community. However, having a Lottery Grant as a last resort for funding will no longer be the case.

Without community consultation, other major changes are also coming. As well as ring-fenced funding for disabled individuals being removed, the committee structures are also changing. This includes disestablishing the current specialist and regional committees – including the Individuals with Disabilities committee – and instead setting up six new regional committees and one new national committee. The six new regional committees are:

• Upper North Island (Auckland, Northland)

• Central and Western North Island (Waikato, Taranaki)

• Eastern North Island (Bay of Plenty, Gisborne & Hawkes Bay)

• Lower North Island (Manawatū/Whanganui and Wellington/Wairarapa)

• Canterbury/Kaikōura and Chatham Islands

• Rest of South Island (West Coast/Nelson-Tasman/Marlborough and Otago/Southland)

According to the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), these changes will “allow for more strategic funding decisions”. But it doesn’t really seem ‘strategic’ when specialists in a sector are removed from making decisions on how to fund that sector.

So we approached DIA to get clarification on what is happening and how it could impact disabled communities. We asked them if there is a risk that, without ring-fenced funding and specialist committees, disabled people will miss out, and funding decisions may lack the same level of sector-specific expertise.

Reading between the lines, it appears the strategy is to move away from individual need to broader community reach. DIA’s Hoani Lambert confirmed that: “individuals will no longer be eligible for funding for items such as mobility vans”.

“Instead, organisations providing services to the disability sector will be able to apply for funding for operational costs or project costs,” he said. “The Department’s Community advisors will work with communities including local and national disability sector groups to help them navigate the new committee structure.”

Lambert said community representation “remains a core design principle” of the new committees, which will consist of individuals with regional knowledge.

However, Wellington local Henrietta Bollinger, who received a Lottery Grant a few years ago for a mobility van, said cutting specialist knowledge out of this process is concerning.

“You actually do need people on those committees who understand the implications for different communities' lives and for disabled people's lives. Someone without some community knowledge is not necessarily going to recognise the implications that has for someone's life.”

Bollinger was also concerned that removing ring-fenced funding for particular communities was going to make the funding landscape more challenging with groups pitted against each other.

“You can't measure the benefit that I would get from a car against the investment in a Māori or Pacific community. They have to be judged on their own merits and by people that are in touch with the needs of those communities.”

They said being able to travel is “pretty fundamental”. “Being able to get out, connecting your whole life up, being able to get from home to wherever else you need to be.”

Earlier this year, the Government also announced changes the Total Mobility Scheme. The subsidy is being reduced from 75% to 65%, making travel even more limited and expensive for disabled people. “I can see this certainly being a fear for disabled people,” Bollinger said.

For Bollinger, having a mobility van has been “life-changing”.

“The first major trip that I took was to a friend's out-of-town wedding. And for the first time I knew that I would be able to take the wheelchair that suited me best for that, rather than having to compromise between going and being comfortable and independent, because those are the trade-offs that you're making.”

“In terms of my continued ability to have this independence and freedom and independent transport, it sort of relies on being able to come up with quite a large amount of money a second time and I'm not sure where else that would be able to come from if not the Lotteries Board,” Bollinger said.

DIA’s Lambert said: “We want to reassure people that the committee structure changes do not impact the amount of funding that is available or the criteria that funding can be provided for under the Gambling Act (2003).”

Further information regarding the changes would be provided to communities, hapū and iwi in July.