Four Promises, Fifty Years On

Norman Kirk once said people do not ask for much: someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to hope for. Fifty years later, it remains the most concise statement of what a decent society owes its citizens. It is also a promise New Zealand has never kept for a quarter of a million disabled New Zealanders.

Four policy commitments would keep it. They are usually presented as separate asks from the disability sector. They are not. They are one programme — the completion of the social democratic project for the people it has served least — and each maps directly onto one of Kirk’s promises.

First: someone to love. What stands between many disabled people and ordinary connection is not impairment but a support system that decides for people rather than with them — who enters their home, how their hours are allocated, what their week looks like.

A life administered is not a life lived. Enabling Good Lives reverses that settlement, putting funding and decisions in the hands of disabled people and their families, and more than a decade of evidence from the demonstration sites shows it works. Yet it remains a postcode lottery: a disabled person in Palmerston North can direct their own life; a disabled person in Wellington cannot. Progressives have never accepted that citizenship should depend on your address. The nationwide rollout is not a programme expansion. It is self-determination, extended to every disabled New Zealander as of right.

Second: something to hope for. New Zealand ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008, and has offered strategies and action plans ever since.

But hope built on aspiration alone corrodes. A consumer sold a faulty toaster has enforceable remedies. A worker denied their entitlements can go to the Employment Relations Authority.

A disabled person denied the supports needed for an ordinary life must rely on goodwill or years of litigation — and the Fleming case showed what happens when the state defines its own obligations: it defines them narrowly, so that families carry the cost.

Every other group facing discrimination eventually got legislative teeth. Enforceable disability rights legislation is not a new project; it is the unfinished chapter of the rights architecture that progressives built.

Third: somewhere to live. Disability carries a premium — equipment, transport, energy, healthcare — yet benefit levels are set as though it does not exist.

The result is that disabled people and their families are over-represented in every hardship statistic we collect, including among the children the child poverty consensus was meant to protect.

When benefit levels are set below the actual cost of a disabled life, the state has decided that a class of its citizens will live in poverty. Adequate incomes are funded because it’s the right thing to do — and, as research consistently shows, setting benefits to inadequate levels does not save the State money, it simply relocates cost to hospitals, emergency housing, and crisis services.

Fourth: somewhere to work. The current employment service measures success by exits from the benefit — any job, as fast as possible, regardless of whether it lasts or leads anywhere.

That is workfare logic, and it churns disabled people through insecure work, back into the service within the year. A career-focused service asks a better question: did this person build a working life, with security, progression, and fair pay?

At a time of persistent labour shortages, disabled New Zealanders are the largest pool of willing, capable, overlooked talent in the country. This is not charity. It is the labour market finally working.

These four commitments work together in an interconnected way. Rights without income are hollow; income without self-determination is administration; employment without rights is precarity. That is why they must be advanced together, and not traded off as competing priorities.

A decent society is measured not by the prosperity of those the system already serves, but by its willingness to keep its promises to those it has served least.

Norman Kirk named those promises fifty years ago. Disabled New Zealanders are still waiting for that aspiration to be fulfilled.

The task before us now is not to imagine something new, it is to finish what we started.

Nick Ruane,

Disability Rights activist.