I’m an immigrant to New Zealand–an immigrant with a disability.

Though I’ve worked in the disability sector most of my professional life, I’ve never considered myself a disability advocate or educated historian on disability rights.

however, I am an observer, and it has been interesting seeing how my new country responds to disability issues.

When I started this blog, my premise was to prove disability issues are everyone’s issues and effect every segment of society.

Disability is no respecter of race, religion, gender, or socioeconomic background.

According to the Office of disability issues one out of four New Zealanders has a disability.

35 percent of these are over the age of 65.

In simple terms, there is a high chance that as one ages they will acquire some form of physical or cognitive impairment.

Most of my early posts were taken from news articles from NZ media outlets such as Stuff, NZ Herald and covered a wide variety of stories from NZ’s participation in the Paralympics to a bank card reeking havoc on Wellington parking metres.

What might these issues have to do with the non-disabled society?

Kiwis love sports and are proud of all their athletes—in the US Paralympics barely gets a mention by news media.

As for the parking metres, this well-meaning attempt by a local bank inconvenienced everyone.

The article on problems with the 2018 Census showed how not only disabled New Zealanders but people living in rural areas or the elderly were affected by issues surrounding the online Census.

I shared blogs from voices in the disability community on issues surrounding public transport and access to public streets and the invisibility of the disabled community in statistics surrounding NZ’s unemployed.

This shows the strong voice disabled advocates have in the country.

The assignment was to examine our topic through a bi-cultural lens.

This will be easy, I thought.

After all, NZ has a strong bi-cultural identity for a colonial country.

My premise that disability issues are society’s issues would certainly equally include Maori.

I was only half right.

The Human Rights Act of 1993 protects all New Zealanders—including those with disabilities and ensures all are treated fairly and equally.

This would also include disabled Maori, so Maori would experience the same types of discrimination as Pakeha.

 

But disability is like an onion, once you start peeling back the layers you realise they aren’t all part of the same whole.

Maori have a higher incidence of disability—about one and three.

This averages about 26 percent of the Maori population as compared to 24 percent of non-Maori.

There was a higher incidence in Maori males, people over age 65, and children.

Many reasons were cited for these statistics—including work in manual labour, lack of healthcare, unhealthy lifestyles, and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Coming back to my original premise with this blog, these were certainly issues that transcended disability—healthcare, education, workplace safety, and aged care.

But when I pulled back another layer, there was something else going on.

Maori had the same rights as any other disabled person to the plethora of support services available in NZ, but in some of the blog posts I shared the services were not meeting Maori needs from a cultural perspective.

The social and medical models of disability have long been the accepted practice of rehabilitation in developed countries.

These models treat either the disability as something that needs to be fixed or as resulting from a societal barrier or attitude.

The Maori worldview of disability goes beyond the individual and encompasses whanau, iwi, and the wider community.

It takes a holistic approach, drawing on past and present, with spiritual components.

The challenges for service providers is to work within this framework to identify which Maori may benefit from this cultural approach.

Disabled Maori, like any group or subgroup of disabled are not homogenous.

This means some may be open to a cultural approach while others aren’t interested.

Historically, Maori voices have been left out of disability forums and policy making.

Wha¯ia Te Ao Ma¯rama literally translated means pursuing the world of enlightenment and is the title of the Maori disability action plan, part of the New Zealand Disability Strategy which guides the work of government agencies on disability issues from 2016 to 2026.

This action plan suggests though there has been progress more work needs to be done—especially in the areas of disability responsiveness.

 

In conclusion, I feel I did prove my original point that disability issues are everyone’s issues.

I called this blog Mahi Tahi which means working together and only by working together and accepting separate identities and ideals can we come together as one whole.

NZ’s social justice battle cry seems to be “Nothing about us without us.”

But this is still a work in progress.