The Government will not be appealing a court ruling allowing parents of disabled children to be paid as caregivers, Health Minister Tony Ryall announced this afternoon.
“The Government accepts the current Health Ministry policy of not paying the close family carers of adults with disabilities needs to change,” says Mr Ryall.
Today’s announcement means that a landmark decision made by the Court of Appeal last month will stand.
The Court of Appeal ruled that parents of disabled children are being unreasonably discriminated against by not being allowed to be paid as carers.
The case was taken to the Court of Appeal following an earlier hearing in the High Court in February that was told only rough estimates had been done of what it would cost the ministry to pay parents of disabled children. Estimates varied between $17 million and $593 million.
The ministry's policy of only paying for certain services if they were provided by a non-family member was found in the High Court to be in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of family status.
At that point the ministry appealed, arguing the Bill of Rights allowed for "reasonable limits of rights to achieve a sufficiently important governmental objective", but the Court of Appeal ruled the policy "imposed a limit that was greater than was reasonably necessary… and was not a reasonable limitation on the right to freedom from discrimination".
Mr Ryall says future policy will have to both address the discrimination and be affordable.
“The next step in the legal process is for the Human Rights Review Tribunal to consider and determine what remedies the families who made a claim to the Human Rights Tribunal will receive,” says Mr Ryall.
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