NOVEMBER 2022

Tangata ako ana e te kāenga, te tūranga ki te marae, tau ana

A person nurtured in community contributes strongly to society.

 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ.
1 Corinthians 12:12 (NIV)

Tēnā koe!

In this month’s Policy Watch:

  • NZCCSS President appointed CE of Presbyterian Support Northern
  • NZCSSS Workforce Guide out soon
  • Join the campaign for a fairer future for all
  • Prepping for 2023: Exploring our economy
  • Wallets squeezed as food prices reach record rate of increase
  • Foodstuffs announces social supermarket expansion
  • Will the RMA replacement make a dent in Aotearoa’s housing crisis?
  • Kianga Ora borrowing capacity increased
  • Action Plan for Social Sector Commissioning launched
  • New petition seeks retention of half price fares
  • Disability toolkit for policymakers

Summary of recent NZCCSS submissions

Independent Electoral Review
NZCCSS supports changes that will strengthen the country’s democratic system, including lowering the voting age to 16, making voting accessible to people in prison, increasing the public’s understanding of the electoral system and extending the government term to 4 years. Read more >

 A Fair Chance for All
NZCCSS supports the findings of the Productivity Commission’s report and strongly recommends that the barriers identified be addressed within the public management system to diminish the drivers of disadvantage within our communities. Read more >

Long-Term Insights Briefing: The Long-Term Implications of our Aging Population for our Housing and Urban Features
NZCCSS welcomes this assessment and strongly encourages HUD to continue to communicate with aged care and disability service providers as this work progresses. Read more >

Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill
Generally, NZCCSS supports this Bill. However, without the inclusion of enforcement measures, we share the concerns of disabled people and advocate that this legislation does little to improve lives. Read more >

Review of Childcare Assistance
NZCCSS supports reviewing Childcare Assistance with a view to make the system easier to access and more supportive of whānau. We prefer a return to a universal family payment to mitigate the current administrative cost that tends towards the punitive. Read more >

Ethical guidance for a pandemic
NZCCSS supports the focus on the ethical guidelines to pandemic management being based on readiness and culturally appropriate foundations – foundations appropriate to the healthcare system even when not in crisis. Read more >

Potential Changes to Oranga Tamariki Act
NZCCSS holds the view that information sharing is imperative to combat a siloed approach but that it must be done in a manner that upholds the mana of tamariki and rangatahi. And, we maintain that the regulation of Special Guardianship Orders requires a child-centred approach that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Read more >
See all NZCCSS submissions on our website here.

NZCCSS President appointed CE of Presbyterian Support Northern

NZCCSS President Bonnie Robinson will take up the position of Chief Executive | Kaiwhakahaere Mātua of Presbyterian Support Northern (PSN), one of New Zealand’s largest charitable social, health and disability services providers. She will take up the role in January 2023, replacing Denise Cosgrove who is now Chief Executive of the Selwyn Foundation.

Currently, Bonnie is the Chief Executive of HBH Senior Living (formally Howick Baptist Healthcare), a not-for-profit provider of services to older persons.  She has worked for HBH for 11 years, steering the organisation’s expansion towards supporting seniors in the wider community, as well as those living in HBH’s aged care facilities. From a single rest home and hospital in Howick, HBH Senior Living now owns and manages several aged care facilities and community outreach services.

Congratulations Bonnie, from all of us at NZCCSS!

Read more about the PSN appointment here >

Read more about HBH Senior Living here >

Watch this Space: NZCSSS Workforce Guide out soon!

We’re excited to soon be releasing The Workforce Guide, a resource detailing the various roles and mahi of the inspiring people working in the community, health and social services sector. Along with role descriptions, we’ve included scenarios to show how different roles work together and profiles of the wonderful people who are doing the mahi. The guide is intended to support a deeper, wider understanding of the sector workforce, its diversity, the areas of speciality, and how we all fit together in supporting the people of Aotearoa New Zealand. We’re proud of this guide. It has been a tremendous labour of love from our policy analyst Melanie Wilson.

Coming soon on our website here >

EXPLAINER: 

Prepping for 2023: Exploring our economy

Election year 2023 is rapidly approaching. NZCCSS is planning a suite of information resources that we’ll release next year to help illuminate the issues likely to be underpinning some of the debate. As a precursor to that, Policy Analyst Hamish Jarvie has produced an explainer on our economy, delving into some of the key concepts, frames of reference and major issues.

Check it out here >

Join the campaign for a fairer future for all

Fairer Futures, a coalition of communities and organisations working and living on the frontlines of poverty, has created a petition calling on the government to ensure everyone in Aotearoa has the resources they need.

The campaign asks the Government to implement seven steps that will help ensure New Zealanders break free from poverty:

  1. Increase core benefit levels to the standard of liveable incomes
  2. Raise the minimum wage to the living wage
  3. Increase the Disability Allowance
  4. Overhaul relationship rules
  5. Remove sanctions
  6. Wipe debt owed to the Ministry of Social Development
  7. Improve supplementary assistance and urgent grants

Fairer Futures say these seven steps are a circuit breaker for people and whānau whose lives have been most disrupted by the cost of living crisis and the pandemic.

Find out more about the campaign or sign the petition here >

Celebrating children and those who support them

Yesterday, 20 November, was World Children’s Day. It is the date in 1959 when the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It is also the date in 1989 when the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

We’d like to take the opportunity to mihi all our members and the many other organisations who are working hard to better the lives of tamariki in Aotearoa New Zealand. Your work is so vital in the face of growing need. What you do not only helps the lives of the tamariki and whānau you support, it builds a stronger future for us all.

Learn more about World Children’s Day here >

Wallets squeezed as food prices reach record rate of increase

The lates figures from Statistics New Zealand show that over the last year, food prices have risen at the fastest rate in 14 years. Prices in October 2022 were 10.1% higher than in October 2021. The main drivers of the increase were fruit and vegetable prices and grocery prices for barn-laid eggs, cheddar cheese and two-minute noodles.

See more here >

Time to get real about our ageing population

‘Hyper-aged’ is a technical term describing any population where the proportion of people aged 65+ is more than 20%. An article by Stuff national correspondent Charlie Mitchell looks at the impacts of reaching hyper-aged status, as now 34 territorial authorities around Aotearoa New Zealand find themselves in that category. Focussing on the experience of the Coromandel town of Thames, the article is a sobering deep dive into the factors around hyper-ageing. It also highlights the pressing imperative for planners to stop seeing it as temporary phenomena and start preparing for the needs and demands of changing towns and cities.

Read the Stuff article here >

Will the RMA replacement make a dent in Aotearoa’s housing crisis?

On Monday this week, the Government introduced to Parliament its proposed replacement for the Resource Management Act in the form of two Bills – the Natural and Built Environments and Spatial Planning Bills. The Government says that the proposed legislation would free up land for building and make housing development faster and cheaper. It estimates the costs to consent applicants would reduce by $149m a year, a 19 percent reduction.

More broadly, the new legislation is hoped to deliver both economic and environmental benefits – for every $1 spent, the Government expects the new system to deliver $2.58 to $4.90 in benefits.

NZCCSS was one of many submitters to a Select Committee enquiry mid last year on an exposure draft as part of the development process of the two Bills.

Read the Government’s announcement here >

Read NZCCSS Submission on the exposure drafts here >

Inevitably, not everyone is as positive as the Government…

Read this Newsroom article identifying some of the gaps >

Kāinga Ora borrowing capacity increased

To fuel the Government’s urban development programme – aka housing stock – Cabinet has increased Kāinga Ora’s capacity to borrow by $2.7 billion for FY 2022/23. This comes on the back of the State’s housing agency delivering 8,370 newly built homes and over 900 retrofits in the last five years.

Alongside this, Kāinga Ora will be able to borrow from the Crown’s New Zealand Debt Management (NZDM) providing it a cheaper and more certain source of borrowing than from private sources.

Read more here >

Action Plan for Social Sector Commissioning launched

In late October, the Government launched the Social Sector Commissioning Action Plan 2022-2028.  The action plan is positioned as the catalyst in changing the way government engages with social service agencies so that those agencies are better able support the communities in which they work.

Developed in response to sector feedback that trusted relationships need to be at the centre of social sector commissioning, the Action Plan promotes:

  • removing current barriers that make a relational way of commissioning difficult
  • building on existing initiatives and successes, and supporting major social reforms underway
  • using continuous learning, monitoring, and information sharing to ensure change.

A programme of work will roll out in three phases. The phases progress from identifying new ways of working, to extending to the whole sector the initiatives that prove successful, finally through to normalising practice.

See the Social Sector Commissioning Action Plan here >

New petition seeks retention of half price fares

The collaboration advocating for free fares on public transport has launched a new petition. This time, it seeks the retention of the half-price fares introduced by Government earlier in the year as an offset to the ratcheting cost of living.  Fares are set to return to full-price levels in January 2023 for all but people with a Community Services Card.

Petition organiser, Aotearoa Collective for Public Transport Equity says that extending half-price fares for everyone will reduce hardship in a time of high living costs, among other benefits.

Learn more about the petition or sign up here >

Disability toolkit for policymakers

The Office for Disability Issues has produced a toolkit to help policy practitioners in every domain to consider disability as they formulate policy and help reshape New Zealand as a non-disabling society.

The Disability Toolkit for Policy includes guidance on:

  • Thinking about disability issues at the start of the policy process
  • Engaging with the disability community
  • Embedding disability into the policy issue
  • Incorporating disability into the policy options
  • Incorporating disability into Cabinet papers, information and communications
  • Considering disability throughout implementation
  • Considering how disability outcomes can be monitored and evaluated.

Find the toolkit here >
We welcome your feedback on POLICY WATCH and other publications produced by the Council, email: [email protected]

Ngā mihi nui

From all of us in the team at NZCCSS