New Research Shows Poverty Hitting Intellectually Disabled New Zealanders The Hardest
IHC Advocate Shara Turner says the report, The Cost of Exclusion: Hardship and People with Intellectual Disability in New Zealand, shows this is a deep, systemic issue.
'The cost of disability is real and it's falling entirely on individuals and families who are often excluded from work, transport and even food.
'It is not acceptable that people with intellectual disabilities can't afford a healthy diet.
'It's also unacceptable that this is not part of national conversations on poverty.
'We need to include intellectual disability in all poverty tracking and public reporting. We need to adjust income support to reflect the true cost of disability and to build joined-up systems that recognise the long-term, cross-sector disadvantage disabled people experience.'
The report shows that people with intellectual disability face significantly higher rates of hardship at every stage of life:
Hardship is twice as likely for people with an intellectual disability under 40 and almost three times as likely for those aged 40-64 compared to others
Severe hardship rates triple in middle age, even as they decline for the rest of the population
Nearly 50% of people with intellectual disability cannot pay an unavoidable bill within a month without borrowing (vs. 18% of others)
They are over four times more likely to go without a meal with meat (or vegetarian protein equivalent) every second day
They are almost three times more likely to cut back on fresh fruit and vegetables due to cost
Nearly 30% of children with intellectual disability can't have friends over for a meal due to cost
Children with intellectual disability are also over twice as likely to not have daily access to fresh food and are 6.5 times more likely to miss out on school events for the same reason.
The report was completed for IHC by Kōtātā researchers Keith McLeod and Luisa Beltran-Castillon, and Geoff Stone from Ripple Research. They interviewed people with an intellectual disability and their families, and extracted data about the outcomes of people with intellectual disability from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), one of the more comprehensive linked datasets in the world.
The IDI holds de-identified data on nine million individuals in New Zealand, dating back to 1840, collected from government agencies, surveys and non-governmental organisations over many years.
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