Kia ora Supporters

The #AccessDeniedDiaries campaign has been a big success with more than 60 ‘incident reports’ submitted, and hundreds of posts published to the Access Matters website and across social media. The response has been amazing, with more access barrier stories still arriving daily. Thank you!

The Access Matters Campaign team has exciting plans in store to further leverage our growing collection of personal #AccessDeniedDiaries stories, to directly convince members of the Government of the desperate need for comprehensive and enforceable Accessibility Legislation in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to an excellent piece of work written by Olivia Kelly on behalf of Auckland Disability Law (ADL):

‘Aotearoa New Zealand’s Proposed Accessibility Legislation: An Initial Critique’

The Government intends to introduce its accessibility legislation to Parliament late July 2022. This new access law will have a profound impact, for many years, on how people with access needs participate in society. But will it meet our expectations?

ADL decided to address this question by publishing their own independent assessment of the current law and the steps the Government will take to make Aotearoa New Zealand more accessible. The Government has not widely shared detailed information, such as draft legislation for comment, but ADL has been able to base their findings on a number of public sources of information that gives some clear indications of what to expect. The Access Matters Campaign agrees with ADL that it is better that people with access needs start thinking now about the ramifications of the proposed legislation, than wait until it is revealed at the Select Committee stage.

You can access the ADL paper, as well as a summary of it, in various formats here:

• Accessibility Legislation - An Initial Critique - Auckland Disability Law (Word doc)
• Summary of ADL's Accessibility Assessment (Word doc)
• Summary of ADL's Accessibility Assessment (NZSL)
  

ADL states they have no formal position on accessibility legislation and that this paper makes no recommendations. Rather, it is an independent objective assessment, based on legal research into the publicly available information, by an experienced disability lawyer contracted by ADL for this work. ADL hope it will help people with access needs be better informed about the proposed disability access laws. The sharing of this paper is encouraged, so please forward it on to your networks.

Auckland Disability Law is a Community Law Centre that provides free legal services to disabled people to help with their disability related legal issues.

If you have any difficulty accessing the ADL paper please visit the Access Matters website or email [email protected] or phone/text 0220162571

Ngā mihi

Juliana Carvalho

For the Access Matters Campaign