Disability Issues Minister Louise Upston has introduced the Disability Support Services Bill to Parliament, legislation that places the operation of the country’s disability support system on a clear statutory footing for the first time and, in the process, declares that the Crown is not the employer of family members who care for disabled relatives at home.
The bill is a direct response to a Supreme Court decision delivered in December 2025. In that case, two parents, Christine Fleming and Peter Humphreys, succeeded in arguing they were employees of the Ministry of Disability Issues while caring full-time for their disabled adult children, Justin Fleming and Sian Humphreys. Justice Dame Ellen France found the pair qualified as homeworkers, writing that the appellants were “subject to constraints and responsibilities and that what they do is of benefit to the Ministry as their employer.” Peter Humphreys, who had fought the case for six years across three court levels, was awarded fifty thousand dollars in costs and described the verdict as providing closure after what he called an exhausting and stressful process.
Upston has been careful to say the bill does not strip Fleming and Humphreys of what they won. Their entitlements stand. The legislation instead works prospectively, removing the legal architecture that allowed the Supreme Court to reach its conclusion and ensuring that no further family carer can use the same route to claim employee status. The minister told reporters in Wellington that she believed there were better ways to recognise and support carers than treating family members as state employees, and that the Government had commissioned a separate workstream on a carer support package to be consulted on later in the year.
The bill does considerably more than respond to the court. It creates a primary statute for Disability Support Services, which has spent decades operating off a patchwork of contracts, ministerial directions and policy documents without an Act of Parliament defining what it does, who is eligible, or how decisions get made. The new framework sets out the purpose of the system, the kinds of support that can be funded, the assessment process people go through, and the way flexible funding can be used by disabled people and their whānau. It also introduces, for the first time in primary legislation, a requirement that the needs of family and unpaid carers be considered when an assessment is being carried out for the disabled person they support.
The numbers behind the system are substantial. Disability Support Services currently funds community and residential support for around fifty-five thousand disabled New Zealanders, environmental support services for roughly one hundred thousand people, and Child Development Services for an estimated twenty-six thousand disabled children each year. The Government has put an additional two point one billion dollars into the system across the last two budgets, money the minister argues has been necessary simply to keep the existing services running as demand grows and as wages in the contracted provider workforce catch up with the public sector.
The political reaction has not been universally warm. Dr Huhana Hickey, a long-standing disability advocate and lawyer, argued that the minister’s framing of unpaid family care as natural family support obscures the fact that families are filling a gap left by inadequate public provision. In her view the legislation freezes in place a system that quietly relies on uncosted labour from parents, siblings and partners, and tells those people through statute that the work they do is not work the state will recognise.
Labour and the Greens have signalled they will engage with the bill in detail at select committee rather than oppose it outright at first reading, given the genuine need for a statutory framework, but both parties have indicated they will probe the carer-employer clauses closely. The bill is expected to be referred to the Social Services and Community Committee, where submissions from disabled people, families, providers, unions and lawyers will land alongside the Crown Law advice that underpins the Government’s drafting.
The first reading is scheduled for Thursday, and the timing matters. With a general election due later in 2026, the future shape of disability support and the question of how the country values the work done inside the home will sit alongside fuel taxes, public service cuts and bank ownership as live arguments at the ballot box. New Zealanders who want to compare where the parties stand on disability policy and other issues can use the Newswire voting tool.
What do you make of the Government using legislation to step around a Supreme Court ruling on family carers, and is a statutory framework for Disability Support Services overdue or overdue and underdone? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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