"Building-block towers never get very high in the Tamaseu house.
They're constructed twice a week, meticulously balanced by 12-year-old Duncan before he smashes them down.
Like his peers he's getting more physical as he becomes a young man.
It's a physicality that means he will require care for the rest of his life because he is severely autistic, has ADHD and is intellectually disabled.
It's a job his parents Paul and Larissa are fighting to be paid to do.
It makes sense they say. No-one knows how Duncan ticks like they do.
"We just want the best care for him and we believe that as parents, we are,"says Mr Tamaseu.
They have two other children, Liam, 10, and Benjamin, 2. Mrs Tamaseu says caring for Duncan is more absorbing than a fulltime job.
"It's not eight hours but 16 or more a day.
"We care for him and feed him but it is a lot of work and it affects the rest of our family, " she says.
Last November the Glen Eden couple made a submission to a Health Ministry consultation document in support of parents being paid for full time care.
The document was initiated after the 2011 Atkinson case won the right for carers of adult disabled children to be paid.
The case involved a group of eight families with disabled adult children taking the Government to the Court of Appeal via the Human Rights Review Tribunal.
The court declared that the Health Ministry's policy of not paying family carers created unjustified discrimination on the grounds of family status under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.
The Tamaseus believed their submission made them eligible to be paid once Duncan becomes an adult at 18.
But in May the Government announced under the 2013 budget that it would only fund 1600 family carers for the disabled as part of a $23 million policy package for the sector, making parents and spouses ineligible..."
The rest here:
And yet we are paying for people who make stupid decisions.
Drunks and druggies who voluntarily stuff themselves up in 'accidents'. Get pissed, smash up yourself and ACC pay for you care. Or destroy what grey matter they had, also rending them unfit for shoveling shit from on place to another.
Girls who decide to breed instead of working and the feckless sperm donors that aid them.
Those who make themselves unemployable by scribbling over their faces and are more pierced than Custer's uniform.
The list goes on.
We pay for their care through our taxes.
And when they are partially held to account, as in the current round of welfare 'reforms', there are howls of outrage from the do-gooders about 'beneficiary bashing' (as if that is a bad thing)
Yet when it is those disabled through no fault of there own- it's tough shit.
But I guess they don't make up much of a voting block...
1 comment:
It's an effing scandal and a disgrace. There's money for everything from Pasifika pom-pom twirling to free legal representation for fucking career scumbags, yet caring, expert parents are deemed to be somehow less deserving.
Such people save the taxpayer millions and care for those who need it better than anybody else can do the damn job.
That's if somebody can even be found to do it.
For all the posturing about NZ as a "caring society" and all the rest of the feelgood drivel, this will remain a blot on the reputation of the country until it gets fixed.
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