Medical versus social model
A 1976 manifesto published by the London Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation called for a change of attitude to disability and disability policy.
They challenged the ‘medical model of disability’ whereby disability was considered to be an individual’s problem, something wrong or broken that could be cured or contained.
The individual’s consequently lowered status often led to institutionalisation or exclusion from participation in education, employment and other aspects of citizenship.
Instead, the growing international disability rights movement developed what became known as the ‘social model of disability’, whereby people have impairments, but it is society’s attitudes that disable.
For example, when a person who uses a wheelchair requires access to a public building the problem lies not with the person’s paralysis – the impairment – but poor building design that excludes the entry of some citizens.
Disability was thus the negative economic, social and political responses to impairment by a society built by and for non-impaired people.
A disabled person is someone with an impairment who is disabled by society.
To identify as a disabled person is therefore to adopt a highly politicised position which requires change to society’s values and structures.
The disability rights movement also demanded a say in disability policies and governance. "Nothing about us without us" became the international slogan in the fight for nondisabling services and structures. It remains the impetus for disability activism today.
New Zealand experienced a burst of disability activism and empowerment in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
There was the first Minister for Disability Issues, a dedicated office in the Ministry of Social Welfare, a social model based New Zealand Disability Strategy and numerous pieces of rights-based legislation, including the promotion of NZ Sign Language as an official language.
New Zealand and New Zealanders had significant input in the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) external which was finalised in 2006, and ratified by New Zealand in 2008.
The articles of the CRPD set out what rights look like, and what signatory countries must implement.
Several groups have established their own disability-led Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs), which partner with Government in monitoring the CRPD, while there are also numerous impairment specific and provider groups.
Robert Martin was elected to the UN Committee to monitor the CRPD in 2016, and in 2020 became the first New Zealander with learning disability to receive a Knighthood.