I don’t know who the hell Penny Simmonds is, but her disgraceful attack on the disability sector is just insult to indy after news of her chainsawing has come to light…
Minister takes aim at ‘pedicures’ for carers in disability funds row
She claimed carers had been taking advantage of a “broad” funding criteria to use public money “for massages, overseas travel, pedicures, haircuts” for themselves.
Earlier today, Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the disability community will pay for the Government’s “fiscal incompetence”, with restrictions on funding for equipment and modification services.
The change — cited as due to financial pressures on Government departments — was announced by Whaikaha the Ministry for Disabled People on Monday after an email leak.
It announced it would make changes to its purchasing rules “to clarify how people can use their disability support funding”. The changes were effective immediately.
The Government has come under increasing pressure over how it would fund its tax cuts.
…woah!
At the exact same time she is chainsawing disability funding to afford tax breaks to the richest landlords, she’s negging what people are spending that funding on?
Look, as far as I am concerned, I find it difficult enough to get around my day as an able bodied person!
I think the disabled are legends for getting through their days WITH a disability!
As far as I am concerned, the disabled shouldn’t face work requirements and should instead be generously looked after with a focus on life enrichment and self agency.
There but for the grace of God go I!
Accident, genetics or misadventure should not rule your existence nor limit it in a progressive liberal democracy.
That we are about to rip that agency away with a. new prescriptive budget threshold so this Government can afford their $2.9billion tax break for their real estate pimp donor mates is an obscenity and you all know it!
Your anger at Jacinda saving 20 000 lives doesn’t justify this malice and you all know it deep down in places you will never admit.
This is ugly and Disability Minister Penny Simmonds is quickly becoming my favourite new right wing hate figure.
Tell us more Penny, tell us more.
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Another selfish ugly person dragged out of a rabbit hole somewhere .Where do the rabbits live these days as there cant be many holes left .?
You can take one look at most of these weird local politicians, and realise they wouldn’t be in politics at all if some wealthy mega-donor hadn’t bought their seat.
The minister’s line of attack is bizarre propaganda. All nurses get haircuts and pedicures, and go on vacation — pay cuts for them too? It should be nurses doing this work in the first place, of course.
There was a time when the government aimed to give crippled and insane patients a living standard akin to that of a fine resort. They built modern residential hospitals in picturesque locations, complete with 24 hour medical care, free mess halls, and leisure facilities beyond that of many high-end hotels (swimming pool, tennis courts, bowling green etc.) But you’ll never hear that mentioned in the censorious corporate press.
Martyn – Agreed…being a carer for the disable is hard work, and mostly thankless…not Penny’s best moment.
Oh my God! @ Nathan. You agree! Wow! I mean…double wow! Thank God you agree. We all hang on your every fucking word. You’re like a fart without a brain so it’s immensely comforting for all of us to know that your wondrous self agrees! There is a God!
dick-ionary.
Sarcasm refers to the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really want to say, especially in order to insult someone, or to show irritation, or just to be funny. For example, saying “they’re really on top of things” to describe a group of people who are very disorganized is using sarcasm.
Thank you?
Countryboy, Nathan’s comment was genuine however I completely disagree with his last statement…not Penny’s best moment.
I ask Nathan…compared to Penny’s best moment, which is?
Corrupt Gnat – Extending fee free SIT scheme in Invercargill
Countryboy – that boy in class desperate to be recognised as ‘alternative’.
Can we not give Nathan the benefit of the doubt. He has spoken truth actually.
This.
The self appointed expert in everything countryboy has spoken,golly gosh.
says the expert on nothing bob the last
So she thinks that people who either physically cannot trim their toenails or cannot safely cut their toenails, shouldnt be allowed to have someone help them maintain toenail growth for health reasons, and perhaps believes that said persons are doing it for vanity?
What has the National party become? They used to be socially conservative, now they are just horrific.
The days and dignity of Sir Keith Holyoake and Jack Marshall are well gone….
Muldoon , Shipley, Key , English, Luxon….. clueless, no morals, wrecking balls!
Read it again. It seems that carers have been enjoying pedicures etc for themselves – diverting the funds from those for whom they were intended.
Yes, and hordes of carers on overseas trips.
Everyone is talking about it.
They aren’t allowed any fun I guess.
Only rich people can have fun.
That is a fucking lie, and you fucking know it, you tax cut loving redneck.
A day in the life of Millsy:
Wake up
Be rabidly woke all day long / scare small children along the way
Go to bed
Rinse and repeat
Wow – have a cup of tea and a lie down.
Believe everything this clownshow tells you do you?
citation for your original statement please bry or are you just another no facts rightard blowhard….I know what I think prove me wrong
Bryan C
You are so wrong!
Carers do so much physical work such as lifting people in and out of wheel chairs, baths, turning them over in bed and the list goes on.
Those Carers are totally entitled to have a massage to ease their bodies and have their feet seen to.
The majority of Carers dedicate their lives to caring for their special needs loved ones.
I’m speaking from experience. I am my 36 year old sons carer and have been since he was born.
Joella Allcott. Well done caring for your son, and every good wish along the way for you both. Mothers’ work is constantly under-estimated, and derided, and yours is heroic.
This current move is much more than massages and pedicures. It looks very much like a continuation of the Nat’s insidious privatisation by stealth of the health service in New Zealand.
Knowing what I do about the rotten state of journalism here, it is unlikely that there has been any comprehensive record kept of this. Off the top of my head, I know a weekly massage service for multiple sclerosis sufferers in the Wellington region, held at the Hutt Hospital I think, was abruptly axed a few years ago. This was important for both medical and social reasons.
The very good Quit Line for smokers was flogged off to PHO’s, and is no longer particularly good at all, right at a time when politicians are determined to stop constuents from ever lighting up again.
Some intimate female procedure which used to be carried out free at Wellington Hospital got abolished altogether, and made available, payment required, somewhere out the Hutt, I think.
Ear clearing, for blocked ears, a cause of deafeness, and I gather, possibly dementia, was a procedure once done free at Hospital outpatients, and without an appointment. Gone.
One local medical practice did it for free, and another does it for a high charge. Ironically, the practice which dewaxed for free was shut down by Compass Health who owned the premises, and the principal was relocated elsewhere in the Wgtn Eastern suburbs, and retired shortly thereafter.
Transgender people can still get free speech therapy for would-be women to learn to speak like women, right throughout the country, but the speech therapy sessions for speech impeded children, are now more limited than they were, but children don’t really have much clout at all in New Zealand, apart from being clouted, abused, and killed in OECD leading figures. That’s the way we are.
It all comes down to the heath reforms of the 1990’s and how everything was shifted into ‘the communitah’.
as Chippie has pointed out they were allowed to do so because their own health is as important as that of the person they care for .These people also care for these people around the clock .Av $30 pedicure is peanuts compared to the cost of having these people in a care home or hospital at around $2k a week starting point .
So you have been reading the boasting comments on the various Facebook pages too? Some of us have been waiting for this are to fall for a few years now. It surprised me that these people didn’t realize that those Fb pages are perused regularly by the Gatekeepers. As usual…the entitled few are causing grief for the many.
citation please bryan c or once again you are knowingly telling porkies
It looks like her department stuffed up here, and their making such a major announcement to its targets via Facebook, was a shocker. It was discourteous, and dehumanising. Some won’t have Facebook at all, others have abandoned it as boring as Melissa Lee is. It would help if she tidied up her appearance a little too, these things do count, but to be fair to the lady, at least she doesn’t go out of her way to look like a circus clown. Parents of challenged children in particular already struggle to cope on a day to day, or hour to hour basis. Typecasting any as frivolous is a cruel tactic.
The families of disabled people save the country more than they spend. Thats why they shut all the big care facilities and brought them all into the community in the 80/90’s. This government is now scraping the bottom of the barrel for tax cuts that were supposed to cost nothing. Next time you wealthy donors donate to the right wing parties for your own selfish reasons ,have a thought for the people who are caring 24/7 for the most vulnerable in our society and go tell them they are not worth a pedicure or a massage for some well earned time out for themselves .
Yes. Some of the violent autistic children would have been cared for in secure units in psychiatric hospitals, in times past. Entrusting them, and other tragically mentally challenged persons to the community, doesn’t always work out well. Scungy boarding houses, Loafer’s Lodges, stressed-out carers, and the odd murder in camping grounds and other public places may make economic sense, but it is societally damaging and brutal, and not necessarily in the best interests of the afflicted.
Those psychiatric hospitals you refer to used archaic and monstrous techniques to subdue said patients and as someone who witnessed this Id suggest to you, not so Gentle Annie, that it was most definitely not in the best interest of the afflicted, far from it.
And what you don’t know is the number of ” murders” that we’re committed inside those hospitals.
Thankfully those barbaric hospitals were closed.
Corrupt G They weren’t all like that, we know the horror stories, but there were some ok places too. As a student I worked at the Cherry Farm facility part of the Seacliffe Mental Hospital complex, one long summer vacation, and in the secure villa. Some of the young people shouldn’t have been there at all, and I did talk of this with an Alliance MP, about 20 years ago, but had signed a confidentiality agreement at the time. There was nothing systemically bad going on; OU students worked continuously as aides in that particular hospital, and had a fairly effective grapevine.
Jee–ee–zus…is there any remaining vulnerable group for these tory scum to attack and demean? They have had a go at state tenants, school kids lunches, endangered animal species, low paid workers, and now disabled…
Fightback time people, haunt these fuckers whenever they appear in public. And, if public housing tenants are evicted they should occupy the nearest ghost house.
First they came for the disabled, and I did not speak out—because I was not disabled…..
Now you pull out that quote. Haha. You make this old fella laugh.
Thought you were?
Yep were, but that country is gone. Just hassling pat about is comment paraphrasing a famous comment. A recent 3 year period would’ve been more apt for pats quote
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/512172/we-got-it-wrong-on-disability-announcement-minister-penny-simmonds
Would love for turncoat Anker to come in here and explain her support for this. Nothing worse than a traitor
There you are Millsy. As this headline was doing the rounds the other day I was talking to a mate who is not only active in the MOH funded disability community… but also an honest to goddess, actual wheelchair using person with a disability. He was not surprised that the Misery of Health was curtailing some of the spending on Carer Support and Individualised Funding … he’s active on faceache, and reads the posts from carers boasting at their ingenuity at stretching to the absolute limit the rules regarding use of such Funding. It was only a matter of time before higher levels of scrutiny were implemented.
Are you knowledgeable with regards to this issue? Are you familiar with the history of supports available (or not) for non ACC disabled and their family carers? I am. Very much so.
Over the past five years there has been a shift from famine to feast , for those adept at navigating the system. It was never going to be sustainable. Enough people have wrung the neck of the goose and have boosted about it.
Small wonder that the Misery is looking to satisfy their government overlords’ demand for reduced spending by rigorously applying the rules for accessing this Funding that have always been in place. The rules are there, and always have been.
Now, before you go of half -cocked, as is your habit, I am not saying that carers don’t deserve a massage, pedicure or overseas trip…if they can afford it. But not on the taxpayer dollar …obtained by ‘inventive’ use of Funding made available for keeping the disabled person and their family carer safe, healthy, properly supported and if appropriate engaged with their wider community.
Pedicures, massages and overseas trip are luxuries. Equipment, home modifications and the necessary number of hours of funded care are not luxuries.
I could delve into the minutiae…but I fear I may have exhausted your attention span already. Suffice to say…this is merely a reset to pre Covid terms and conditions.
If a solution is genuinely sought…have a look at the fact that ACC clients enjoy entitlement to supports. Non ACC disabled have to prove eligibility….but are entitled to nothing. We run two systems for ‘supporting’ disabled people in this tiny country of ours. It has resulted in two classes of people with disabilities.
This is simply unjust, and unsustainable.
Oh, and Labour could have solved the paid family carers issue back in 2000, and in 2007….but chose not to.
Some may confuse massage with the salacious forays of indolent politicians and drunken sports teams, and the skilled therapeutic procedures of trained physiotherapists who do sterling and necessary work. If anybody considers being able to sit upright, or walk without limping, a luxury, I consider them in error.
Some folk cannot physically reach their toes which do need the odd clip from time to time, so a pedicure will involve more than just applying pretty nail polishes. Not everyone wants holes in their socks or ingrown toe nails.
There’ll always be a few who rort the system, but certainly not on the scale of the double dipping originating from Dipton, or a millionaire Prime Minister expecting the taxpayer to fund him thousands a year while he prances around in fancy pyjamas to celebrate the feast of Christmas so important in the Christian tradition which he professes to adhere to.
hear hear rosemary
Penny Simmonds is a white, red-neck, right wing Southlander.
She just needs a nice cup of *E and a wee lie down.
Southland? You voted for this dick, so embarrassed yet? You are! So you should be.
*The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/05/ecstasy-mdma-anonymous-drug-user
Her efforts to kill the polytech merger was reprehensible. She wanted to protect the competitive model of tertiary education because it would benefit SIT. Never mind that Southland students would have access to courses that SIT didnt previously offer. Never mind that it was ok for her polytech to ‘merge’ with Telford.
she is another mean looking bitch like Upston and the lets get everyone smoking lady .
Southland is full of red necks and farmers who votes for themselves not what bests for the majority hope their rates go up heaps. They also have a knob for a mayor.
So it’s fine for disabled people and their carers to have a ‘difficult and unsettling time’ adjusting to the changes in their funding.
But landlords and other wealthy people definitely shouldn’t be subjected to such uncertainty or funding constraints.
Ms. Simmonds may well have a Downs child but who’s looking after that child while she’s at parliament?
Not her. Presumably that child is grown up and reasonably well and independent.
That doesn’t compare to some of the dreadfully disabled people we have in the community nor their isolated, traumatised caregivers.
Ms. Simmonds obviously doesn’t bother with haircuts herself, but some people need to. If your autistic child is continually grabbing your hair when you try to deal with them, you’d want it very short. But why should you have to look like a scarecrow as well?
Wealthy people need to tell this govt. that they can keep their tax cut and to divert the money towards the disability budget. How can they sleep at night knowing they are turning the country’s most vulnerable peoples’ lives upside-down, in order to give them that promised tax cut.
What have some New Zealanders become?
Joy Govt does need to up tax the rich, address the off-shore tax havens, stop being unrealistic about tax cuts. A reasonable CGT should have been introduced by the previous govt and should be now. They are incapable of future-proofing about anything at all, let alone addressing current crises, and are all as bad as each other. Unfortunately, politicians live in some ghastly parallel universe.
As the old saying goes, if you are going to be a disabled person, it is better to be a rich disabled person.
While she is clearly a vile and ugly human being, it would take a lot more to upstage Seymour or Winston.
Don’t put all the blame on some lowly ranked Cabinet Minister who is only there because she fought so bitterly against the polytech merger.
The blame for this is on the kitchen cabinet – Luxon, Willis, Bishop – who have all set the expectations for ministers to adhere to. This is fairly and squarely on them and they need to take responsibility.
Correct and I hope everyone witnessed the arrogance of Willis in dismissing the IMFs advice on the economy. It appears that Willis and Willis alone knows what is nest for our economy. Therefore it is no surprise that we are in a recession under this National/ ACT/ NZ First led government anfd their policies that created it..
One can assume that anything that is being cited by the likes of Simmonds is not a case of ‘things that are commonly occurring’, but in fact ‘something that happened once’.
It would appear that in this case, the ‘rort on the taxpayer’ is that at some point in the last decade or so, someone, who may or may not be related to the person they’re caring for, and is certainly underpaid for what they go through, may have claimed the cost of a haircut or a pedicure performed at the same facility that they transported the person they were caring for to. It sounds like something that should be formalized as a fringe benefit if it is common practice, but it’s only a scandal to bloodthirsty psychopaths like Simmonds.
Well blow me down, it’s not like i warned about exactly this months ago on TDB. As one of these Parents with a disabled child we never once used funding for personal reasons and we were on the maximum of 52 days per year. Respite days were used for Brackenridge at the old Templeton hospital where our child received specialist care.
It is hypocritical though when TDB claims to support the disabled community for brownie points but still persistently continues to use the word retarded in their posts.
I will say it slowly. The word R.e.t.a.r.d.e.d is used by people who are ignorant or low IQ, do we see the irony? The only government department that uses that offensive word is MSD, the worst experience I ever had was Going to MSD for support and being told the only classification for my child was retard.
Martyn.Your comment,’This is ugly and Disability Minister Penny Simmonds is quickly becoming my favourite new right wing hate figure. should have omtted the words ‘is’ and ‘and’.She is and looks awful.
‘Accident, genetics or misadventure should not rule your existence nor limit it in a progressive liberal democracy.’
Yes, but in a neoliberal democracy it’s all a matter of “bad choices” right?
to use an old northern english phrase ‘she’s a mingey twat’ ie- MEAN
Southland is full of red necks and farmers who votes for themselves not what bests for the majority hope their rates go up heaps. They also have a knob for a mayor.
Southland is full of red necks and farmers who votes for themselves not what bests for the majority hope their rates go up heaps. They also have a knob for a mayor.
Penny Simmonds is the Minister for Disability Issues, Minister for the Environment, Minister for Tertiary Education and Skills, and Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment. She was elected the MP for Invercargill in 2020.
Hon Penny Simmonds | Beehive.govt.nz
https://www.beehive.govt.nz › minister › biography › pe..
Wonder how she would cope with the thorny situation of the aluminium plant at Tiwai Point. It has produced lots of toxic material that no-one wants around in any place and probably should be shut down as would be wanted by the Minister for Environment. Invercargill has been foremost in making skills training accessible for no or low cost, but I think that has been under threat. But if the Tiwai Point plant was shut down the need for retraining would rise sharply for dismissed staff and this would come under her Tertiary and Skills Education Ministry. This would also affect her role as Associate Minister of Social Development (brief pause for sardonic laugh at mendacious government here). And also her role of Disability Issues as the aluminium production would have hazards, immediate or chronic illness would affect some.
Farming and hockey are what she has been involved in. https://www.parliament.nz/en/mps-and-electorates/members-of-parliament/simmonds-penny/ This underlines that in a fast-moving high-tech world we can’t keep our present system of government with partly informed amateurs selected and elected on spurious grounds like declarations that they are ‘passionate’ about the area and some specialist interest or training. We cannot enter from ordinary life without an updated general study carried out with say eight papers resulting in a diploma required to be passed, plus a verbal test carried out in front of a wide sector of people in the electorate. See before you buy.
Yes, their qualifications for ministerial jobs are very tenuous. Ministers are personally, so mad keen for advancement, they accept them and then wonder why they are completely overwhelmed by the complexity of the job. Luxury Luxon is a perfect example too.
Pushing paper where peoples’ lives are at stake. Where hundreds of people can die if there’s a major mistake. His decision from his shiny, well-appointed office, would never have been found to be the main cause for a catastrophic failure. It would always have been attributed to the person on the end of the spanner out on the tarmac in all weather. Luxon was safe from blame.
Same thing now. He sends lacklustre Simmonds in to take the flak. Let it be her who’s seen to make the blue. Same as Lee, Mitchell and the rest. They get the immediate blame and howls disgust from the public. Luxon remains worry-free and ready with the next slogan where he denies facts and slimes out from under criticism.
This lies with him, Willis and Bishhop, the main architects of this tax-refund mess. It’s their lolly scramble.
Look at kiwiblog now and then. It’s a mad place, not a lot of punctuation, but you get the idea of what they are on about.
We’d have been in recession anyway now, after the last few years. Grant was holding back the tide but this lot don’t intend to. Divide and rule, weaken the workers and the ‘have nots’ so they can’t fight back. Get ready to sell our assets.
On news, the obscene profits made by foreign owned banks. Does anyone really think Luxon will criticize his friend John and bring the banks to heel. Not a chance. Integrity ought to be a qualification for all those jobs, but it’s not. Hence our problems.
This government is ableist