The working blind may lose invalid benefit

Sandra Schmidt

A unique, 48-year-old law which allows blind people to do paid work and keep getting welfare benefits may be under threat with the Government's plans for a "single-core benefit".

The Royal NZ Foundation of the Blind will launch a major report today on the "cost of blindness" in a bid to keep the provision.

But Disability Issues Minister Ruth Dyson says the provision is "anomalous" because it applies only to the country's 3200 blind people and not to people with other disabilities that also carry extra costs.

"It's an anomaly which I don't support," Ms Dyson said. "But we, the Government, have made it very clear in our benefit work that this is not about saving money. This is about having a simple and fair structure."

The proposed single-core benefit will replace all the main existing benefits for unemployment, sickness, disability, sole parents and widows.

It is intended to increase incentives to work for people in all the non-unemployment categories by cutting their base rates to the same as the dole, but providing extra payments to cover each person's specific costs of sickness, disability and care for children or others.

Those extra costs will then continue to be funded even when people get jobs, for as long as they still have their sickness, disability or caring responsibilities.

Ms Dyson said no decision had been made yet, but it is clear that the Government would like to put blind people in the same category as the others.

But this could mean a big income cut for blind or vision-impaired people in paid work, because at present the blind can keep receiving the full invalids benefit - not just the specific extra costs of their blindness - on top of their wages.

Sandra Schmidt, an information officer at the foundation's head office in Parnell, receives the full invalids benefit of $210 a week on top of her salary of $635 a week before tax.

"If it wasn't for my benefit, I couldn't live the way I do. I couldn't afford the rent," she said.

Ms Schmidt, 32, has some vision, but what a normally sighted person can see at 20 metres she can only see when a metre away.

She lives alone in Manurewa and catches a train to work in the mornings but takes a $55 taxi home at night because she believes it is not safe to walk home in her area.

To navigate, she uses a white stick with a rolling ball at the tip, which has to be replaced at a cost of $30 every three months.

"Not many vision-impaired people tap [with a stick].

"We roll, because if there's a pothole ahead it will feel it."

She watches television with a device that magnifies the programme on to a large screen, and has a program for her computer that magnifies the text and speaks it aloud. The foundation's report says the total of such costs to all blind and vision-impaired New Zealanders is $61 million a year, plus a further $28 million in costs to the rest of society.

Ms Schmidt said the present benefit system should be reviewed because it discriminated against women.

If she married a sighted working man, she would lose her benefit. But a blind man marrying a sighted working woman would not, unless he worked too.

The foundation chairman Don McKenzie urged the Government to keep paying out the full benefit to blind workers, and to extend it to people with other disabilities.

www.rnzfb.org.nz