Whaikaha Ministry of Disabled People
Get to know the ministry that supports our disabled community.
Whaikaha Ministry of Disabled People is our disability community’s representative in our New Zealand Government.
Whaikaha works with all the ministries, like Ministry of Education or Ministry of Internal Affairs, to make changes in the way that they work with our community. We might not realise how often we rely on different ministries in our daily lives. Going to school, paying taxes, walking down the street - all of these are impacted by the way our ministries work. This means there are millions of opportunities for Whaikaha to make living a good life easier in Aotearoa for more than one million disabled people.
Whaikaha focuses on removing those barriers that make life particularly hard for our community and bringing about change to the way New Zealand works.
Whaikaha does not provide direct support to disabled people or their families - that’s where Disability Support Services comes in.
The name Whaikaha
The word 'Whaikaha' is closely associated with Maaka Tibble, a Ngāti Porou kaumatua, who has worked in the disability world for decades. He is also blind and was never comfortable with the word disability. He felt that te reo Māori words like kāpō (blind), turi (deaf) and hauā (disabled) focused on deficiencies. This led to him coining the term ‘Tāngata Whaikaha’, meaning people who are determined to do well, an enabling and aspirational term focusing on people’s strengths.
Over time 'whaikaha' has become more and more widely used, and many in the disability community now claim this enabling word to describe themselves.
