By: Mike Hosking | Wednesday, June 13, 2012 12:11 PM

So a very nice victory for the family members who care for the disabled. They should never have been in court of course. They should never have had to win and watch the Government appeal.

It’s always a distasteful sight watching regular people take on the state in a legal battle especially when you had as good an argument as they did. In a nutshell, those who care for their disabled kids or family members save the state money and if they didn’t do it they would be more than entitled to state funded services by right. So why they shouldn’t be recognised in some way financially has always been beyond me. No one is getting rich, it’s not a gravy train. These people do it for all the right reasons.

Making it even worse the Government argued by way of defence that they didn’t know what the bill would be, therefore they couldn’t do it which is why they kept losing in court. Economics is not a defence to discrimination. It’s like saying we’d love to be able to educate all those lovely little Maori children, it’s just we don’t know how many would go and therefore we don’t know what the bill would be, therefore we can’t. It’s as simple and as farcical as that and this goes across government. This isn’t new. They’ve been fighting this fight for years so both major parties can share the blame and shame in all of this.

So I suppose given that, good on this government for at last realising its not only a legal fight they cant win, it’s a moral one as well. It’s about doing the right thing. They’ll never admit it and it might not even be true but you wouldn’t have to look hard to find a queue of people that might just suggest that after a torrid couple of weeks in areas like education back downs, the ACC disaster and superannuation, somebody just might have decided that a good old positive announcement that makes the Government look like the decent guys wouldn’t go a miss and might just distract a bit of attention away from all the bad bits. But even if that was true, it’s the result that really counts, isn’t it. As we heard earlier, places like Britain have had this sort of thing for years which simply made us look like a social backwater.

I hope those who’ve won think it’s worth it. I hope they have some satisfaction in it. I hope it hasn’t worn them down too badly. But as in so many cases like this, the fight is really for others, the next generation. It’s a foundation decision and victory that will see benefits for years to come. So maybe there is satisfaction in that. Good on them. It’s massively overdue and exceedingly well deserved.

Photo: Health Minister Tony Ryall (NZ Herald)