A disabled woman who turned to Work and Income after suffering burnout so intense she had to leave her multiple jobs says the agency hung up on her as they didn’t believe she was deaf.
A disabled woman, who once held three jobs before suffering burnout so extreme she had to quit working altogether, says she was made to feel that she had faked her deafness on a check-up call with Work and Income. The agency has since apologised and pledged to review the process that identifies which clients need accessibility support.
Wellingtonian Felicity Maera-Wallace told The Spinoff she had been accused of “faking” her deafness when she phoned Work and Income to check on her benefit on April 11, via the NZ Relay service, funded by the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). She believes that because she was brought up in an oral deaf family, her ability to use English well may have played into misconceptions about the deaf community held by the operator at the other end of the line.
“That was insulting,” she said. “I have the right to communicate in the ways that I need, and that means that if I’m deaf, I need the Relay service. I have the right to do that, and they don’t have the right to tell me I’m faking it.”
NZ Relay is a free telecommunications service that allows New Zealanders who are deaf, deafblind, hard of hearing or have difficulties with speech to be able to make phone calls throughout the country. The app supports users by providing a text relay, in which the caller can type out their part of the conversation with an assistant who will speak on their behalf, a captioned relay which provides a transcript of the conversation, or video interpretation.
Despite first believing the issue was the fault of NZ Relay and MBIE, Work and Income apologised to Maera-Wallace on Tuesday. However, while the agency says it had failed to cross its t’s and dot its i’s in ensuring Maera-Wallace’s profile reflected her disability, it denied she had been accused of faking it.
“We acknowledge the frustration Felicity experienced not having the call accepted. We apologise for this. Felicity should not have been denied access via this line,” a statement from the Ministry of Social Development, which operates Work and Income, to The Spinoff read. “We will be reviewing our processes to ensure that people who need to use the NZ Relay service to communicate with us can be identified more quickly and efficiently.”
The Ministry of Social Development said its usual process for accepting calls through the service is to verify a legitimate need, so the line is available for those who aren’t able to use the agency’s general phone line. “We did advise that until we had verification of a disability we were unable to accept a call via the NZ Relay service,” the ministry said. “We did have that verification, and we are sorry we didn’t accept Felicity’s call.”
Working 60 hour weeks used to be the norm for Maera-Wallace, who held two healthcare jobs and ran a home business before ending work entirely a month ago. She often slept in her car between jobs, took pride in the care she provided for clients (who also lived with disabilities) and struggled to balance the demands of her work life with the low pay attached.
Maera-Wallace said she realised in March that her work life had become unsustainable when she worked an extended shift after feeling she “wasn’t able to leave” a patient, before collapsing in her car, and later being hospitalised. Afterwards, a doctor signed her off sick, deeming her unable to work until January 2026.
Adjusting to her new lifestyle has been difficult. “I’m a workaholic, I want to be working,” Maera-Wallace told The Spinoff. But it became impossible – she often worked consecutive 18-hour days, and having to wear her cochlear implants all day compounded her stress. “The shame I feel for not being a productive member of society is huge … Society is looking at us like we’re worth less than nothing.”
She is on the jobseeker’s benefit with a medical exemption, meaning she does not need to meet the sanctions required to keep the benefit, which she secured after two face-to-face interviews at Work and Income’s Lower Hutt branch with an interpreter present. This is the information the agency neglected to keep on her client file.
Maera-Wallace will start receiving her benefit in early May, but she says soon after this she will be moving to Australia for better work opportunities in the healthcare sector. “The wages are so low here for my job, and over in Aussie, they actually pay comparably well,” she said. “[The government] is always talking about losing people, and I’m the perfect example – I would not be this sick, I would not be this burnt out, if I didn’t have to work two jobs to pay my mortgage.”
For now, she has been living off her savings, and sold her house and started living in her car (she is now living with her daughter in a different part of the country) to make ends meet. She said she appreciated the apology and felt a review was a “really good result”, but added, “I’m glad I am emigrating and will only be on the benefit for a week. If I was staying, I’d go back to work – having to deal with WINZ and burnout is worse than working with it.”
According to the 2023 census, 5,736 New Zealanders are profoundly deaf, while 62,640 people recorded that they have “a lot of difficulty” hearing – the number of profoundly deaf New Zealanders had dropped by nearly 2,000 people since the 2018 census, while those who say they experienced a lot to some difficulty hearing had risen significantly.
A 2023 study by the New Zealand Hearing Industry Association found that one in six New Zealanders will experience hearing loss, while the World Health Organisation projects that one in 10 people globally (around 700 million people) will experience disabling hearing loss by 2050.
