Officials on the wrong track
If you lived near the Waikanae shopping centre around the late 1990s, I may have kicked over your wheelie bin. I was on a spree. What began with respectfully moving bins from the middle of footpaths on to berms quickly deteriorated into booting them unceremoniously into gutters and driveways.
They were empty – I’m not a monster – and I’d appealed with no effect for the local rubbish company to leave them on the grass, so I thought my civil disobedience might have effected a change. It didn’t, and I’m sorry if I targeted yours on my mission.
It was in 1997 that my brother became a paraplegic and the bins became the focal point of my rage. While he would dutifully navigate his way around them, wheeling on to muddy berms without a complaint, to me they epitomised everything he was having to negotiate in a thoroughly thoughtless world.
There were plenty of other things, of course. With the wrath reserved only for older sisters, I also punted boxes out of shop aisles, chewed out those who thought ‘‘accessible’’ meant a chair user could enter their restaurants through the kitchen, and cinemas whose ‘‘no reserves’’ policies meant we couldn’t bags a seat on the end of an aisle. There were also plenty of well-meaning business owners who offered to help lift him up a flight of stairs without realising what that costs in dignity.
I was the worst sort of advocate: one whom the person I was advocating for didn’t actually want, and one who hadn’t given the issue a second thought until it affected someone I love. A privileged avenger making a right pain of myself.
Nonetheless, it’s astonishing that KiwiRail says plans to add a wheelchair-accessible ramp at the front of Wellington Railway Station have been blocked for two years because of heritage concerns. First, it beggars belief that plans have only been in the works for two years. Second, even the mere suggestion that heritage should ever trump accessibility is an outrage.
There’s been the usual blame game: earlier this week, Greater Wellington Regional Council chairman Daran Ponter blamed Heritage New Zealand because of its opposition to the ramp’s design, but the Crown entity said it was still waiting on final plans from the council and station owner KiwiRail. Now, Heritage NZ says it expects the dispute to be resolved by the end of the week. KiwiRail won’t commit to the same.
The saga might be playing out in Wellington, but it could be anywhere where bureaucrats pay lip service to inclusiveness while continuing to discriminate against people with disabilities.
The station was opened in 1937 and is a Category 1 heritage-listed building. It’s true that there is already wheelchair access, but it’s through a side entrance, firmly keeping those who need to use it in their place as different to everyone else.
The building also has a supermarket, coffee stand, and bar within it, none of which were there in 1937. I venture our forebears would also have been astounded at the digital billboards that hang from the roof announcing train schedules.
The only heritage being preserved here is the age-old treatment of people with disabilities as second-class citizens. Apologise, build the ramp, and be done with it.
It’s also worth reminding our bureaucrats that wheelchair access has been created through the ruins of Pompeii. Much of New Zealand’s public transport is also a disaster zone, but the least we can do is let everyone access it.
And in the meantime, please keep your blimmin’ bins off the footpath.