Page 548 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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is it difficult to find a space but it is difficult to know whether the space, if you are lucky enough to have found one, is time limited, whether it is free, and whether the parking meter works or not.
One can only assume that this is government strategy, although not a particularly clever one, to make parking so difficult, and so unreliable, stressful and costly, that it forces people to catch public transport instead. This might have worked for some Canberrans if the government had not monumentally stuffed up the bus network, having finally been forced to admit defeat by overhauling it a few weeks ago. As we all know from the hundreds of complaints all our offices have received, finding a bus that can actually take you where you need to go, when you need to go, is becoming as scarce as finding a car space.
With all those difficulties, let us add just one more: finding an available disability car space that can accommodate unloading a wheelchair safely. In Canberra it is estimated that 65,000 people have some form of disability. Not all of them drive, of course, and not all of them require a disability space, but a good proportion of them have a need to be driven, and they require close access and need the extra space. The Territory Plan’s parking and vehicular access code of 2014 has a requirement that the ACT provide for a minimum of three per cent of total parking spaces to be disability parking spaces. The Australian standard is set at four spaces per 100, so the ACT is not even at best practice.
When you consider recent developments, at least in Civic, it is obvious that the actual number of car spaces is also reducing. A report in the Canberra Times in May last year suggested that there were now 180 fewer car spaces owned by the government, compared to 2014, from 2,915 down to 2,735. Couple that with our growing population and the reduction in car spaces is even more acute. That would also suggest that there are proportionately fewer disability car spaces. If that is the case, we are not providing the services our disability community need and deserve. The sad truth is that it is an issue that appears to have not gotten much better in the last several years; perhaps it may even have gotten worse.
In 2012 Ms Le Couteur raised the issue of the shortage of disability spaces. I know she will be speaking on this motion later. With indulgence, I will quote her, mostly because she is, on the whole, supporting my motion. In that speech she said:
… all Green MLAs … have consulted with a number of Canberra’s disability organisations about this issue … Robert Altamore—
who was then the executive officer of People with Disabilities—
pointed out the bleedingly obvious, that if disabled people cannot park their car, they cannot do their shopping, they cannot get their prescriptions, they cannot meet up with friends for coffee.
This captures why this issue is so important for the Canberrans who live with a disability. Having appropriate and genuine access to parking, with consistent and clear rules, goes beyond the convenience of being able to drive and park close to where you want to go. For Canberrans requiring the use of a disability parking permit, it means
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