First I parked illegally,in a School Bus Only spot. Does it compound the sin if you’re rehearsing your excuses before you even get out of the car? There are no school buses on Sundays;it was the only spot to get my mobility-restricted mother into the church;the organist,whose music we had come to hear,had told us to park there. None strictly a lie,but none a fully compelling truth either,not least so close to the eye of God.
Disabled parking:the blue stickers are meant for people with a disability.iStock
But we had a trump card:the space,though designated for buses,was marked what I like to call “disability blue”,and we had The Sticker.
Mum has one of the 417,000 mobility stickers currently issued in NSW. For her it is permanent,for me just for a day,and its empowerment was quickly going to my head. Sunday was Pentecost,when the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit and,in the earlier Judaic version,Moses had received the commandments. Today they might opt for the blessing of The Sticker.
So righteous was I feeling,not even the archbishop could compete. When my attention flagged during the service,I read emails and an interesting article,in violation of St Mary’s Cathedral’s no-mobile-device rule. Afterwards,I wandered unwittingly between praying congregants and their statues,and between tourists and their selfie-shooting cameras. What can I say? I had Sticker hubris.
For lunch,The Sticker and I drove the wrong way into a car park (“Sorry,couldn’t find the entrance”) and jumped the long cafe queue to order (“Sorry,didn’t know the system”). The Sticker had taken over. Every time it and I broke a rule,I felt like I was saving $581 and one demerit point. Hallelujah! The Sticker,used while caring for a beloved elder,gives you a cloak of righteousness. It doesn’t matter how many Bad Guy things you do;you are demonstrably the Good Guy.
Abuse of mobility parking permits,a crime deserving its own place in hell,is growing. An NRMA and Spinal Cord Injuries Australia found that in 2020/21 (a COVID-affected year),12,992 fines were issued in NSW for illegal use of disabled parking spaces. This is only part of the story. With the number of issued permits rising by 60 per cent since 2007 so that 8 per cent of all drivers have one,councils have lagged in providing enough parking spaces,leaving genuine Sticker-holders competing with not only each other but also the thousands of abusers,for fewer spaces.
The Australian Disability Parking Wall of Shame Facebook group,membership 13,000,posts photos of cars parked in blue spaces without permits. It shames cars with fake and expired mobility stickers. (You’d be surprised by how many of the cheats are dumb enough to drive cars with company logos,and by how many also park across two spaces.) It also shames people who harass permit-holding parkers who don’t have a visible disability.
International academic studies on abuse of mobility parking spaces focus on the disrespect for disabled people and the social breakdown it implies. A Slovenian study,for example,found that up to 90 per cent of disabled parking spaces were misused,with 29.3 per cent of them having a free legal parking space nearby. No wonder the authors saw threats to “solidarity,morality,social norms and values”.
My own Sticker hubris wasn’t in misusing the permit so much as a misappropriation of its benefits. Not illegal but ethically somehow murky. Not the end of the world as we know it,but it got me thinking about what a nation of able-bodied people with the use of someone else’s Sticker might look like.
Illustration:Dionne Gain.
You didn’t have to look far. Our richest individual was already carrying her own special Sticker,claiming to have been rendered a victim by an artist. Everyone who hadn’t been paid off was because they think someone that rich shouldn’t be sensitive about their looks and should also know something about art.
But it turns out that Scott Fitzgerald,who wrote that “the very rich are different from you and me”,was completely wrong. The very rich also delete photos of themselves that they don’t like;the very rich also know nothing about art but they do know what offends them. They do exactly what 99 per cent of Australians would do if Vincent Namatjira had painted them and they could enlist the art-critic powers of the Australian swimming team to protest. They have someone’s Sticker,and they’re going to use it.
One poor little rich person is no outlier. We are a poor little rich country,as budget night showed,with able-bodied Australians clamouring to check that they hadn’t lost their government subsidies. What was this if not an advantaged group grabbing the access that the disadvantaged had fought so hard to gain? The narrative that “Australians are doing it tough” is so universally accepted that it has been appropriated by all voters;as soon as the disadvantaged were able to make their struggle known,it became another thing stolen from them.
Stickerism is politically agnostic. The victim narrative has been a blueprint for electoral persuasion ever since John Howard claimed it for “his” battlers.
We all have our own Sticker to bear. Last I looked,the victim mentality,while a real psychological condition,doesn’t get you a mobility Sticker,but last I also looked,,singing from the same hymn sheet:we’re the real victims,nobody understands us. Who in the disabled community would have thought they had carved out such an effective path for able-bodied billionaires and marketing shills?
By the end of Pentecost Sunday I had to take my mum and her Sticker,regretfully,back home. One of the functions of Catholic Pentecost is to confirm new parishioners into the church and give them somewhere to confess their sins so they’ll stop carrying on about their own problems and care for the genuinely needy. While I don’t share the belief,I can see the purpose.
Without The Sticker,I felt reduced,no longer a superhero of righteousness. I would have to go back to being more considerate. A thought came to me. I could have nicked Mum’s Sticker for myself! But then I would really need a God and a confessor.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist,author and regular columnist.