“If you can’t walk you can’t take the tender” in most cases is an outright lie!

Not taking a wheelchair user’s booking at a small Indian restaurant is a valid business decision that needs to be acknowledged and understood.

Hurtful disability discrimination is caused more though plain ignorance due to no experience so no recognition of someone else’s normal. Not all disability discrimination is illegal, nor should it be.

This is a two way street. I will discuss the intensive news and internet exposed incident instigated by a C5 quadriplegic public speaker that occurred at an Indian restaurant near his home in a Melbourne suburb in June 2021.

This author had been a customer of this particular venue for many years. Not a frequent diner but when I feel like eating their delicious food I do. I have never eaten in the restaurant as I feel the venue is too crowded, with patrons packed in like sardines.

The restaurant is on a terrace, they offer a takeaway menu and dine in option. In good weather tables and chairs are on the terrace outside the front door with plenty of room to move around. At the time an Indian family were the owners who had built up a strong client base over 25 years, they even arranged for customers to do cooking tours to India with them. The venue is small in area, a converted shop space, very tightly packed with compact tables and chairs. Sometimes to pick up takeaway it is difficult for a patron to make their way through the crowded venue to the takeaway pickup point at the back of the restaurant.

The quadriplegic was a young fit and healthy man who fell down spiral stairs when he was 22 years old. The fall resulted in lifechanging damage to his spinal cord. Suddenly the young man found himself living a life he did not plan to live.

Fast forward seven or so years during which time he had to learn how to live, laugh, and have fun again. He had to discover what his new normal life looked and felt like. He had to get to know how his body and bodily functions now worked. He had to rediscover his relationship with mum, dad, brother, other family members, and friends. How would love and sex be with his girlfriend who he met when he was 17, who became his fiancé, then wife, then mother of his child. He had to accept that for the rest of his life he is very dependent on other people to keep him alive and provide him with basic personal care. He had to learn how to ask other people to do things for him all the time.

His social media profile presents an image of a friendly, kind, inspirational and caring person who genuinely wanted the world to be educated in disability to make life easier for the next generation.

Seven years in a wheelchair is early days…

Back to the restaurant experience… After incidents where this man had been made to feel uncomfortable due to his injury, he decided to voice his frustration and disappointment after trying to make a booking at the Indian restaurant. After requesting a booking for five people, as a courtesy, he advised the staffer that he was a wheelchair user. He has said that he spoke to the manager and was told that the restaurant could not take his booking because they needed the money, and his wheelchair takes up too much space. After the fact he stated the experience definitely came at a cost for everybody involved, but the bigger picture of his understanding of what is right/wrong with disability was spread to over 2 million people via social media posts.

There are two sides of this spat, but the disability warriors only see one side and have no consideration of how much damage occurs by their sensationalism of a disabled person as a semi-god who in their eyes must have every whim met or there is a reason for an outrageous public outcry in support of the poor downtrodden soul.

Social media is such a powerful tool to bring out a pouring of love and support for the poor quadriplegic that could not make a booking to eat inside that particular inaccessible restaurant when he had a desire to. If the group particularly wanted to eat Indian cuisine then there was another local Indian restaurant in the area or they could have ordered takeaway.

Social media is such a powerful tool to bring out a pouring of hate, death threats and wishes of destruction of the restaurant owners and their business for not accommodating the wheelchair user’s illusionary 2021 human right .

From my perspective this event is a backward move in the fight for inclusion.

Surely any experienced wheelchair user would understand how awkward it is in a very tiny restaurant space to accommodate a wheelchair, especially a motorised wheelchair.  The restaurant owners have a responsibility to all their patrons not just social model of disability human right activists and the business owners are entitled to make a profit.

In my view the restaurant could not accommodate a wheelchair user patron unless they removed a few tables and then it would still not be an ideal place to eat in comfort. Sure the wheelchair may have fitted under a table but that means nothing in the real scheme of a comfortable place to eat a meal when there is no turning circle and people’s feet and bodies on chairs placed closely together get in the way. The waiter has to be able to get to the tables in all areas of the restaurant. People arrive and depart to eat at different times and need to manoeuvre themselves around other patrons packed in on a busy night of trade.

Any business has the right to refuse an offer of business from a customer. While the young wheelchair user may have ‘human rights’ the business has ‘client selection and service’ rights. Australian law does not say every business has to serve every customer who wants to be served. Yes, I noted the posed questions to the business were on the basis of I am in a wheelchair so business owner you MUST give me what I want as my human right of being treated equally as an able bod overrides everything else you know.

The business did not say they would not prepare food for the wheelchair user’s group they said the venue could not accommodate a booking with his wheelchair requirements without discomfort to himself, his party, the restaurant staff and other patrons.

Disability is not about being different, even if your condition makes you stand out in a crowd. It is not an opportunity to celebrate diversity within a circle of a ‘vanilla’ or an ‘ordinary’ or a ‘superior’ group of people. Disability is a toxic label for impairment. Living with impairment is nothing more than living a normal existence in a complex social structure.

The natural environment, the built environment, the social environment, the financial environment, and psychological state can all create barriers from time to time.

Most people living with physical and sensory impairment want to be left alone to live their normal life. Normal for them is being able to do what they can within their own self acknowledged limitations. Society can assist them to improve their normal way of life by supplying equipment and support that are freedom giving in their intent and operation.

Providing a gateway to embracement is understanding that what is normal for one is not normal or needed by another. Transport vehicles all need brakes to assist them to stop. No matter how hi-tech bicycle brakes are they will not assist a semi-trailer truck to stop.

The following image is an example of embracement in action. A daughter being presented to society at a debutante ball. A daughter who wanted to dance with her father who could not walk without artificial mobility aids.

The other debutante fathers’ normal was to dance moving forward in a circle with their daughters. This would not work for a man unable to walk and who used calipers and crutches to be in an upright position. The solution was simple this father and his daughter danced in the middle of the circle where his normal could be embraced. If this man were in his wheelchair he could have been embraced in the same way.

For this embracement to occur no fuss was needed to be made, no drama was created, there was no need to point out the two involved had ‘human rights’. A father and his daughter’s needs were acknowledged and embraced by the organisers.

Ramps are not the only way to get to the next level in a building.

First published 05/06/2023