Well intentioned but …

Red Nicholson writes at The Spinoff:

Yesterday, Labour ministers Carmel Sepuloni and Iain Lees-Galloway were invited by the Spinal Trustto spend the day in wheelchairs, in order to highlight the challenges a wheelchair user might face getting around parliament. A well-intentioned PR stunt that no politician, particularly given the fortnight Labour has had, could easily turn down. After all, how could anyone resist the temptation to make a gag about “sitting by his statements”, eh minister? That said, as a veteran wheelchair user myself, I reckon there is only one context in which it is OK to “have a go” in a wheelchair, and it is this:

• You are a curious nine-year-old.

There is also one context where it might be considered a particularly bad look to be playing wheelchair dress-ups:

• You are the minister for disability issues, seeking to understand the needs of disabled people.

I think the intentions were very good, but Nicholson has a point that it wasn’t well thought through.

Carmel Sepuloni, as minister for disability issues, should know better than this. Dressing up as a disabled person for an afternoon is no less disrespectful than if a Pākeha minister for Māori affairs thought it might be helpful to paint their skin brown for a day to better understand the needs of Māori. Or if a male minister for women’s issues wore a dress for an afternoon in order to appreciate the barriers facing women. The only difference here is that wheelchairs seem to have developed into some sort of whimsical lark for able-bodied people, as a “fun way to get around“, making this particular dress-up act somehow seem less offensive. It’s not.

Fair points.

The purpose of the stunt was, according to the Spinal Trust’s twitter account, to help the minister better understand the needs of disabled people. The minister herself said that sitting in the chair helped her to “gain some insight” into how accessible parliament is. But the minister shouldn’t have to play dress-ups to appreciate either of these things. In fact, there are already wheelchair users working in parliament, so if accessibility was of such concern, the minister could surely have respected these individuals’ lived experience enough to sit down and listen to their perspectives, instead of playing pretend for the day.

It’s a bit like when people sleep rough for a day to help the homeless.